When is a neurpsychologists evelauation warranted?

Try Phono-Graphixs, it works very well with dyslexics. It treats the advanced code and MS words differently than LMB. Some kids relate better with it.

We went through the whole Reading Reflex book a couple years ago. It helped a little. It got her to a place of knowing the alphabet with minimal mix-ups and CVC words. Still not fluently though. She seems to be a sight reader and uses picture clues to remind herself of a word. Such as the word “something”….she would remember the curvy s and the “sssss” sound at the beginning, the tall t and h in the middle and the g with a lower hook on it at the end. She would stare for a few seconds and decipher the word but it was by going over those clues, maybe with a little decoding thrown in too.

I get the feeling that she is really in a category with few others. I had a special ed teacher tell me that only 10% of dyslexics fall into the severity level that she sees with my dd. At first I thought she was full of it and I refused to accept such a dim prognosis. However, now, after many programs and talking to other parents whose children are dyslexic but don’t struggle anywhere near as much as she does, I am beginning to see that maybe the teacher was right. I still think anyting is possible and with continual work and support and using any and all tools that will help her, she can be successful.

I am now reading the book The Gift of Dyslexia by Ron Davis. I am sure all of you have heard of it. Any opinions on his program?

We are pursuing a neuropsychological evaluation with our son who has a very similar profile. I can’t tell you whether it was worth it yet though. We too have lots of diagnoses but I have reached the point of wanting some help in putting it all together. I thought I had it figured out last year but new issues appeared.

We also have done PG, which taught him to read, and tried LIPS briefly this summer, with little success. Our son reads on about a early third grade level with a grade approxpriate sight vocabulary. We just can’t seem to get the decoding piece down–and we’ve been over it and over it. We are now seeing an OG trained tutor who the neurologist recommended.

Anyway, I know this isn’t much help but just wanted you to know you are alone.

Beth

Personally, I’m not impressed with the Davis method, though I’ve heard of some who have had success.

I think it’s baloney that dyslexia is strictly a gift - I think there are strengths to dyslexia, but there are also very real deficits. He believes that any remediation other than his (if I understood correctly) takes away the “gift”. I thnk he’s definitely making a lot of money with this theory, but I, as a parent of a dyslexic daughter, find it far fetched that it is STRICTLY a gift.

Well, over on the International Dyslexia association Bulletin board there are many people who think Davis is just wonderful. I suggest that you try to read their posts and judge by the spelling, organization, and attitude whether they learned anything positive out of Davis’s program — what I see is not impressive.

I have a question for those of you who have used PG and didn’t find the success that you wanted. Did you do a lot of error correction using text above the child’s reading level? Without doing this, the program doesn’t work. You can give the child the instruction but if you don’t practice with him in having him correct his mistakes he makes, helping him by questioning him, not giving him the word, the program is of little or no value. Email me and I will tell you how to do it.

Victoria and Leah, Thanks for sharing yor rthoughts. I read a bit on the dyslexia site you mentioned Victoria. It all goes along with what I have been hearing…..it is a miracle program, you have to be a certain type of dyslexic or that it was terribly dissapointing. I am only willing to invest the cost of the book with those kind of reviews and see what I can accomplish at home.

I read the book a few years ago when she was maybe 7 yo, but she was too young to understand what the heck I was talking about. It was too abstract for her and she didn’t understand what I meant by orientation and all of that. Maybe now at 10 it would have a different meaning to her though.

Annette,

Something in your post made me want to make a comment. You said you want her to re-enter school. I will just have to tell you, that students with severe dyslexia like your daughter rarely fit the “box” of public education and you may just set her up for failure if you put her back in. If you have done PG and a year of LB and she is still at first grade level in reading, then it will be tough to get her where she could keep up in a regular class even with modifications. And in my state, a child like that would never get through the mandatory tests to get a diploma. If you can learn the techniques to remediate her and help her work to her potential yourself, that’s great. If not, it sounds like she’d be a good candidate for a private LD school. (An exception to this would be if you live in the school district where Shay would be her teacher for high school!). I hope you will forgive me for saying these things, but I think sometimes parents do not realize that the public schools in general do a very poor job with severe LD kids.

It sounds like to me that you already have an adequate diagnosis. Almost everyone will tell you to do either Orton-Gillingham, Lindamood-Bell or Phono-Graphix for the decoding issues. People will tell you to go get a developmental vision exam to see if she needs vision therapy. I have heard people on here say that Audiblox is pretty good for visual processing and so is PACE. Others may recommend Fast ForWord or a listening program for the auditory issues. She likely has an auditory processing disorder and you could have additional testing for that. But basically, you need to look at the same things regardless of how much additional testing you have done. It seems that children with multiple processing deficits are much harder to remediate. My thinking is that you need to focus on strategies for remediation and not further testing.

Janis

/

Janis, I appreicate your honesty *so* much! Really, I feel like so many people, even people we have paid for their expert opinion tip toe around the reality of the siutation and it is *so* frustrating! I am a bottom line kind of person and I can handle the brutal honest truth much better then the feeling of someone telling me what they think I want to hear.

I am not necessarily the one who wants her to enter school. *She* has expressed this desire. Sports are the big pull…….she is an awesome athlete. However as time is going on she has been talking about what her other options are. I think she knows she would be a round peg trying to fit into a square area. I am involved with a charter school that has a site based school for 8th through 12th grades which is a possibility. There is a charter Montessori in our area that goes through 8th, a Waldorf school that goes through 8th and is considering a high school program. Or I could just keep home schooling her which would be fine with me. This is my 11th year hsing some conglomeration of my children so this isn’t new to me and I am totally open to all sorts of modes of learning….*not* sitting at the table for hours on end filling out worksheets.

My two biggest concerns are that it is very expensive to remediate a child on your own. We are a family of 6 living on one middle range income. My husband totally supports me being home and if I say that I think a direction is a good one to pursue for our dd then my dh does everything possible to make it happen. However, it is still very expensive and I wonder how long we can keep this up and also are we not providing everything we should because of finances. Major mom guilt. :o)

My second concern is high school academics. My older kids are going to school for high school and I think of chemistry, algebra, geometry, biology…..how on earth would I pull that off with a child with disabilities to the extent that she has?!! I know I would probably read aloud to her, get her textbooks on tape, I woud certainly make all of the accomodations that she needed, but would I just be enabling her or empowering her? This is a question I ask myself often even at this young age.

We have done a developmental vision exam and and did some VT but quit when I had our last baby. It was over an hour away one way. I don’t know that that was really her thing anyway. She seemed to test out fine on the dev. vision exam. She was tracking fine, had good binocular vision…the one comment the VT made was that she had “tight vision.”

I also had her tested at our state university for CAPD but she didn’t fail enough of their tests to qualify for their program. You had to fail 3 out of 4 and she only failed 2. Kind of a mixed blessing. The audiologist that sent her there said, that it was too bad as it means that something is wrong…just not wrong enough to meet their criteria for admittance into the program. So where does that leave us?

Everything you said bears witness with my own thoughts on the matter, so thank you for confirming what I was already feeling. I really do appreciate your clear, succinct, message to me.

Shay,

We did tons of reading and tons of error correction. I am coming to the theory that the problem is visual. I think PG expects that eventually a child will internalize a pattern and recognize it. My child just hasn’t done that. We still, for example, don’t have down that an e at the end of a word makes the vowel long. Now I taught it like PG does, over and over again. Now I am teaching it as the e making the vowel say its name as OG does. He is getting it a bit better, but I am hardly ready to say this is going to do it. Now he knows tons of words with the pattern but doesn’t seem to generalize.

This is where I am hoping that a modified OG with a few rules might help him. He knows that pen is either a short or long e. But he doesn’t seem to know which, unless he knows the word (which he does, but you get the idea).

He has CAPD as well but frankly, I am not sure that is the stumbling block for him right now. He has had a lot of remediation and he is much better auditorally. Still, problems with reading persist.

Does this make sense? He tests like he has been taught by whole language. Grade approxpriate sight words and terrible decoding. Nothing could be further from the truth. He just doesn’t seem to be able to retain the patterns for decoding the advanced code. He eventually learns words and knows them but faced with a new word, with the same pattern, he might as well be reading french. It is very frustrating.

Beth

Beth

Annette,

Thank you. Sometimes I worry that I may get blasted for my honesty, but you were most gracious. I think having high but realistic expectations is so important. I hate it when parents are mislead and not told the reality of their child’s prognosis. But it happens everyday. I have had a mentally retarded/hearing impaired child (with mild CP) tell me about how he was going to college when he grew up. The family also did not understand that he would not pass the driver’s test. No one had ever really explained his cognitive level to them apparently. So the child had such disappointments to endure as his dreams failed to materialize. I was there to cushion those blows, but I could not get a child with a 50 IQ up to the college level.

You have obviously done SO much already for your child! I’m willing to bet on the APD. That university felt she did not fit the criteria for their program, but obviously she does have AP problems. The decoding problems do indicate that. I am just wondering if maybe a review of Phono-Graphix might be beneficial at some point. I think sometimes the child is not ready for something the first time we try it and are more successful later. Or perhaps the sessions need to be more intensive? I don’t know the answer. All we can do is try things and see if they work! Do you have the Earobics Cd-rom? (www.earobics.com). That is relatively inexpensive and good to help with auditory skills.

Our daughter with APD does go to a charter school. It has many advantages for her. We tried a private Christian school for kindergarten and the Abeka phonics was very good, but I could see that the upper grades’ work was too accelerated for her. Our huge obstacle is that the charter schools in our state still have to give the state tests and no diploma if you don’t pass. It’ll be awhile before she takes the first one, but I will have to pull her and homeschool if she can’t play the testing game. We have few school choices where we live.

Regarding high school, I couldn’t begin to teach all that either (and I am a teacher!). I think if reading is really remediated, then there is less of a problem. Then they CAN be empowered. But if a child is reading at second or third grade level in high school, they can’t manage without the texts read aloud on tape, etc. (And most regular schools can not pull a severe LD child through those courses either if major remediation has not been achieved. Many kids just drop out). The only way I could homeschool high school is if I used a video program like Abeka and some other curriculums offer. At least that is a viable option and much less expensive than a private school!

As far as sports go, does your area have teams sponsored by civic organizations? Our Optimist Clubs offer most sports for a nominal fee.

Sorry to talk so long!
Janis

Hi, Beth,

Do you think it might also be poor short term or working memory from the standpoint of remembering the sounds that go with those advanced code symbols?

Janis

Well, I think her IQ is above average. When she was 7 she took the WISCIII and her IQ was around 117 before any remediation had taken place. A private clinician later told me it was probably actually much higher but the WISC test is filled with auditorh and visual processing. That was such good news to me. I really do hope that someday she can find her niche and live a really different, probably non-traditional, successful life as an artist or helping other dyslexic children or something. I don’t see her growing up and working in an insurance office though. :o)

Shay emailed me privately with some ideas on how to make the PG work more effectively for her….I still need to get back to her, but that is a definite consideration. We own both levels of Earobics and have almost finished level 1. That was a great investment.

Our charter school has the same testing requirements. I have been waiving her SAT 9 testing as she does not have an IEP and she would most defintely need the test read to her and they won’t let that happen without an IEP. I have had her take the Woodcock Johnson each year just so she has something in her cume file. I don’t know how she will get through the exit exam…except that at some point I am probably going to have to give in and have her tested by the charter school and classified as special ed with an IEP just to accomodate her as she gets older with some of these testing issues.

I used Abeka with my older kids. That was how I taught them to read and lately I have been thinking if I should just go back to Abeka and its basic phonics approach. Lots of repetition and drill….it would probably kill us off, but if it got the job done maybe it would be worth it. I don’t know.

Thank you for acknowledging that all we can do is try things and hope they work. I live under this burden of feeling like I need to figure this out and stop trying this and trying that….but I really don’t know what else to do! We finish most things we start unless it is really apparent that it isn’t going to work.

As to the sports..she plays rec league sports and that has been great. I think there is just something different about being that high school athlete though. Both her older brother and sister play sports for their schools and she just naturally has assumed that she would too. Last year I went through this big battle with the sports commisioner in our district to let her run cross-country on a ps team….he wouldn’t give an inch. Finally a friend who works for a school kind of snuck her in and let her come and work out with them everyday, but she couldn’t run in the races. There ended up being one race that was unofficial and she got to run in that one and came in 1st place. So it looks like for now at least, us working with the schools and doing something part time or compromising so that she could play sports for them and maybe take a class or two on campus…won’t work. *But* I have it in the back of my mind to begin getting our name out there and seeing what we can work out in the next few years. Hopefully we can help change policy and open a door there. I so wish that there wasn’t this “us and them” mentality between home schoolers and public schools. If we could work together for the betterment of these kids think of what could be accomplished!!! Well, I am getting off on a tangent. I will stop for now. lol

Janis, I have enjoyed your posts *so* much! Thank you for responding.
Annette

Hi Beth,

You may be right. One thing that I do know is that if it is a visual problem, nothing works. Have him tested by someone who is really good with vision therapist. About silent /e/, I tell my kids one thing that if they see the e at the end of the word, it usually is the long sound. If the word doesn’t make sense, then try the long other, short, sound. Concerning the dipthongs and digraphs, I tell my kids that if they see two vowels in a word, it is usually the long sound, but not always ex. said. Also, after the kids are done with the basic code, I tell them that if the word is three or four sounds, the vowel sound is mostly the short vowel sound. I don’t use the terms short and long, I just give them all of the sounds of the vowels as examples. Janis may also be right, it may be auditory discrimination problems and if that is the case, you have to do PG longer and each stage over and over again. Go slow and drill and drill. The patterns do imprint on the brain, research tells us that. Some kids really need more time going over the patterns. Have him look at the chart in the book a lot. I hope this helps but do get his vision checked.

Janis,

It might be but you would think that overkill would do it then. My observation is that it is more of a generalization problem than anything else. I have had him to the point that he can list out all the ways to say a certain sound like (a—long) but still get it wrong when he encounters a new word. So it is some sort of application issue with him.

I was talking to his Neuronet therapist about this. I never learned any of the rules—even the ones about e at the end of the word. Yet when faced with a new word that is similar, I do OK. She was the one who told me that I visually compare which is what we all do (who don’t have problems, that is). I started paying attention and I realized that is what I do.

She isn’t that keen on the rules of OG either—says slows down your fluency if you have to think of rule.

Beth

Shay,

He has been through vision therapy and we are doing visual work using a Neuronet approach right now. She, and a second vision therapist I took him to for another opinion, see problems with visualization.

His auditory discrimination is pretty good at this point. I have tried going over and over material. He seems to get it in a lesson –can list various ways to write the same sound, can easily read the list of words in lesson but then when faced with a word not in the lesson but with the same pattern, he seems clueless. It is clearly some sort of issue with generalization.
Have you ever seen anything like this?

I do like your idea of telling him that most of the time the vowels in a three or four multisyllable word are short.

Beth

Janis,

I thought about this some more and I think you are right. He isn’t automatic on the advanced code and so he can’t generalize it. The question is why isn’t he automatic. One possibility is that, as I suggested, he doesn’t remember visual patterns. I think that one of the reasons Seeing STars was developed is that Lindamood folks discovered that some kids just didn’t get automatic even after they learned the sounds. Makes me wonder whether I should look at Seeing STars.

The OG therapist I took him to told me PG isn’t multisensory enough for him to remember.

I don’t think just more drill and kill will work. I have tried that.

The thing about him is that he can remember lots of other things. He asked me how many palm trees I can name yesterday. I came up with maybe five. He proceeded to tell me about twenty.

Beth

Beth

It is SO complex, Beth. It really is. We had taken a break from Earobics and started back a few days ago. Anna has always avoided Karloon’s ballons but I made her do it last night. After the first couple she just could not do them. She cried with frustration. How will I ever get her decode longer words when she can’t remember three environmental sounds in sequence! So for her, I think the memory issue will be our problem. Since your son has auditory and visual issues, I can see how he is having difficulty with advanced code. The only thing I can assume is that he has a good memory for words when they have some meaning for him. Do you know if he knows what those 20 kinds of palm trees look like? If he does, then he may be using visual imagery to help him remember. If not, then who knows?! But it is good he can retain that kind of information. Lots of school tests require remembering that kind of information. By the way, I am reading V/V now and I think those people at LB are brilliant. You have the V/V manual, don’t you? I am not sure about Seeing Stars for N., but I can definitely see it as a logical thing to try. Do you think he’d go for another PG intensive on the advanced code? I had recommended it to a FL mom on the APD list, and she emailed me the other day and said it was a phenomenal success. It was like the intensive nature just made everything click for him. He is 12. I’m just wondering if timing isn’t a real issue when we present some of these things. Maybe he’d do better now since he has had other therapies in between. I agree with your other post about the rules slowing things down. I think it is better for the skill to be automatic instead of having to think of a rule.

Janis

This is a funny coincidence, but I just read one of Susan Long’s posts that said she thinks sometimes the kids are just not cognitively ready for things like O-G until around age 12. That was just what I was thinking when I wrote my previous post!

Janis

Actually, and I have no scientific data to back this up…just mom instincts for what they are worth……I agree that children do go through a developmental leap at around 12-14 years. I have read so many testimonies of children who could not read, struggled with many of the same issues that our kids are stuggling with and low and behold they turn 13 and something clicks for them and they make these huge leaps in progress. Their issues are not solved or miraculously gone, but a large improvement takes place. I am hoping, waiting, for this day….in the mean time, we continue to march along. :o)
Annette

that the ability to do abstract thought increases strikingly around adolescence. This is certainly true in math; subjects that simply cannot be taught to kids age eleven seem easy to them when they’re fourteen. (which makes a mess of all those spiral curriculum plans — half of the work is ridiculously inappropriate). Not that Piaget is always right, but I find the general developmental line useful.
If you have a child who learns by structure and logic, then abstract logic blossoms and things like abstract symbols make a lot more sense at this age.

That said, there’s also good pedagogy. OG was originally designed as a remedial program for use after other programs had failed, and so I believe it wasn’t usually used until Grade 5 or later. So the materials were designed for ages 11 and up, more or less. The explanations and rules that make perfect sense to a young adolescent are naturally over the head of a seven-year-old. Now that we have learned the importance of early intervention, it’s necessary to get materials that are suited to six and seven-year-olds. I use workbooks that have rules in them, but teach the rule by model and example and comparison of patterns. I verbalize the rule with the child, but the child only has to apply it to real words with sample models shown, not recite it or anything similar. This works well with most kids.

One of the audiologists I have worked with told me that the corpius collusium (bridge between two sides of brain) matures when kids are about 13. Maybe that is what people see and what Piaget described from a totally different paradigm.

Beth

Janis,

But he is 9!! I don’t know if I will make it until he is 12!! But I guess it does suggest that things might get better, not worse.

I don’t have the V & V manual. I have the Seeing Stars one. I hoped to do V & V last summer with the tutor who did not work out. I think it would help him a lot but keep thinking we should get the reading really solid first. But maybe I ought to buy the manual.

I am not sure how my son keeps all the palm trees straight. I remember Robin G interpreted some part of his Woodcock Johnson as meaning that he has difficulty learning information that doesn’t have meaning for him. I certainly can see that to be true. He had a very hard time learning the alphabet, for example, as well as this darned advanced code. But he is better sometimes at recognizing palm trees and naming them than my husband who is a horticulturalist by training (although he learned up-north so this is relatively new to him too).

My son was typing out his spelling words tonight. He says the sounds as he types each letter. Typing has been one thing we’ve done right lately. Not so sure about these reading programs!!!

Beth

Beth,

He is reading well enough to benefit from V/V. He will need the boost on comprehension since he has the disadvantage of not having the decoding down yet. I do not think Anna is ready yet. She needs to get to where she is reading more. Do get the manual and just read it yourself. It has such good language theory in there.

I don’t know about the advanced code issue. I wouldn’t want to drop it for three years, either. But I might consider sending him back for a refresher intensive later on.

Janis

This is going to sound terribly simplistic and flippant, but honestly it isn’t. **Sometimes the best thing to do is to drop the programs and just teach reading.**
I get a good basic phonics book with oodles of repetition and start *below* where the student is (in most cases starting review at Book 1 page 1), for mastery and confidence and review; then I work through it gradually, a page or two a day, reading every single thing orally. I get good basic readers with enough vocabulary repetition to drive you mad (but in continually different contexts, to avoid memorization), and I start *below* where the student is for the same reasons, and we read a few pages a day, orally, sounding out eachj and every new word — the student sounding by himself where he can, and me modelling sounding with him repeating on the patterns that he hasn’t formally met yet.. I get whiteboards and markers or hundred-packs of paper and markers and I start *below* where the student is, with the basic alphabet and directionality, and we practice a few letters and words a day, writing our new reading words and spelling them; later we get some workbooks that repeat another ten times the same words from the reader and we do every part of them out loud, too.

When we reach a roungh spot, I try to figure out where the student is stuck and work on that specific point, going back to it and reviewing every day or two until we can get it right..

Working through things gradually, very very gradually like this, we don’t make any sudden huge jumps or any overnight miracles, but after ten months you and the student look back and he says “Wow! this stuff is really easy!” — and then you know you’ve won.

Feel free to email and ask for references and sources for low-cost non-programs if you are interested.

I don’t think you are flippant at all. I purchased some readers from the tutor which are second grade level. He can read them pretty easily—sometimes every single word correctly. He is in fourth grade.

I have done a lot of what you are talking about. Maybe my real problem is impatience. He has improved over time. He made about a years progress in a years time last year. But that was with a lot of work!!!! The bottom line is he is relatively in the same place as he was a year ago. It gets discouraging.

I will email you about materials.

Beth

Janis,

I agree about the part where you say maybe he would do better after the therapies.

It does seem that teaching my son things like regrouping for subtraction was easier to do after we did interactive metronome. You need the therapies and great teaching methods. The therapies don’t teach but they provide the most basic of the basic skills that allow them to then learn new things.