Is my son dyslexic? Confused about Woodcock Johnson Achievem

Are those all the tests? Is that the only test they used was the Woodcock Johnson?

K.

There were other tests - but none that related to phonological and/or phonemic skills. (He took the WISC, Cognitive assessment system, Bender and a bunch of projective tests)

Perhaps other tests might indicate more about where his reading is breaking down? I’m open to suggestions…
Thanks!

I could be wrong but I believe you need to look at the entire evaluation to determine what is going on, you can’t just look at one tests or part of a test.

How did he score on the other tests?

K.

Of course you are correct and there ‘s plenty to discuss about his WISC. I just wanted someone to explain to me the signifigance of these particular scores since each professional used them to justify their opinions. But maybe that isn’t an appropriate question to ask?

My sons school is far more confident in his phonemic awareness that I am. They cite things like “he tries to sound out the word” as evidence that all is okay. He has many of the sounds down as in identifying them but cannot actually sound out anything but fairly short words(cant remember syllables???) Spelling is his weakest area which makes me agree with expert #2.

Like anything, memorizing facts and applying them are two different things.

But thats just my experience-cant help you with scoring

Karen,

The raw scores mean nothing. You need to post the standard scores of all subtests and clusters. Then you also need to post the WISC-III scores as well.

Janis

WISC III

Information 14
similarities 15
arithmetic 11
vocab. 16
comprehension 9
digit span 15 * supplemental, not incl in full scale IQ
picture completion 9
coding 1
picture arrangement 9
block design 13
object assembly 8
symbol search 6 * supplemental
mazes 8 * suppl.

verbal IQ 118
Perf IQ 87
Full scale 105
Verbal comp. 120
Percp org. 99
freedom from distract. 126
processing speed 67

WIAT

basic reading score 91 / 27%tile
math reasoning 105/ 63
reading comp 94/34
numberical op. 109/73%tile
listening comp 138/99%

Gray oral reading

Rate — 0 score / below 1.9 grade / 16th percentile
accuracy 10/ 2.8/ 50%
passage 9 / 2.1 / 37%
comprehension 13/ 4.7 grade / 84 percentile

WJIII SS
Oral language 114

WJIII SS
oral language 114
oral expression 106
listening comp 119
broading reading 88
broad math 109
basic reading 93
math calc 104
academic skill 88
academic fluency 86
academicknow. 121
phon/graph 91

letter word id 90
read fluency 88
story recall 128
understand dir. 107
calcuation 108
math fluency 96
spelling 82
writing fluency 85
pass. comp 92
applied problem 111
word attack 100
pic. vocab 97
oral comp. 120
academic know. 121
spelling of sounds 77
sound awareness 120
punctuation 110

Okay Karen,

This is not my primary area of expertise since I am much more familiar with auditory processing problems. I agree that your son’s problems are not in the auditory area. But the low score of 1 on the the WISC coding subtest is a strong indicator of a visual perceptual problem and therefore can effect reading achievement and problems (I think you mentioned) in things like fluency.

Has he had a developmental vison evaluation by a developmental optometrist? That looks to me to be the next step. Did either evaluator suggest a visual perceptual problem? Surely the coding score of 1 stood out to someone!

You have a large gap between verbal and performance, and that is why there is a problem labelling LD because the full scale IQ score is brought down by the performance score. I’ll have to look at the scores a little more to see if I can see a way he’d qualify, but in actuality he may need therapy that he couldn’t get at school anyway.

Janis

“broading reading 88
letter word id 90
read fluency 88

spelling 82
writing fluency 85”

In the subtests above he has a 15 point or one standard deviation between his full scale IQ score of 105 and the subtests. In my state, they require 15 points, so we would qualify him for LD reading and writing with those scores, I believe. Do you know what discrepancy is required in your state to qualify?

Janis

Since there is a 30+ point spread between the verbal and performance IQ and he scored a 1 on coding, I see some real potential visual processing or motor skill issues (or very high anxiety level). Yet, because he seemed to “hold-up” better on the math calc and fluency segments (which are also written), one would tend to look more toward the visual processing element.

I need to print this section and open the top section to really compare. So, this is really comment #1 and the one above will be comment #2.

I’m in NY, and I think its a 50% discrepancy (there was an earlier thread on thsi) however, he’s in private school right now. (regular, K-12 college prep) so all of his services are being provided after school hours and by me.

But we are going to investigate other options for him… so I’ll keep this in mind. Thanks.

Prelude: We can’t really do much because we cannot see this child. I learn more by working with the child and observing than through standardized tests. They just tell me where I may need to look. So, all of this is purely “blind.”

First, with this spread between the VIQ and PIQ, I would use the PIQ score to figure discrepancy…however, your school district may not allow that. Without looking at *why* the problem is occuring, let’s just first look at the what the data show. However, this child is more than “just an average 100ish.”

Reading rate is way *way* slow and accuracy is a little off, too. Error analysis is very important here in understanding *why* but that’s not part of a norm-referenced test. Let’s assume that visual processing has at least something to do with it because the Symbol Search and Coding are low, low. With Similarities and Block Design in the higher range, your son/dd has high fluid intelligence. Very teachable! Good thinker. Looks like he/she does better spatially on a whole-to-part than part-to-whole (good block design/relatively poor object assembly). (From a teaching standpoint, I would try spending more time in chunking big words than word building from individual letters—after phonemic awareness is in place. JMO) The picture completion is relatively low score could also mean that he has a figure ground issue. We *know* it isn’t innate smarts by the BD and Sim scores.

Now, interestingly enough, this child’s brain seems to have rewired to strengthen the auditory channel (evidence FD index score). (S)he probably has a wonderful ability to hold stuff in working memory and gets things into memory better that way.

It would have been nice to see Sound Blending subtest on WJIII. However, what they did give indicates that the child has average ability to look at patterns and say the word/pseudoword. However, that isn’t transferring to spelling, obviously.

I can tell you what I would do, but since I’m probably not in your state or school district, it may not help much. As a mom, you will likely know if what I mention are problems for him/her.

1. I would do some sound moving with symbols other than letters, like LmB tracking to improve ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken language.
2. I would do word building of one syllable words to improve spelling abilities along with synthetic phonics. (Synthetic will make him work whole-to-part and part-to-whole.)
3. I’d be looking really closely at the visual tracking. Is it something more than just slow processing? (What is his reaction time like? Eye-hand coordination is likely slow, too. Not really a sports-guy like basketball or baseball—too fast moving?) As a reading teacher, I’d be working Great Leaps to improve that fluency. I’d investigate what works to help speed up visual tracking. (Sometimes something as simple as using a white index card to cut down on the visual clutter makes a big difference.

Comprehension is very biased culturally, but also may indicate a child who isn’t processing socially appropriate situations. NLD? Quite the little professor with that vocabulary score! Still, may not get along well with peers and see correct things to do in social domains.

My blind guess is that he/she is reading so slow that meaning is lost (certainly vocab isn’t the issue!) Or, gets hung up in syntax or pragmatics—which would doesn’t necessarily show in the Sim score or information. Problems understanding jokes? idioms? Complex sentences?

Is handwriting very sloppy? Slow writer, too, I’ll wager. Excellent attention to punctuation detail.

Overly attentive to detail? Need to keep toys/room all lined up? Not necessarily saying so, but sometimes scores like this are present in kids who have those traits.

I’m sure others will jump in here. I’m tired and will probably miss anything else tonight.

Here’s where I get confused about what visual perceptual means. He had a mild delay on the Bender (sorry, forgot to post that one) - about 9 month below age level.
In the report she says his visual perceptual skills are intact (average) , but he is a slow processer. I believe her conclusion was that his low coding score was primarily due to graphomotor issues.

quick question: why use the piq score to figure discrepancy, shouldn’t we use the higher score to make our case?

Let me tell you more…

The tester found high levels of anxiety which I truly believe depressed his coding score and probably effected his performance overall. He was a basket case at the time of the testing (last spring). We now have him in therapy, and are considering medication if need be.

He has some NLD characteristics: can be inflexible, mild social skills deficits, some motor planning issues. He is predictably not a natural athlete, but holds his own despite looking clumsy. He rode a 2 wheeler right on time. Has friends, but talks excessively. But his room is a mess - his obsessive tendencies are only evident in his speech.

But unlike NLD he’s good at math, his reading comprehension is much better than his decoding, and he seems to possess strong abstract thinking skills. SHe gave him an additional test called the cognitive assessment system. Doesn’t seem to be well known. In a nutshell he scored over 99%til on a piece called successive processing which requires both verbal and nonverbal abstract processing skills including some verbal/spatial skill. (“choose the picture with the yellow arrow over the blue square”) AND off the charts on a figure/ground test where he had to find an image that was imbedded ina nother image. Noone expected that particular skill.

I have been doing great leaps this summer - hard to say what the result is. I think its helped. On those exercises he decodes very accurately (we are at 1st grade level material) but slowly.

We may pull him out this year to do LMB, or find an LMB tutor as a last resort to putting him in an LD school. I may also investigae vision therapy, although I think he’s tracking/scanning better now than at the time of this eval. He’s about to complete interactive metronome which may help some of the motor stuff.

Your assessment is very good considerinig you’ve never seen him! Would you say he’s a bit of a puzzle?

THANKS!

Yes, you would use the VIQ. Finger/brain glitch.

Based on your comments, I point more toward dyslexia than NLD. Definitely a flip kid. I own one of those—or should say rent one indefinitely. He’s a dyslexic flip. Bright like yours, too.

Wish you were here. I could help, I think.

I have a dear friend and colleague who does private work in that area.

I hope it is not 50%. That sounds wrong to me.

We live in Manhattan. But sometimes think of fleeing nto Ithaca.

We have no shortage of resources where we are - the problem is choosing the right type of resource. We have him with a tutor who is OG certified, but is a psychologist too. What have you done with your son?

If you’re already working with a psychologist it shouldn’t be too hard to have that person find out the criteria for services in the public school with a dx of LD; the dx of NVLD will not get you services…but given the Gray Oral Reading Test your son should fit reading disability certainly. Has he had reading tutoring? My son has a similar profile, with rate at 16%, and the rest at the 75th%, and he’s done Wilson(through school), Great Leaps at home, and tutoring for a long time. He works very hard to keep up in 6th grade(public school), and we read his text books with him and will use books on tape. Our son is a very bright kid but he’s anxious and processes slowly and would never make it in a private prep/academic school setting. But don’t underestimate maturity…entering 3rd grade our son looked FAR worse than now!

When my son was small and his first grade teacher told me that he would likely never really read, I just wouldn’t accept that. His reversals were so serious and his ability to hook sound to symbol was non-exsistent. I lucked into finding a Lindamood-Bell tutor who started him on the pathway. He got up to about a 3rd grade level from that round of tutoring…and no longer qualified for sped reading services (or any other reading services, for that matter.) So, in 6th grade, he was still slumping along at grade 3. I was advocating like crazy for appropriate services in reading/writing, but all these prairie provincials knew was whole language and continued to metaphorically “yell at the deaf” (thinking, of course, that this is an aid to their hearing) and talk about whole word reading instruction.

I met an O-G fellow by the name of C. Wilson Anderson, Jr. (who is now Pres. of the O-G Academy) and began to learn O-G myself. I wasn’t a teacher but had a degree in Business and, more important, have always been linguisitically gifted. My son was my “lab rat” and I finally pulled him to home school while I went back to school to become a certified teacher. His current book is “House of the Seven Gables,” Hawthorne. I call that a success over the first-grade teacher’s prognosis.

My son’t rate and visual processing isn’t an issue (16 Coding and 18 Symbol Search) but his phonemic awareness was very, very low—like you son’s coding (except they didn’t really have tests for it then.) The speech/language people had tests but it took an Act of Congress for anyone to be worthy of their time to test.

Sorry for all that digression. Back to you. I would be sure that my O-G tutor was including fluency. It doesn’t have to be Great Leaps, but some kind of structured repeated reading program or teacher-made program. School could do that for 5 minutes each day, too. I suppose it is too much to ask that a tutor know both Lindamood and Orton…that’s what I chose to do and it is an excellent combination. I think many kids need both.

Susan,

My son too is better at whole to part than part to whole reasoning. I was interested in your comment about chunking syllables instead of focusing on letters. My son doesn’t know the advanced code cold—although he has a sight vocabulary that is grade approx. It is all the words he doesn’t know that are a problem!!!

Wonder what you would suggest. We are working with a tutor who knows both Lindamood and OG but my feeling right now is that we are low on her interest list. Not sure how long I will keep this up. She does a lot of consulting and I think that is where her heart is. So what sounds ideal, doesn’t seem that ideal in practice.

Beth

In our neuropsych report she said he has strong phonemic awareness which really got us looking more at NLD than dyslexia. Which is why I started this thread…. But as much as my son may be NLDish socially (and he is) - academically he looks dyslexic.

I take comfort from your advise that we’re doing the best we can right now. His tutor hopefully can use her various skills (OG, not sure about LMB, but other things…) to supplement the little bit of help he gets at school. We’ll keep doing great leaps at home. He has a nurturing teacher known at his school as the perfect teacher for a kid like my ds. Now we begin the praying…

Late breaking news: just hung up withour tutor - she ‘s not formally trained in LMB, but knows about it, is going to look into incorporating some with him. Better than nothing!

//

For most kids, remediation isn’t short-term. For my son, it has been on-going since he was six years old. We didn’t begin Orton-G until he was twelve and I think that is wise in some cases.

I get personal emails from folks with children age 10-11 who’ve had O-G for two years and the progress isn’t great. I think that many kids may not be cognitively ready for O-G until they are approaching the end of elementary school age. Sort of a developmental thing. My son would not have been ready without the PA skills that LmB brought to him.

It appears that you’ve got what I had: a dyslexic flip-kid. Some NLD signs. Some language-based signs (like poor P.A.), but not enough to “slot” into one or the other category.

I am still concerned about the visual processing and I don’t feel that I know enough to steer you in the right direction. If I knew your son, maybe I wouldn’t feel that way and could say that Great Leaps would likely help him start moving along better when he reads.

I’ll be visiting with an old professor of reading on Wednesday evening. I’ll ask him about other quick assessments. He’s just about seen it all over the 50 years he’s been running a reading clinic. Others may chime in, too, with ideas.

In any event, keep him interested in literature w/book on tape. Read along for a bit until it gets tiring; however, enjoy the stories first & foremost. We can remediate a kid right out of the desire to read by taking all the fun out of everything. :-)

Since I read so many parent posts (and have many private emails as well), I *think* I remember your son as being fairly young—say 9 or so. (????) If over ten, forgive my feeble-mindedness.

I usually don’t do O-G with kids before they are ten—some not until 11/12. Piaget and many others have told us that children aren’t ready for analytical thinking until “about” age twelve. Some 11, some 10.5, some 13. Our brains are ready when they are ready and it is an individual process.

When I do give-in to a parent who wants their 8/9 year old to have O-G, I usually don’t do the big multi-syllable words of such as a Wilson Language program. SPIRE doesn’t do that—is more developmentally appropriate in its vocabulary. Even the A-level vocab in Wilson Language can get pretty difficult. I haven’t seen their new product (to compete with SPIRE), I’ve been thinking of writing for a sample to review.

Now, my last thought has to do with a tutor whose priority list doesn’t put your child in an VIP category. Look for another and replace the first when you find one you like. Why not call the IDA folks in Florida and see if they have a referral list. Or, look for a LmB tutor on http://www.iser.com. What I found in K.C. on that site was a private clinic that does LmB. It’s your buck and it otta have a big bang!

I didn’t have time to post a thought on your thought, but it is a *really good* post and gives parents a chance to get ahead of most school people on this issue.

If letters are being used, the activity is phonics-based. If some other symbol is being used or no symbol (just verbal), it is pure phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to add, delete, shift, segment, and blend sounds in *spoken* language. Playing oral rhyme games are PA activities. Chunking spoken words into individual sounds is a PA activity. If I say /chat/ and ask you to break it down into phonemes (individual sounds), you would correctly say, /ch/, /a/, /t/. If I said break down /ate/, you would correctly say /ae/, /t/. The /ae/ together indicates long a sound as opposed to just /a/ being short a.

Phonemic awareness is part of a larger process called phonological awareness. This would include chunking spoken language into syllables, hearing how syllables are accented, and more.

Now, before the National Reading Panel’s review of the literature on PA, we all thought that block-tracking was necessary for 40-80 hours. Now we are seeing that putting the phonics piece together with the PA piece after a shorter time is actually more beneficial to reading.

In your son’s case, there is a possibility that he is not firmly hooked to all the sound/symbol relationships. Since it is not automatic yet, he’s having a difficult time holding several sounds that form a syllable. There are also many, many other possibilities (I have kids with slight speech apraxia—speech motor issues—and they have trouble with multi-syllables and final blends and etc.)

His PA could be okay—in other words, he can move around up to six or seven individual sounds—but not be able to “chunk and deliver” multisyllables words. Sometimes this is because they don’t know where they are visually chunking.

At the risk of sounding like a linguistic weirdo, I can remember being in 4th-5th grade and trying to figure out how words chunked into syllables. I’d have my dictionary w/pronunciation guide. I had teachers who were good at it, so this was helpful, too. I could hear the speech patterns created in words with “medial i ” (ex: medicate) and would recognize it in other readings. Same for roots and affixes.

I hope to have not caused more confusion with all this.

Susan -

I found this post very helpful. Thanks for taking the time to write it up. It gave me some additional ideas for working with my son.

aj

///

Susan,

As you remember, my son is 9. The approach the tutor is using with him doesn’t seem that difficult cognitively. She calls it modified OG. We have rules about closed and open syllables, silent e at the end, y at the end of word but that is it so far. But I do find your comment about OG interesting. I know Wilson is recommended for older kids.

The tutor is who the neurologist recommended as a resource. I think she thinks my son is a difficult case and that it would be wise to take him on herself for awhile before referring him to someone else. The problem is that she seems too busy for us—doesn’t get back to me ect.

I think we will go a few more times and try to get a referral to someone else. I don’t know what kind of person though. I am concerned about your OG comment, and yet the therapist my son has worked with for almost two years doesn’t think LIPS is a good match for him (he has fine motor issues and thus doesn’t gain information from feeling the sounds).

Beth

Amazing but true. Professionals I respect use the phrase phonemic awareness and mean different things but you have finally explained it!!

My son scored very high on sound awareness, which I believe he does have. And very low on phoneme/grapheme . Throw ina lack of automaticity and you have his reading problem.

Thinking about it this way makes sense: he has strong auditory skills, and weaker visual skills. Brings us right back to the visual stuff - where I am less confident that I understand the process and his relative weaknesses and strengths. He seems to have both, including some surprising visual strengths .

Maybe a good developmental optometrist is a good idea after all.

I agree with you about the visual processing and would welcome any thought s you have now or in the future.

I feel like I have a handle on the other areas but this.

I’m curious about how your son has developed over time . Since ds isn’t NLD all the way, I don’t assume his social acceptance will deteriorate, or that his math skills won’t keep up. Likewise, I also don’t assume his reading is going to take off (as some have suggested - if only it were true!) It sounds like your sons reading progress has been typical for a dyslexic child, what about the other stuff?

Karen,

If you go the developmental optometrist route, I would make sure the OD incorporates body work. The first one I went to really did not. Neither I or another family I know got the results we for which we had hoped. I think this is especially important if a child has underlying sensory-motor issues, which I know yours does. We just haven’t received really good results from “flat” work. An OT oriented person is likely to value such an approach and may be a source of referrals.

Beth

Can your son hear the word scamp and give you back the individual sounds: /s/, /k/, /a/, /m/, /p/? Would he know what was changed from /skamp/ to /kamp/? How about /kamp/ to /klamp/ and then to /klam/? Would he know what was different about /amp/ to /map/?

> I’m curious about how your son has developed over time .

He has continued to cognitively mature. He still isn’t Mr. Socialite and sometimes fails to perceive situations that others take for granted, but he may continue to grow as “normal folks” begin to stop advancing. Who knows what the brain can do.

Likewise, he never had a comprehension problem. Vocab lagged a little until I made sure to intervene to keep that afloat.

Mine is pretty typical dyslexic with some anxiety and ADD thrown in. His auditory memory isn’t as good, unlike your son, who prefers that mode. Mine is more visually adept.

They come in all kinds of wrapping. :-)

Thanks, Beth!

Susan,

You should add Phono-Graphix to your tool belt. Honestly, it is the perfect thing to use earlier than O-G. It teaches kids to blend, segment, and manipulate sounds in words just as you have mentioned in the previous post. But unlike O-G, it does not teach rules. I think that it can be used for younger children successfully for that reason.

Janis

How would you compare PG (phonographx) with LMB(lindamood) for developing the skills one might need pre-OG (ortongillingham)?

This is just an opinion as I have not personally used all these programs! (I have had PG training and have viewed the LB training videos). I think PG is the obvious first choice. It will help everyone to some degree I would think. If that didn’t work, I’d likely go to LB, which is certainly in the O-G family. I was told my child did not have severe enough phonemic awareness problems to need LB, so I would probably keep her in PG as long as it took. She is almost 7 and far to young for an O-G program. The rules are confusing even to me! But I would definitely consider repeating a program like PG when the child was older and had developed more cognitively. My daughter could not do tasks on the Earobics CD when I first got it and a year later with no special interventions, she could do many. I knew she was just not developmentally ready the first time even though her age was appropriate.

As an aside, I want to mention that I love LB Visualizing and Verbalizing. I think it will fill some comprehension gaps for kids who get the decoding part down.

Janis

Rod pops up on Teaching Reading now and then and posts about Vision Therapy, for who, how, and how to get in touch with good people. He apparently refers to a really effective Developmental Optometrist, one who would be worth travelling cross-country to see — or at least get the name of this person from Rod and have him refer you to good people closer to you. (There are apparently really good and really bad VT/DO providers out there, so go with past record). Go through the archives and see the old discussions if you can.

Thanks, but I use LmB before Orton.

About two years ago, the P-G folks were so nasty & rude that I just got turned off of the whole idea. (You know how that goes.) If I get a kid with whom I cannot make progress, I’d certainly give it a whirl.

One of the best reading mentors I have found—and still correspond with privately—left this BB due to all that conflict. That was sad.

I believe that Lindamood Bell is more complete. Having already been trained LmB and O-G, I saw no reason for P-G. However, I was more than a little biased by the lamblasting given on this very BB toward O-G folks.

I would go for the LmB tutor myself. I feel very strongly about that…however, be sure the person is a reading teacher and that they don’t “get lost in the tracking” to the expense of read reading. Reading is, after all, the goal. There are some that get so hung up in the speech therapy that they forget to read.

I don’t teach rules. I teach students to *see* patterns in words. Those patterns are syllable types, syllabication of large words, spelling patterns, and prefix, root, and suffix patterns.

I don’t believe most dyslexic—or reading impaired—students generalize rules. They generalize what they have categorized into patterns and practiced again & again.

Brain is a pattern seeking instrument. (Eric Jensen)

Susan,

OK. I did this. Now I did it when he thought I should be reading Harry Potter to him instead. This is important in interpreting results.

He had no problem segmenting “scamp”. He scores perfect on segmenting and blending tests. Now the manipulation part, that was another story. He looked very irritated at me and told me that he couldn’t do that without paper and pencil. So I went and got colored blocks. He was able to do all that you asked but none of it on the first try.

He looked at amp and map and told me that all the letters were in a different order and that you couldn’t just change one letter. (I assume he was supposed to look at it??)

This is pretty typical probably for him. His ability to discriminate sounds is much much improved over a few years ago. He used to not be able to segment or blend. He can’t seem to manipulate sounds around though unless it is really easy—like dropping the first or last sound of a three or four sound word. He can do it with manipulatives though, although not easily.

What do you think?

I know when I do these tasks, I see the letters in my mind. I don’t have extremely strong auditory processing skills. I have some wierd glitches and have a really hard time with foreign languages, odd names (really rough with some of names my students have these days), and spelling. My husband, who is one of the best spellers I know (but don’t ask him to follow directions from diagrams) thinks I am nuts. He doesn’t see anything in his head.

His resource teacher wrote me a note and said she was going to use Corrective Reading Decoding program (By SRA) with him this year. Are you familiar with it? What do you think? She used PG last year and although we saw progress, she is concerned by the same things that I am.

Beth

How do you teach your students to “see” these things? This, I really think, is where it is all breaking down for my son.

Beth

I think it depends what the problem is. Mary (MN) who used to post tons on these boards daughter learned to read with a combination of PG, vision therapy, and PACE. She read above grade level. She had done OG tutoring and it didn’t seem to help, or at least very quickly. Now from Susan’s descriptions, her daughter might have been too young. But her daughter didn’t have auditory processing problems. Her problems were in the visual end along with phonological awareness. LMB would have been expensive overkill for her.

I think PG works for an awful lot of kids. Mine learned to read with it when the school couldn’t do squat. Now for complex kids, it often isn’t enough and for some of them, it just doesn’t do a thing. A lot of these kids need LMB. The problem with PG is that some of the advocates can be a bit overzealous. But that doesn’t mean throw the baby out with the bath water.

Beth

At the time, I was strapped for hours in a day and purchasing materials with money needed for household expenses. I’ll try to look it over before Christmas. Anyone want to donate the materials for review?

I started trying to explain all of this. I just don’t have the stamina to type all of that.

Simply put: I work the visual through tiles/cards with letters/magnetic letters—whatever I need to give that student practice at “seeing the patterns. Plus, the LmB *talk* (Socratic questioning and error handling—which is why I feel so strongly about that training—helps the student to figure it out w/out being told). Lots of practice in word reading that support what I’ve modeled. No answer telling—coach to figure out the word.

On of these days, I’ll have someone video tape me teaching. The two methods are just interwoven in whatever portions the student requires.

Sorry, I’m just so tired tonight. I’ve answered hundreds of emails today.

Susan, I do understand. I vaguely have an idea of what you are talking about. Glad I wasn’t around for that! But I wouldn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater either. ;-) I have relied on those like Shay for evidence that PG really works for a large number of kids. And I believe in trying the most basic program first, before getting into the next level like LB which teaches tongue positions or even O-G with all the rules. I just don’t believe all kids need that. It is absolutely wonderful for those who do, but for those who don’t, I’d rather go with the basics. And it would be awhile before my 6 year old could have O-G. So that really leaves me with PG for now. But I have viewed the LiPS training tapes in the event some of my students need more than PG. Some will as they are hearing impaired. It definitely is important to have multiple tools. I am reading V/V now and I love it.

Janis

Harry Potter is way more important! I agree with him. Okay. I’ll get serious. (I think I’m having mood swings on this BB…)

Actually, I didn’t want him to do the exercise with paper/pencil, especially amp/map. Louisa Moats (of whom I’m a way big fan), indicates (and NRP confirms) that segmenting and blending are the key elements. I think Hallie Yopp would agree, maybe not. If a kid can do that, I don’t fuss with lots of other LmB tracking & etc.

Post for Sue on the SRA. She knows that series (There are about a million of them…I only remember the one I like for whole word.) What I’ve seen on phonics hasn’t impressed me much. Sue remembers all those programs. I just need a whiteboard and marker, really. Everything else is just a timesaver.

I have my doubts about teachers who talk programs instead of methods. Do you have the book from National Institute for Literacy? “Put Reading First: The research building blocks for teaching children to read.” It should open some eyes real wide in schools. [email protected] or 1-800-228-8813.