good grades but reading still low

I have you thought of something like phonographix. It can be done very easily at home. It would help with decoding and the more advanced combinations of letters.

I am using it with my son, who is six, we are using it for the alphabet sounds but I understand it is excellent with older children who need remediaton. The book itself only cost about $16 dollars.

Also, on the teaching an ld child bulletin board, there is a poster named Shay, who is unbelievably helpful. I have spoken with her several times since I started using the book. She has used the program with many different types of LD children and been very successful. Since your daughter already seems comfortable working with you, this book might be very helpful. There are also trained phonographix tutors but in my case, there is not one in my area.

Try their website:

www.readamerica.net

K.

Hi Denise,
You might want to try doing PG with her (although she did LMB, she may need a “refresher” on sound symbols). You can find PG or Phonographix at most book stores and even borrow it from the library. I think PG would definitely help her decoding skills.

After PG, you could try a program like Great Leaps, or your could try doing something like I’ve been doing with my son. We take a book at a comfortable reading level and, using a stop watch, I have him read it daily over a duration of about one week— for speed and accuracy. Although his progress is slow, he does seem to be getting a little more fluent.

For slow processing you might want to try a program like PACE or Audiblox. I’m doing Audiblox with my son right now and although it’s way too early to know if it’s helpful or not (we only started this week!), I think it’s a decent program and one thing I like is it’s easy to do (just a lot of repetition so, although my child has to think and progress, I don’t have to think too much!!! ;-) .

My son is a similar kind of student, although we are only at the beginning of his remediation (he’s 8). His school also uses the Gates, and it is timed, and even the people using it don’t feel it always accurately reflects his true decoding abilitiy. He is also a slow processor, and a slow reader. It sounds like your daughter is doing well despite her LD and if she’s happy, she should stay with the regular class and continue with the modifications. From a reading perspective, it sounds like she really just needs to gain fluency - have you looked into Great Leaps or something like it?

My son is a similar kind of student, although we are only at the beginning of his remediation (he’s 8). His school also uses the Gates, and it is timed, and even the people using it don’t feel it always accurately reflects his true decoding abilitiy. He is also a slow processor, and a slow reader. It sounds like your daughter is doing well despite her LD and if she’s happy, she should stay with the regular class and continue with the modifications. From a reading perspective, it sounds like she really just needs to gain fluency - have you looked into Great Leaps or something like it?

Laura,

Can you give us a little more detail about what audiblox is working on? Do you think the goal is to automate things like left and right, improve sequencing, improve visual spatial things, using form drawings etc.

OR, is it more cognitive; teaching inference etc? I guess I am just curious about what types of things you do.

I don’t think my son is a slow processer. He gets things pretty quickly but then he doesn’t use what he knows when confronted with a new task. Sometimes all I have to say is you know that and the lightbulb will go off and he will say, “Oh, I know what to do.” When he gets cooking he just breezes right through it. Unfortunately I am not sitting with him when he takes the placement tests and they keep putting him in the group that learns the things he already knows. I just don’t know exactly what this is and what program will address it. I think it is somehow related to not looking at details. Maybe it is attention. PACE is supposed to help attention. (IM helped with attention but not fully but enough for me to think I could do this with another program and avoid meds.)Do you think audiblox does? Sorry for all the questions.

Thanks

Linda,
I can’t remember the technical terminology, but my son’s neuropsych report talked about his deficits in the area of modifying his strategy as he worked thru a talk based on what he already knew. Planning I think, and it is related to attention. Maybe this is also related to generalizing your knowledge. When I say my son is a slow processor, it doesn’t mean he’s slow to learn new concepts - it means he applies his skills slowly when he has to produce output. I would expect a PACE or other program that stirs up the cognitive stuff to improve these areas.

Sounds like my son. It is almost as though he can grasp concepts but has trouble using them at times to develop a plan of action.

I will let you know what the PACE evaluator says about this.

Despite having totally opposite testing profiles, our boys are clones.

or Woodcock Diagnostic Reading Battery? That kind of test tells better whether the problem is still word attack or if it is comprehension. (By the sound of the Gates, there are a lot of comprehension issues, even if speed is a problem.)

Are all the PIQ subtests low or just the Coding and Symbol Search? How is the Block Design? Picture Arrangement? What the heck, just post ‘em all.

How is reading speed? Slow, I’ll wager. What is being done for that?

I’m all for propping a kid up in regular ed classroom with accommodations; however, everyone needs a basic reading ability. I’m not sure we know the real bottom line with your daughter yet.

Hi Denise,

I think that the reason for the low reading score as well as the slow reading is due to the fact that she doesn’t understand dipthongs and digraphs, more than one letter that represents a sound. She may think that each letter represents a sound, for example take the word ‘though’; if she doesn’t know it as a sight word, then she may think that the word has five sounds, th/o/u/g/h. Also, she probably doesn’t understand how to decode the multi-syllable words. She is missing the strategies on how to decode these words that make up about 40% of all of the words that she has to read. You can’t keep doing what you are doing, her homework for example because her grades aren’t totally hers, they are partly yours.

Now, a possible solution. Do what some of the posters have said before me, buy Reading Reflex, read it, and then email me your phone number and I will help you refine her reading. Remember, reading level is usually dependent on how many multi-syllable words she can read in a list of words and how well she can answer short passages and answer the questions about the passage. If she has to guess at too many MS words, her comprehension level will be low. Once she can decode MS words on her own, practice it by reading, her reading level will start coming up. It was Susan that said that fluency takes time, and it does. You should feel very fortunate, she appears to be an auditory learner and will do well in school. Please get the book and email me.

Thank you for the response. Yes her reading speed is slow. Did not take the Woodcock diag Reading Battery. Her Wechsler scores are;
VIQ 118, PIQ 95, Full scale 107

Verbal comprehension SS 122, Perceptual Organization SS 104, Freedom from Distractibility SS 112, Processing speed 77.

Verbal Scale:
Information 12
Similarities 14
Arithmetic 10
Vocabulary 12
Comprehension 17
Digit Span 14

Performance Scale:
Picture Completion 9
Coding 4
Picture Arrangement 10
Block Design 12
Object Assembly 11
Symbol Search 7

Deveopmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration SS 119 (90%)

We did have a private neuropsych eval 3 years ago after all this started. IQ scores similar, his final dx “Developmental Language Disorder-mild (with problems in Phonics, phoneme processing, reading and spelling). A WRAT-3 was done, Reading SS 96 (39%), Spelling SS 97 (42%) and Arithmetic SS 106 (66%), and also WIAT Listening comprehension 109 (73%).

She is now labeled LD, 4 years ago she was dx’ed with petit mal seizures so got services under POHI then. Was put on medication (zarontin) for 2 years and neurologists says is ‘cured’ no seizures, no meds, don’t come back.

I am taking advice of a few other posts who recommend looking into PG. I feel she is a bright girl who’s stumbling block is reading, reading is so difficult due to decoding and speed, that the comprehension is lost. When she is read to, (which she much prefers), she understands.. We did the LMB in hopes of improving reading, but saw little. THey felt she has very weak visual memory..

What do you think? I appreciate any advice.
Denise

Thanks for the response. I agree the reading is difficult because she doesn’t understand dipthongs, digraphs and MS words. She has been taught strategies but has difficulty actually applying them. She uses a ‘best guess’ approach.. I actually have the PG book, haven’t used it on her yet. I will start reading it and contact you.

There looks to be something visual going on; however, I cannot say visual memory without different tests/data. Sometimes slow processors look like they have no visual memory because people don’t wait for them to process—hurry them along too much.

There are different kinds of visual memory: Memory for scenes, people, things (episodes) and memory for semantics (words, letters, etc.) and memory for spatial/logical things (shapes, numbers, geometry, etc.) As a mom, you know how she remembers things and where to be suspicious of memory based on her recall of history with you/family/ school. Her average vocabulary and information scores indicate that her long- term, semantic (words) memory is working okay on the verbal track.

This could be a visual processing disorder and that’s not my specialty. I’m still trying to get my arms around the right things to do and how to know what is what in that diagnosis.

None of the tests given really get under the reading issue completely. There is no fluency component, word recognition/word attack isn’t evaluated, phonemic awareness isn’t part of the tests mentioned (but I’m sure the LmB gave a LAC and found deficiency there. However, I’ve given the LAC to college-level readers and found they measured deficient in phoneme awareness on that test…) I am very suspicious of the word attack intervention—LmB instructors don’t always provide enough structured phonics to get the job done over a 3rd grade reading level, depending on the needs of the student. In this case, the possible fluency issue would compound the phonics issue.

Kids w/ more than a simple phonics deficit will usually take more than just a phonics program to get them going. When we analyze problems, we cannot be thinking up-front about a certain program. We need to think about (analyze) the processes in the task in a very systematic way to see where that process is broken. That is impossible to do completely in an on-line format. However, we can help you think about the tests that have been given and see where the data-holes could be.

I think we need to find out who the national guru’s are in the world of visual processing disorders: identification and correction. This topic keeps coming up frequently. I have a kid right now that I’m tutoring whose reading rate isn’t growing nearly like it should. (We are using Greap Leaps and I’ve contacted Ken Campbell with some specific questions because this one defies that intervention.)

This might benefit you and others. Suggestions, folks?

We have looked into the vision.. she evaluated 3 years ago by an optometrist who did a developmental vision exam. The results were (she was 7.9 years) ;
Test of Visual-motor integration (VMI) age equiv 8.7 years
Test of motor speed and percision age equiv 7.0 years
Test of visual-perceptual skills (non-motor):
Visual discrimination 99.9%
Visual memory 50%
Visual-spatial relations 91%
Visual form constancy 84%
Visual sequential memory 9% (very low) (‘a child’s ability to remember for immediate recall a series of forms from among four separate series of forms’)
Visual figure ground 99.6%
Visual closure 95%
Develomental eye movements 0% (‘This test allows insight into the way a child tracks her eyes across printed material. Student was unable to complete test’)
Test of tracking age equiv 12 years
Test of reversal frequency age equiv 5.8 years
Dx was ‘mildly farsighted with Accommodative Insufficiency’, she used the glasses prescribed but actually thought it made her reading more difficult, so we stopped! (got a few different pairs of glasses from different places..)

We thought about vision therapy (VT), which the optometrist recommended. However, in researching I found both the Amer Academy of Ophthalmology and Amer Academy of Pediatrics both state “no scientific evidence exists for the efficacy of eye exercises “vision therapy” or the use of tinted lenses in the remediation of these complex pediatric developmental and neurologic conditions…”. So we haven’t tried it..

My husband did speak with Dr. Ken Gibson from PACE who is a vision optometrist himself, about the above scores, he didn’t think VT would help..Can’t remember exactly, but something to the effect that she was already strong in the areas that it usually helps..

Ideas? Comments?
Thanks! Denise

Susan et al,
I’ve begun reading these posts and will offer more tomorrow. I’ve had a concussion and in the aftermath can only work in bits. Ken

We’ll miss your wit & wisdom but understand why you cannot post just now. Good mending!

Thanks, Susan et al

I’m trying to go through the info. but cannot pull the concentration to adequately give insights. I’ll try again tomorrow. I like these group efforts on the board. It shows a spirit missing in present day education. Ken

I’m still reading and thinking about this one. I don’t think my Great Leaps is called for - and perhaps nothing commerical at this point. I think we need a good diagnosis before we intervene. I still don’t have a good sense as to the cause of the dysfunction. As in many “learning disabilities” there are things happening which defy our common sense. I’ll keep thinking and looking for clues.

Thank you for your response. You say we need a good diagnosis before we intervene. We have searched so much, trying to find out what exactly is the problem and what helps.. As I originally posted, she gets good grades (studies hard) but her reading level is still low, approx 3th-4th grade level(is in 6th). We did get a dx from a private neuropsych “developmental language disorder, with problems in phonics, phoneme processing, reading and spelling”. Specifically- her reading lacks fluency, reads slow, miscalls known words and has difficulty decoding unknown words, uses a ‘best guess’ approach. She did LMB for 8 weeks, but saw little improvement.. We’ve entertained dx of ADD- inattentive, but trial of meds didn’t help. She has a history of petit mal seizures, was on zarontin for two years and is now cured, don’t even ever have to return to neurologist for that (yea!). Although I think, somehow the seizures and the LD are related, it’s not a coincidence she had both.. But bottom line, how can I help her increase her reading level?? As we have for years, I read to her a lot, she reads to me.. I’ve looked into, but haven’t done vision therapy, or PG? Any other ideas, what do you think?
Thanks so much,
Denise