Laura or anyone-hows Laguage Wise going?

I have the book and there is enough to go on with just the book. It is filled with many different language activities. I have used some of them with my entire school class.

You use this book after you complete the phonographix book?? My library has it but I don’t want to check it out and get myself confused!!

K.

Language Wise addresses a completely different set of skills- vocabulary and language development- not decoding skills. It is perfectly fine to do them together. The Language Wise activities are actually a lot of fun and not dissimilar (though not as detailed) to what an SLP might do when working in this area.

Robin

Well….I haven’t gotten a routine going yet. Also, it took me awhile to read through the first section of the book (which the author recommends). Also, we just got back from a camping trip…that’s my excuse! :-o

Anyhow, we’ve tried some of the exercises so far and it has been interesting to see where my son has some weaknesses. For example, there’s one activity called “Guess What” in which I have an item in mind (ex: tooth brush) and I gave my son clues (“I have bristles, “You put paste on me,” “You use me to clean something on your face,” etc… “What am I?”). For some reason my son had a lot of difficulty with this. He couldn’t get tooth brush! Perhaps he was tired at the time. We did this exercise in the car while waiting for his sister to finish her dance class.

One nice thing about the exercises in this book. You can eventually do them anywhere and incorporate them into car trips, errands, etc….

However, at this time I plan to set up a weekly lesson plan (starting tomorrow!). So tonight I’m going to type one up.

By the way, besides “Verbal Intelligence,” I’m also going to include with my daily lessons some activities and exercises from a second book. I recently ordered and just (today!) received “Developing your Child for Success” by Kenneth Lane. I looked through it this afternoon and am quite pleased with it. I also ordered a booklet called “Recognition of Reversals.” One idea I got from this booklet is that my son mixes up the following words consistently: “saw”/”was,” “there”/”where,” “then”/”when.” I’m going to make a set of cards for each combination (ex: 20 of each word) and then work on each seperate set. With the first one I’ll mix up the “saw/was” set and have him read through it as quickly as possible.

One thing I noticed this evening is that even though I have my son read a book a day (level 2, approx 30pp) 5 days a week, it’s not enough. His skills are beginning to “slide” and he’s starting to forget how to read. It’s very upsetting. I’ll probably have to do PG with him again…gosh…sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed!

Hi Laura,

Are you having your son read at his comfort level? If this is what he is doing, his skills won’t improve. You have to have him read out loud to you and you help him correct every sound that he says incorrectly. Don’t worry about comprehension for right now, he needs practice reading multi-syllable words. I teach high school reading/English and no matter what the reading level that my kids are on, I have them read Poe in the 11th grade book. I then spend a lot of time on error correction with them reading out loud. Error correction is a very big part of the program. After you have taught them how to decode, if you don’t error correct, they go back into their poor reading habits. Email me directly if you want to and I will help you.

//

Thanks Shay!!!
I’ll try having him read at a much higher level. I checked out Dick King-Smith’s “Charlie Muffin’s Miracle Mouse” and will have him work on it. He’s 8 so I don’t think he’s ready for Poe (although I do have a few volumes of Poe in my personal library! ;-).

What I notice is that regardless of his reading level (easy or difficult), he still makes a lot of errors. And many of these are consistent errors. Each time he omits a word or says one that’s incorrect I tell him to “try again” or I point at the word until he corrects it.

BTW, with material he’s fairly comfortable with (or should be comfortable with!), I calculated his reading speed to be about 18 wpm. This seems quite slow to me…

Thanks for offering your help! I’ll try having him read at a higher level and see if this makes a difference. I’ll email you if I can think of any specific questions.