Seriously considering Lindamood Bell

Laura, why do you think he needs PACE? If he did need it, it probably should come first. But if he has learned to read (Decode) and has fluency(slow orthographic recognition) problems, then Seeing Stars would address those problems. There are those here that say you should address cognitive/processing issues separately (and first), but I have the tendency to feel that some kids just need the right reading program and the processing will be improved as the child progresses through that program. I am impressed with what I’ve seen of LMB so far. But I am taking the trainings and not having my child tutored at the clinic.

Janis

Lindamood is very labor and time instensive. Not to mention expensive if you go to their clinic. I have found it very good, however, for beginning or older non-readers. The older students don’t seem to get much from it, however, after a certain point. If your son is decoding, but slowly, he is probably beyond Lindamood. I understand that the Seeing Stars is the next step, but I’m not familiar with it.

I’d recommend Orton Gillingham at this point. If you are homeschooling or tutoring, you can try Looking Glass Spelling to teach spelling and reinforce fluency and decoding. The website is www.gwhizresources.com.
LGS is based on Glass Analysis, a decoding teaching technique that builds fluency and speed (you might want to try that, it is relatively inexpensive and you can do it at home with little training). LGS works nicely with Orton or Wilson (an off-shoot of Orton) , too. Great Leaps is also a reading method that helps build fluency.
Fern

Hi, Laura,
You might look for a clinic that provides a number of programs where they can use their experience to help fill in hole. I don’t know any in your area, but there is an excellent clinic in Diamond Bar. She would give you an evaluation and recommend programs that might be effective. My son had LiPS, Fast ForWord and Davis with her. I know that she has also been using PACE. Seeing Stars is tht sight word portion of Lindamood - the words that don’t play fair and need to be learned through visual imaging. I trust her judgement and knowledge of programs. She may then have contacts in your part of town. Also, for pulling all of these pieces together we have tried Read Right…which involves excellent reading of text at a good pace with understanding. They tutor over the phone…so my son has his lesson in the comfort of our home. We are into our third month of twice weekly tutoring. I like what I see happening and plan to give it some more time. Their web site is www.readright.com. Take care, Angela

Well I have NOT had the SS training, I’ll preface my remarks that way, but I have been working with the SS manual and imo it is pretty user friendly (unlike say LiPs). I think some parents here have actually done this program with their kids. It is not exactly sight words, imo. They use visualization to teach sight words, but I think it is basically for the kid who finds that words just go in one eye and out the other :-). They can’t remember words and so they go back to decoding every word. If you have to continue to do this reading will be pretty slow! At some point the decoded word must move from decoded to sight. Most kids will do that naturally. SS uses visualization and some other techniques (one is that you have the kid substitute one letter for another which improves decoding as well. There is also work on suffixes and prefixes, which give many kids trouble.

IMO, SS is QUITE different from OG which continues to work at a decoding level, so if the kid is very good at decoding it is a waste of time. Also imo, esp. in a one to one setting, I don’t think that SS has as much of an age problem as LiPs (although I understand older kids will more want to write on the table than in the air).

I also feel that the LMB programs really do work on the processing but they work on it thru the subject matter. I couldn’t really say about the PACE.

Anyway these are just my impressions until someone with more background with SS wants to straighten me out. :-)
(we’ll take if virtually to the back lot of the forum :-))

—des

des, I think you were accurate about Seeing Stars. It is to develop automaticityand fluency for all words…they use the term “sight words” meaning automatic recognition. Our V/V trainer told us that this summer.

Lindamood Bell clinics do not do LiPS alone anymore. They move the children quickly into Seeing Stars. LiPS alone is not enough to teach a dyslexic child to read well.

Janis

I have taken the Seeing Stars, Visualizing/Verbalizing, On Cloud Nine, and LAC test training this summer. I have taken LiPS the previous summer, so I have more experience with it. My students that I have taught using LiPS can decode and encode, but their spelling is not yet perfect; phonetic yes, but not perfect. They would need SS and that’s what I’m doing now. I’m also using V/V. I’ll use OCN next when my students are on the sentence by sentence level on the V/V because that’s what OCN recommends. My problem as you can probably guess, is finding the time to do all of these programs! I don’t have the luxury of the LMB clinic where they see the children for 4 hours 1 on 1 with 4 different teachers. I just see my students for an hour and they are in a group.

Anyway, let me know what the LMB recommends for your child. How old is your child? There’s no age limit for the programs, but the pace will be faster for the older kids depending on their needs. When I observed the LMB clinic during my training, I saw both 7 y/o and 18 y/o and they were having fun.

Check into a cognitive skills program. It is very difficult and time consuming to teach reading/spelling if underlying skills such memory and sequencing are not in place. Audiblox is a good choice.

Laura in CA,

I would do PACE, and possibly follow up with Master the Code.

Vision therapy is great for developing visual efficiency skills, but it often needs to be followed up with a cognitive training program to fully develop the *visual processing* skills necessary for fluent reading — short-term visual memory, visual sequencing, etc.

Since your son was able to learn to read using RR, chances are that his visual processing skills are what is holding back fluency. PACE will develop both visual processing and auditory processing skills.

Nancy

Getting the Read Naturally tapes and doing those with him. He needs more practice with reading to develop automaticity. I agree with Angela About going to Stowell Learning Center in Diamond Bar. Jill Stowell is a trainer for PACE and she defintely is saavy when it comes to figuring otu what is keeping kids from learning.. I used to work at Stowell. I am trained in all LMB programs but I ran into the same problem you did…I had to be my child’s mom and let other people be her tutor while I worked with other children at Stowell. Where are you in CA?

When a child had choppy reading but knew the code Stowell would have us use Read Naturally to help build fluency. We would also work on Seeing Stars with the kids every day too.

Thanks for all the great responses! I think my son is past LIPS. He’d most likely get Seeing Stars/VV and possibly On Cloud 9 (although he’s very good at understanding math concepts, he has difficulty memorizing math facts).

I’m thinking maybe it would be a good idea to start with PACE as well. We had looked into it about a year and a half ago, but my son didn’t test as “needing” it. All scores were above age level. Yet I still believe my son has some processing difficulties that might be addressed by PACE (WJIII low cognitive fluency 9%ile, RAN 1%ile and low word retrieval). My husband wants to start LMB right away, so I may not have this choise. But, we’ll see!

I’m not close to Diamond Bar (I’m closer to L.A./San Fernando Valley/Santa Clarita ).

Although I’ve made a lot of progress with my son’s reading, I’m at a point where I’d like to try something more intensive (and have someone else do it! Of course, I don’t mind following up and working with him afterward).

I’m a little worried about the time he’d need to take off school. I’ve heard they have a school program too. That might be worth doing. This year I chose a “nice” and “understanding” teacher over an “academic” one. Part of me worries this may have been a mistake. So far there have been no spelling tests (not that I want them, but I think spelling helps my son with reading and word recognition — yet, we are using Sequential Spelling at home! So actually, I guess we don’t really need any more spelling. SS is much better for my son).

Thanks again for sharing information with me!

Laura,

You might look at Eileen’s post to Janis about fluency—under NW Arkansas. Janis’ daughter also has decoding down and has issues with fluency.

PACE does not seem to improve rapid naming. We did it with no difference and I have seen other posts with the same thing. It does help automate eye functioning. I have a friend whose daughter did eye therapy and then PACE. The combination solved her fluency issues but she didn’t have RAN issues.

We are on day 48 with AVKO spelling and I am starting to see some recognition of patterns. He is doing spelling at school too and last week he got them all right on the pretest (taken day before regular test), which made him estastic. So we tried the same strategy this weekend of starting on the list early–only to find out Sunday night that the class is skipping the unit we were working on!!! The next unit is much harder!! Personally, I’d be happier with no spelling at school. AVKO is where he is at and school spelling is a bit beyond him.

Beth

I took my son to my mother’s friend for testing earlier this week and according to this doctor, my son is not dyslexic! (of course, this
doctor is not familar with the correlation between a deficit in RAN and dyslexia). He thought my son’s reading was very good. He had
him read a paragraph which was on half a page and supposedly at a 3rd grade level.

His belief is that my son shows signs of a disorder of written expression along with mild aspergers and mild ADHD (hyperactivity!????
I’ve been known to give my son sugar to give him energy!!!!).

This has kind of thrown me for a loop! If my son’s reading really isn’t that poor, LMB might not be necessary. It may be that what I’m
doing is working fine (maybe even remarkably well!). I just need to continue with it and also try and work on these other areas of
weakness.

By the way Beth, did you ever order the fluency drills? I think they are a good addition to AVKO (they help in adding a speed element to
orthographic recognition). I really like them. Although we use them slightly different than recommended. Rather than timing the entire
page. I have my son try to improve his speed line per line. This seems to work best with his slower processing. Doing the entire page quickly is just too overwhelming for him at this point.

Oooops! Sorry about the line breaks!!!!