We did 5 weeks of Seeing Stars at the LMB center in December. Since then I’ve been doing an hour a day of Seeing Stars plus 30 min to 1 hour of reading per day with my son. He is in 4th grade and his test results from 3rd grade showed he had a severe RAN deficit.
Originally I was hesitant to do Seeing Stars. I was worried it may not help with fluency issues. But I wanted to share that I have seen some fluency progress with my son’s reading.
His teacher has the kids take home timed reading sheets each week. They are to read the paragraphs 2x per night and record their reading speed. Prior to LMB my son was reading an average of 40wpm (quite a bit slower than the rest of the class!). This week they started the timed reading again and my son read 112! And that was at a comfortable and accurate speed.
So SS may be a worthwhile program for helping with RAN and reading fluency.
Re: Reading Speed & Seeing Stars
Hey congrats to both of you on your hard work! Sounds like the idea that SS will help with fluency was right on target. Sounds like you have been very successful at doing it yourself.
—des
Beth in FL
Laura,
My hunch is that Seeing Stars training built on the foundation you had already built. So it wasn’t just doing the LMB intensive that did it….it was the LMB intensive in addition to all the other work you had done. Sort of like the straw that broke the camel’s back except the result was positive.
I say this because your results are far superior to what LMB reports themselves and because complicated kids, like ours, rarely have one thing out of whack that fixing will produce a miracle.
Beth
Re: Reading Speed & Seeing Stars
I think SS may be one piece in the puzzle. But we still have a long ways to go! His reading speed isn’t completely consistent. For example, if my son comes to a word like “talk” or some other similarly difficult word, he’ll still sometimes stop and you can see him thinking “What’s that?!!!”
Also, his general daily reading seems quite improved, but not dramatically so. There are still lots of reading quirks and he’s obviously “dyslexic.”
Where I think SS may have been most helpful with RAN is not just visualization (although getting that automated is very important), but the Sight Word Box exercises. I happened to read some old posts and noticed Linda F. mentioning that Audiblox has something like this (quickly cover a word card and have the child say what the word is) and Vision Builder has some similar type of exercise which she found very helpful . Also, I know when my son had some vision testing his visual sequential memory tested very strong at 99% while dynamic visual sequential memory (related to processsing speed?) was 1%. I suspect something like this may be more typical for a child with RAN and processing deficits and therefore this type of exercise may help force processing speed and orthographic recognition.
That’s my theory!
Beth, we still haven’t “broke the camel’s back,” but we’re doing all we can to move in that direction.
Yea, Laura!!! What a fabulous gain! Boy, I am more than happy to hear this! Congratulations! I really have not heard of fluency increasing that much in a short time before.
Janis