is consultation typical

Many schools figure “she’s doing okay, we don’t have to do anything more.” The kid pays the price for trying.

How old?

It’s typical but it is *not* OK. The reading will become more and more of a barrier — but as she changes schools they won’t see the hard worker, they’ll just see another non reader and lower their expectations. The other typical thing that happens is that the student also lowers them and the student who could have been college bound has gathered negative momentum in rather a different direction.

My daughter is 12 going into 7th next year. We work a lot at home. I always have to give her continued one on one instruction at home. It is a nightly routine for most week nights. Her IEP is coming up and I am concerned that they will not see my point of view since she gets A’s and B’s sometimes C’s, but I listen to her read and it is just not very good. Her spelling is really bad and it makes her writing look bad. She is good in language mechanics, but you have to add a lot of vowels in where she leaves tehm out for the writing to make sense. Also any new math concepts do not come easy-we have to work on them for more than the one or maybe two weeks that are given. I am also a teacher in the same school system only in the high school(science). I see so many students who come to the high school with such low reading skills and it really drags them down. I have been fighting this for 3 years now. She has only had one year of spec. ed. instruction from the spec. ed dept. That was the year that she gained the most. Am I fighting a losing battle wanting her to have more one on one phonetic instruction since she has good grades?

Hi Sue,

You are right to want more specific instruction in reading before she gets into high school. I am a resource specialist in elementary, and I honestly feel I am not doing my job if I send them on to middle school without very good decoding and at least rudimentary spelling skills. Even though I rarely have the luxury of teaching kids one-on-one, I do teach them in groups of no more than three to four, using a modified Lindamood Bell method, and it usually works very well. Last year about 50 percent of my students reached grade level in reading, about 30 percent in spelling. About half of these students were fifth graders. I have no guarantee what will happen to them at the middle school, of course, but at least they left me without that holding them back!

I also have a lot of friends who teach resource at the high school level, and the picture they paint of the chances of a kid with low reading/spelling skills is not a very pretty one. They say they spend most of their time teaching “compensatory strategies” which means: come to class on time, sit in the front, try to take notes, do every homework assignment, even if it’s wrong, and do your best on the tests, and if you’re lucky and the teacher is nice, you’ll pass with a “D”! Things are even worse now that the tests for graduation from high school are coming down the pike… one of my friends thinks it will increase dropout rates for LD students by about half, and I worry she may be right.

Anyway, you can’t guarantee that you’ll get the right kind of teaching from the school unfortunately, and probably not at the intensity that she needs it, so my advice is to find a educational therapist who has training and experience (and can show you results) in one of the methods shown to work (LiPS, Phonographix and PACE/Master the Code are all good options). It’s not too late for your daughter, although studies do show that the longer you wait the more time-intensive it is to remediate these type of problems. If you can’t afford a good educational therapist (and I’m not talking about generic tutoring here, that would be a waste of time and money) then get yourself trained in one of the above methods. Email me if you have more questions or want help finding them, but there are many places on these boards where you will no doubt find out what you need to know! Good luck and hang in there!

Sharon

Hi Sharon,

I like the information you gave this last reader. I have some questions for you. I have a 5 y.o. daughter who is in all day kindergarten. She is having trouble with what I believe to be Demand Langauage and shortterm memory perception. I ‘ve asked her teacher since the beginning of the year for testing, but the teacher keeps putting me off. Lexi is smart, but is having trouble with letter sounds and sight letter recall. Well last Monday her teacher told me on the parking lot when I was picking up Lexi that she thought Lexi needed to be held back to do Kindergarten again. Wow what a blow!!! So I have started educating myself. It seems to me if it is indeed an LD problem then holding back does absolutely no good. Where would you recommend I go from here.

Thanks for any help, Lori

Hi Sharon,

I like the information you gave this last reader. I have some questions for you. I have a 5 y.o. daughter who is in all day kindergarten. She is having trouble with what I believe to be Demand Langauage and shortterm memory perception. I ‘ve asked her teacher since the beginning of the year for testing, but the teacher keeps putting me off. Lexi is smart, but is having trouble with letter sounds and sight letter recall. Well last Monday her teacher told me on the parking lot when I was picking up Lexi that she thought Lexi needed to be held back to do Kindergarten again. Wow what a blow!!! So I have started educating myself. It seems to me if it is indeed an LD problem then holding back does absolutely no good. Where would you recommend I go from here.

Thanks for any help, Lori

I would recommend trying cognitive training — perhaps this summer. PACE (http://www.learninginfo.com) is an excellent program to do over the summer, although expensive. Audiblox (http://www.audiblox2000.com) is also good. These programs typically improve a wide variety of underlying skills that make academic learning easier and faster.

For spelling, we have found Sequential Spelling (http://www.avko.org) to be invaluable. We do two lessons a day. This is by far the best spelling program we have ever done, and it is the easiest!

PACE dramatically improved our daughter’s reading fluency. If PACE works well for your daughter, I would recommend adding on the same company’s Master the Code program. These programs can make an enormous difference in a child’s ability to read — which impacts all subjects, including science and math.

Unless you have no other alternative, I think it’s best to invest your time and energy one-on-one with your child. You can waste an awful lot of time and energy working to get the school to provide stuff which is a dollar short and a day late.

Mary

Hi Lori,

Well, I agree with your basic premise, that if a learning disability is involved, then retention in and of itself is not going to help. The theory behind retention is that additional time will help the child to “catch up” in the skills that are lacking, and if there is a learning disability that is interfering, what is needed is intervention, not just more time or another year of the same stuff. However, for some kids it may help, if it also gives you time to arrange and begin intervention efforts. There are some other factors to consider, such as her age (was she born in the summer or later?) and size and overall maturity level, i.e. social skills, etc. Does she have strengths in other areas, such as math, that might cause her to get bored in that area if she’s held back? I believe it’s an individual decision for each child, and you as the parent know her better than anyone else.

I let my learning disabled son start kindergarten a year later — even though I didn’t know it was a learning disability at that time — and I’ve never been sorry. I knew he was about six months behind in the preschool testing, and he had a fall birthday, was small for his age, and did not know his alphabet or how to write his name at age 5. For him, it was the right choice, but I wish I’d known about and been able to get early intervention for him as well. As it was, I still remember picking him up one day a few weeks into kindergarten, and asking him why he had such a sad face. His reply broke my heart: “My teacher says I work too slow!” He was tested and qualified as learning disabled in first grade, but to a large degree, the damage to his self-esteem and love of learning was already done.

If that’s all they are proposing, to have her repeat kindergarten, then I’d say “no thanks” at this point. If they’ll agree to also do some testing and can offer an early intervention program, then I might consider it, depending on your answers to the other questions involved. If retention is ever a good idea, then repeating kindergarten seems to do less damage to self-esteem than just about any other grade. But the key is to get some good help for her. There are some good books out there on how to work on phonemic awareness and sound/symbol connections with your child, or you could look for an educational therapist who is skilled in the language area. Some speech therapists can also help, and your health insurance may cover their services.

Kindergarten is certainly not too early to start, in my opinion, in fact the earlier you begin, the more likely she is to avoid a special education placement down the road, which would certainly be desirable, I think you would agree! The areas you mention, letter sounds and sight letter recall, are very good early warning signs to pay attention to. If the school has access to the CTOPP, the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, you could probably get a handle on how serious the deficit is, and perhaps get a jump on things. They could also test for memory issues and motor skills, all of which have tests appropriate to her age.

One of the problems with testing a child that young for a learning disability, however, and one of the reasons they may be putting you off, is that it is so difficult for them to meet the qualification standards for a significant discrepancy. Unless her intelligence is significantly above average, it’s hard to show a significant discrepancy between ability and achievement in kindergarten, but it’s impossible to know unless you test. Finding a processing disorder is usually a little easier, if the right instrument is used. You could ask them to do the testing now, and base your decision about retention on the results of the tests. You can ask for the testing directly, you know, you don’t have to wait for them to make the referral. Just put your request in a letter, addressed to the principal, and make it clear that you expect the testing to be completed with the 50 day timeline as required by law. If you do this right away, you should get the results before the end of the school year, but if you wait much longer, you probably won’t get them until early next year…. Anyway, good luck and I hope this helps!

Sharon

Mary,

Thanks very much for your reply. I will look into all the information you gave me. Lori MaryMN wrote:
>
> I would recommend trying cognitive training — perhaps this
> summer. PACE (http://www.learninginfo.com) is an excellent
> program to do over the summer, although expensive. Audiblox
> (http://www.audiblox2000.com) is also good. These programs
> typically improve a wide variety of underlying skills that
> make academic learning easier and faster.
>
> For spelling, we have found Sequential Spelling
> (http://www.avko.org) to be invaluable. We do two lessons a
> day. This is by far the best spelling program we have ever
> done, and it is the easiest!
>
> PACE dramatically improved our daughter’s reading fluency.
> If PACE works well for your daughter, I would recommend
> adding on the same company’s Master the Code program. These
> programs can make an enormous difference in a child’s ability
> to read — which impacts all subjects, including science and
> math.
>
> Unless you have no other alternative, I think it’s best to
> invest your time and energy one-on-one with your child. You
> can waste an awful lot of time and energy working to get the
> school to provide stuff which is a dollar short and a day late.
>
> Mary

This is the point at which you might consider pulling her entirely from school and working on those skills, and on some content areas where she’s got interest, done in the ways she learns best (right about her age is when kids with skills deficits start having to make choices between learning stuff and getting higher grades — the quantity they have to crank out for the higher stuff keeps them from really learning it, much less enjoying the process). It’s amazing the difference returning to school with reading skills under her belt can make.

Hi Sharon,

Thanks so much for the information. Yes, my Daughter is a summer birthday, but she is of average size and very social. She is in a Daisy Troup of 20 girls and we just moved and she has 3 friends who live in our subdivision and are either in her class or another kindergarten class. I feel because of all this it would be a blow to her self esteem to retain her. Her math skills are she can count and write to 100, count to 200 by 10’s and 100 by 5’s. She’s starting to tell time. I guess I’m not sure what is appropriate for 1st grade.

She brought home a paper on Friday where her teacher had give a sight word test and she had missed most of them, but when I sat down with her she was able to spell most of them. She also asked her to turn over the paper and write capitaals letters that she called out. Lexi only got a few. That night we played a game and I wrote them on crackers with chesse and she was able to identify them all.

As you can tell, I’m sure what to do. I do know I don’t plaan to allow her to be retained, but I’m not sure to about testing at this poiint… Any feedback would be appreciated.

Lori

Hi Lori,

Hmm, I agree that retention doesn’t sound like a good idea at this point, and early intervention is always the better path anyway, if you can pull it off. The right kind of intervention can prevent a small problem from becoming a bigger one, and studies show that kids under 8 are the most easily “caught up” and with fewer long-term issues. Phonological Awareness, which is probably what we are talking about here, is also one area we know responds very well to intervention. One study by NIH (see G. Reid Lyon — Read by Grade 3) found that, in kids who got early intervention (first grade or sooner), over 90% reached at least grade level or higher in reading achievement, compared to over 75% who continued to struggle throughout high school when they did not… ‘nuff said there, I think!

As for what you are seeing compared to the teacher’s results, you are looking at two different kinds of memory I think, and that may be affecting your impressions as well as the teacher’s impressions of what Lexi’s problem areas are. For example, you said that she missed most of the words on a sight word test, but was able to spell them. That may be because you “decoded” the word for her when you asked her to spell them, so once she knows what the word is, she may also know what letters are in it, but she doesn’t recognize the word from the letters, which is the opposite process. I know that sounds confusing, but just remember that reading and spelling are the reverse of each other. To read, you must connect each letter to it’s corresponding sound and hold those sounds in sequence in memory long enough to blend them into a recognizable word. For most of us, this is an almost instantaneous process, which we don’t even have to think about. If your daughter has weak sound/symbol connections or auditory sequential memory, it will not be so quick or automatic, and if she doesn’t have a good “sight memory” that will not work for her either, and that may be what her teacher is seeing.

Then when you said she was able to recognize the letters when you wrote them with crackers and cheese, (quite apart from the sensory-motor nature of the task, which was a good idea anyway!) again you are talking about recognition of those letters, a relatively simple task, and remember she was not under time pressure and did not have to reproduce them. Your daughter’s teacher was asking her to remember the form of a symbol that goes with a random letter name she was hearing (both an auditory and a visual memory task) and then write it down (a motor task). Again, if the sound/symbol connections are not secure, pulling them from memory, especially in random order and without a model to look at (as was probably the case) is a MUCH more difficult task than just asking her “what is the name of this letter?” I know it sounds like both are the same task, but they are not. Many kids do better at one kind of task than the other… just look at the difference between multiple choice and “fill in the blank” tests!

Many kids who have phonemic awareness problems also have difficulty with something called rapid naming. That means they KNOW the names of letters, numbers, colors, etc. but when in a timed condition they have difficulty pulling out the names quickly — that is called a deficit in rapid naming. Your daughter could have a rapid naming deficit, which would have hurt her in this task, and she could also have had trouble with the motor component of writing down the letters, of course.

That is why it is so crucial to get testing to find out what is going on here. If she has deficits in both phonemic awareness AND rapid naming, she is MUCH MORE likely to have ongoing reading problems, and it is all the more important she gets serious intervention, the sooner the better! The CTOPP is the only test I know of that will give you scores in the areas of rapid naming, phonological awareness, and phonological memory, so that would be my best recommendation if you’re going to have her tested, though there are other good tests that will be helpful also. If the school can’t get it for you, I’d go for private testing, and then take them the results. You could always wait until the school does their testing, if they agree to do so, and then get outside testing afterward, but then you’re going to have delays to deal with, and time is of the essence here, so if you can at all afford it, I’d skip that and go straight for the information that will be most helpful in figuring out how best to help her. Hope this helps, and let me know if I can help further!

Sharon