Need some advice before Monday meeting (long)

If you are recieving an IEE this summer,this is what I would do at this meeting.
I would go into this meeting attempting to get as much documented in writing as I could. If you could somehow get in writing from this teacher(middle School) that outside remediation is reccomended to you,this is optimal,if not get it on the tape at the meeting. Next research the program this teacher is using,be willing to bet it mentions, far more time then 15 minutes a week. Establish this at the meeting,again on tape IE: ask the teacher is she feels it worked,if she felt that 15 mins at a time had something to do with why it didn’t work,etc. Establish on tape that the school he is leaving didn’t really give it a good try,but even with this small amount of time it is obviously better than nothing,which is the next thing you want to get on record. Middle school reccomends outside remediation?,then they are obligated to provide it. Use this meeting as a search for documentation of the need for this services. You will have to all meet again after the new eval anyway. No not sign IEP,if you do make sure it is an interm IEP,good for only 2 months until the IEE is complete.

Sorry I can’t give you advice about the school situation.

Have you considered tutoring him yourself this summer using Reading Reflex? If you could spend 40 minutes a day 3 to 5 days a week with this, chances are your son would make some substantial improvements. Reading Reflex uses a sound-to-symbol approach which tends to work better than traditional phonics. The book explains the research behind the approach, and also lays out the methodology to follow very clearly. It’s quite easy for a parent to use. The book is about $16 and available at most local bookstores or from Amazon. Quite a few parents have had success with this approach (our family included).

Mary

Actually that is something I’m considering. First, however, he has an appointment this Friday to see if he would benefit from vision therapy. It’s my understanding that should be taken care of first before any other therapies are started. Is that correct? Thanks for you help!

How long has your son been receiving phonics instruction? I would only suggest that if phonics instruction is going to help your son, someone should be seeing results from it - even if it’s a few minutes three times a week. Children do not have long attention spans and the longest tutoring session that any of them can stand is 45 minutes and that’s usually once a week. If your son is getting 15 minutes x 3 a week, he’s actually getting the normal weekly tutoring session time.
Wilson Language program does though, I think, see kids twice a week.

I haven’t been terribly impressed with phonics instruction as a remediation. Phonics, simply and sadly, doesn’t work for every child.

But I sincerely hope it works for yours and that you get everything you want in the school year to come.

I’m glad you’re checking into it. My daughter had severe developmental vision delays diagnosed at 8-1/2yo, and we did 6 months of vision therapy. It still wasn’t enough, so we followed up with PACE (http://www.learninginfo.com).

Vision therapy corrects problems with focusing (accommodation), eye teaming (binocular fusion and fixation), and eye movement control (gross saccades) — probably some others as well.

However, we found that PACE was necessary to develop the next level — visual processing, or visual analysis/perceptual skills. These include visual concentration (fine pursuits), fine eye movement control (fine saccades), reversals, visual sequential memory, and fine motor speed and precision. (May also provide some visual-motor integration and auditory-visual integration skills.)

We actually started with Reading Reflex before we realized the need for vision therapy. RR provided the basic decoding skills that allowed us to see that we needed to check vision. We dropped Reading Reflex while we did vision therapy and, in retrospect, I think this was a big mistake. Dd could have been learning advanced decoding skills even as her eyes were improving, and it might have helped prevent some of the guessing habit she developed in the meantime.

Dd is now almost 11 and reading at a 6th grade level, but she still has a habit of guessing a word rather than reading it. Just the other day she couldn’t figure out why I had marked one of her math problems wrong. She read the problem out loud several times — mis-reading “fifteen” as “fifty” every single time. She didn’t even realize she was looking at the first part of the word and guessing the rest. That’s a bad, bad habit to acquire!

Although vision therapy needs to be done before PACE, you can still work on Reading Reflex in the meantime. In fact, I would recommend it. If dd had acquired advanced decoding and word analysis skills prior to PACE (instead of just the basic decoding when we stopped for vision therapy), her gains from PACE would have been even more dramatic.

Mary

angie, dont sign the IEP, let them draw it up but dont sign. If after your IEE you all disagree they have to impliment the old IEP while your fighting it out.

about the transition meeting- you should not have had to request to attend it, it is mandatory that you be invited.

about the school testing him- why would you allow the school to test your child if you are in the process of getting an IEE? basically you get an IEE because you dont trust something the school did or didnt do in the past.The purpose of getting an IEE is because you dont agree with the schools identification, their interpeertation of the test results or the actual tests they gave, AND they have refused to re-examine or do additional testing- so If you dont agree with the previous testing why are you letting them do more?

someone mentioned the time needed for wilson- The program requires a minimum of 2 and a half hours a week to be benificial, useing this program for 15 min 3x isnt going to cut it. Orton-Gillingham also has time requirments but i dont know exactly what they are (I am not familar with the other programs you mentioned but if they are along the lines of the first two then they come with very spicific protocals).

Was it an independant evaluation that suggested your son would benefit from Orton? I would not dismiss this lightly like the school is.

My 7 year old is finishing up a little more than a year of private Orton tutoring (it has cost us a lot of $’s but was worth it). Her various reading scores have gone up 2.2 to 3.6 grade levels during this time - she is now reading well above grade level. While she has some other issues that we and the school have addressed at the same time, giving her the advantage of reading tutoring has made such a positive difference at school and her self esteem started rebuilding.

While I see a lot of benefits and great things at my daughter’s school, I don’t trust them entirely. I was told such a bunch of conflicting information from various people at the school about the Orton for her (they do, they don’t, my daughter will/will not get it, “of course she’s getting Orton ” etc.). Actually, in retrospect, it was quite insulting to be lied to. We had decided that just to be safe, we would continue with private tutoring and are so glad that we did. She know has a firm foundation in reading that she would not have achieved so quickly had we left it up to the school.

Go to interdys.org (Interantional Dyslexia Organizaiton) and get the name of your local member. That person will be able to give you a list of current tutors in your area. If your son’s tests says he has low sound blending, sound symbol (letter/sound connection), little/no phonemic awarness, things like that - he might be a good candidate for it. By the way, Orton is very much a phonics based program.

Good luck!

I would agree with Mary and overlap the two therapies, if you need to do vision therapy. We did a month of vision therapy before doing a PG intensive. We have continued to work on vision therapy and PG at the same time. The visual problems have hampered his ability to read smoothly (skipping lines and words) but not his ability to acquire the code.

In the OD’s office he is now fine. His eyes don’t jump around like they used to. We still have problems with him skipping lines and words but I think that is because he is not as automatic as he should be, especially since his auditory processing problems also stress him. We are going to do PACE this summer for this reason.

Beth

Thank you both for your help! I’m checking into Reading Reflex as a possibility for this summer.

He’s been getting the phonics instruction since November although the teacher herself told me she hasn’t been doing it but has instead been working on spelling during that time. Not sure how long that has been going on. Probably not very long as our last team meeting was less than a month ago. The school notified me that they are asking the doctor doing the IEE if he would benefit from additional help in phonics. It looks like I will have to wait for her answer before proceeding with any requests. Thanks for your input!

Oh, too late for the advice on not signing the IEP! That’s another whole story. Long story short, when we went to school conferences in February they had a new IEP all written up and ready for us to sign. I asked them to add a couple of things I could think of off the top of my head and then I stupidly signed it. (I’ve learned a lot since then!!!) I already know there were lots of problems with that, no notification, no team meeting, IEP totally written by resource teacher with no other input etc. Have already told the school that I know procedures weren’t followed at that I will be requesting major changes!

The reason I’m letting the school repeat three of the subtests is because on his Iowa Tests of Basic Skills taken last fall he showed almost no areas of growth and in several areas his scores actually went down— a lot! They administered a reading test to all 4th graders a few weeks ago and his scores for the spring testing were actually lower than the scores for the fall testing (same test, but son said test was so hard that he just guessed on the one taken in the spring). They actually wanted to do the testing to see if the reading program implemented this year made any difference. I agreed because I am hoping to use test results to make a case for why reading program should be continued. They have already committed to paying for the IEE so any results won’t make a difference. Also, the testing they are repeating weren’t part of the testing results I didn’t agree with. Thanks for your input!

Using the Orton or Orton-like program was actually a recommendation of the school’s evaluator. The only problem was that his resource teacher wasn’t trained in any of the methods that were suggested. She borrowed a copy of a book from another teacher in another district and is using that to teach him. Thanks for your help!

This is what I’ve learned about Orton as a parent. Supposedly all the Orton methods (e.g., Recipe for Reading, Wilson) are basically the same with the same exact phonemic units which are taught in a sequential manner (makes me sound smarter than I am about this). The difference is the the order of the sequence taught. The child should complete whichever Orton method used from start to finish. The child should not move on to the next sequence until the teacher is absolutely sure the child has mastered the particular phonemic unit - no skipping around. Also, although I’ve never even tried, it’s supposed to be fairly easy to teach. You should make sure all these things are happening for him at his school by keeping in touch with the teacher.

Just be careful - make sure the school is using a branded OG method and that they follow through start to finish with him. Don’t let them tell you things like “we use modified Glass - it’s just like Orton” (it is not) or “we are using modified Orton with him” (simply impossible, you cannot modify Orton).

Good luck.