My son is being tested this week for possible learning disabilities. He is five and a half and has a pretty extensive family learning disability history. His teacher is considered because he is not recognizing letters, remembering their sounds. She started to notice a problem when he couldn’t remember the letter C and it is in his own name. He is having a speech and lang eval, and a cognitive and achievement test.
That said, my question is, how do I set up a schedule at home that will help him. I have been using http://www.learningpage.com to print letter sheets and other sheets for him to do every nite. I also bought three book by peggy kaye, games for reading, games for math, and games for learning. They were all recommended by his kindergarten teacher. I am not sure how much to do with him every night and what I should be doing. I don’t want to overload his brain. He is in (private) school 8:15a to 2:45p. The school is fantastic and they are really working hard to help him but I want to be able to help too! The head of the school things 2-3 weeks of real one on one would help significantly. I can give him that at night but I feel really lost. I want to make sure I am doing the right thing!!
Thanks
Dawn
Great ideas!
Just to emphasize that yes, it’s a lot better to learn ONE thing well than to be exposed to 20 — these are otherwise smart kids who get overwhemed and then confuse those twenty things forever, and it’s totally unnecessary!
a couple of practical suggestions that work from experience
I really have to disagree with you on two points, not on your general idea (which is very sensible, thanks) but on the presentation.
There is nothing intrinsic in capital letters that makes them “easier” than lower-case — actually the reverse, lower-case have more variety in height and lower-case words are easier to identify than all caps. What is confusing to many, many kids, officially diagnosed as dyslexic or LD or not, is having two *different* shapes called by the same name and sound.
So yes, it is a very very good idea to teach one alphabet first and save the second form for later once the kid has got the hang of this sound-symbol idea.
BUT look at any book or at this website. You will notice that 95% or more of the letters are lower-case. If you didn’t recognize the capitals and covered them all with dots, you could still read this just fine. But if you left just the capitals and x’s out all the lower-case you couldn’t read this at all. So please teach the lower-cazse letters as the standard, and save the capitals for later. They can wait a long time, even to Grade 2 if necessary; a kid who writes well but doesn’t use capitals will do fine in Grade 1, but a kid who writes in all caps and worse yet one who can only read capitals will run into trouble.
The question of name of letter versus sound of letter is similar. By the way, trying to teach the lower-case and capital and name and sound all together is really too much, you are absolutely right. Look at this from the child’s perspective. You give two completely different shapes, G nd g, and you tell him they are the same thing. This is bad enough. Then you say sometimes they are both gee and sometimes they are both juh. Any logical person (and kids are smart) will try to make a system out of this and say G is gee and g is juh. Definitely not the best method of presenting this.
BUT again, which is more useful for the beginning learner? IF you are starting from a blank state, a child who does not know the alphabet, then if you teach the sounds *first*, the child will be able to make use of this skill immediately to sound out words and to really read. If for example he learns c as /k/, a as /ah/. and t as /t/, he can read “cat”. But if he has learned “see-ay-tee”, he won’t be able to read until you start all over again and teach the sounds. (Of course, if the child already knows letter names, you can’t and shouldn’t undo that, you teach the sounds as an additional skill)
Yes, do one thing at a time. That is very good advice. But if you teach the lower-case letters and the sounds as the one thing first, you’ll have an independent reader on your hands before you know it, and isn’t that a nice thing?
The Peggy Kaye books are great, but keep in mind that they are not a substitute for systematic instruction, but rather a fun way to reinforce and practice the basic info and skills. You are right on target with your concern about not overloading him. Very short, daily lessons that he can do successfully will be much more successful over the long haul than hour long tutoring that leaves him frazzled.
I think you’ll get better results if you do a combination of systematic instruction and games from the books. I have come across a couple of studies that found that it’s easier for kids to learn the names of letters first, and then the sounds. That was definitely my experience with my older son. I know not all will agree, but it is confusing for some kids to try to learn to recognize the letter (visual) and associate it with a sound (auditory) at the same time. Also, we didn’t have success with learning the alphabet until we stuck with doing all the capital letters first, and then went on to lower case. For my son, it was just easier to get a solid mental image of “this is the letter A”, and then add new information onto that.
I really like “Let’s Read ABC’s” by Clarence and Robert Barnhart for a simple, straightforward introduction to the alphabet, and both my kids enjoyed it. Each lesson only takes about 10 minutes, and if you do a lesson a day you’ll complete the book in 2 or 3 months. You can order it from EPS. We used pipe cleaners cut into 3 inch segments to make the capital letters, and that really helped my older son.
I’d pick a few games from Peggy Kaye’s book and do one a day. One of my kids favorites was to “find the sound”. I got a box of Easy Consonant cards at a teacher’s store- each card has a picture on one side and the word on the other side. I’d “hide” 6 or 8 cards in the living room, and then as they’d find the cards, we’d talk about the sound (not the letter, the sound) at the beginning of the word. After a while, I’d send them to find a picture that began with the “mmm” sound, etc. Once my older son knew the alphabet, I then began to point out that the “mmm” sound is spelled with the letter m, but at first we just worked with sounds.
My older son really benefitted from Earobics too. This is a computer program with a variety of games to help improve the auditory skills that helps kids with decoding and reading. Wait until you get the auditory eval before you get this- it worked great for us, but I know some parents have found it’s too hard for some kids until they work on underlying auditory processing issues.
Above all, remember that he is 5 and that you are not only teaching him the ABC’s but also shaping his attitudes about learning. IMHO, kids who don’t pick this stuff up easily need time to work through at their own pace as much as they need systematic instruction. I think the efforts to “keep up” sometimes do more harm than good. If he learns to confidently identify a single capital letter, he has taken a big step. Those first few steps may seem very slow, but it’s so important to take the time needed so that he can move forward with confidence. Since we were homeschooling, we were free to move at our own pace. My older son’s progress was so slow, especially at first, and he was 8 1/2 before he was reading a first grade basal reader with confidence. That was two years ago and he’s now reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I worried so much about him being behind, but now it’s clear that taking the time to master each step has paid off big time.
Hope this helps.
Jean