wilson/fundations? language program

My understanding of Fundations is that it is not geared specifically to dyslexic or ld kids. That it is a general phonemic awareness program geared to lower grades. Since a strong phonemic awareness is the strongest predictor of reading success I think it makes sense to use such a program. I don’t think it will hurt the kids who don’t really need it. From what I have seen it uses puppets and other kind of fun things for the kiddos. Of course I really only know what I have seen on their webpage.
You might do a general search for it with a search engine.

—des

Reaction of students is very much influenced by the leadership. If the teacher starts out with an attitude against DI — yea, it just might get picked up by the students.
Given that, boy, if you’d made me do phonemic awareness in grade school… I just might have been a worse behavior problem than I was. However, I suspect my teachers would have just let me quietly read a book… there should be a way to “test out” of it.

Really? I think that since it won’t really look like reading to the kid— you know rhyming games, substitution of sounds games, that type fo thing, you’d have MORE tolerance by better readers (esp, which I don’t know, they have some more challenging activities for better readers ?? Something to ask the Wilson people). It would be more fun than the
Dick and Jane stuff I had to do when I was in school.

Have you seen the Peobody Language Development kit circa 1872 :-) or so. Lots of different language activities and you could, if you wanted make some of the material easier or harder, that’s how I see it anyway.

I agree on the attitude of the teacher when forced to do something they don’t want to do.

You might have a point about testing out of ti though, Sue.

—des

To all,

My apologies in advance. I’m getting ready to seriously vent, from the parent perspective, on this topic. My son, 11 with dyslexia, attends a charter school formed solely to serve reading-disabled kids. The school had three major selling points: (1) the principal/founder, himself a successful dyslexic, was informed and hugely empathic; (2) the promise that all kids would get 50 minutes a day, five days a week of LIPS/Seeing Stars in small groups; (3) the promise that all kids would get 50 minutes a day, at least 3 days/week, of the Wilson system, again in small groups. Well guess what? The reading teacher, a 10-15 year veteran of local public schools, thinks Wilson is boring. So on many days she doesn’t use it at all. When she does use it, it is not systematically, but a bit here, a piece there, combined with whatever else she has planned. She spends much of her time “teaching” comprehension using high interest passages that a substantial percentage of the kids cannot begin to decode. Many of us parents, who have spent hours to educate ourselves, realize that this sort of haphazard, piece meal approach to reading instruction is part of what has led our kids to be 2 or more years behind grade level, and two to three s.d.s below expectations based on their IQs. It is all that I can do to stay civil I am so angry and disappointed. I would give anything if I could turn back the clock five or six years and find a place where my son could receive good old, boring, systematic and direct OG style instruction, so he’d be in a different place now.

Apologies again for the vent. The topic just struck me in a bad place.

>My apologies in advance. I’m getting ready to seriously vent, from the parent perspective, on this topic. My son, 11 with dyslexia, attends a charter school formed solely to serve reading-disabled kids. The school

Hah! Well welcome and have a go. None of us minds a little venting.

>had three major selling points: (1) the principal/founder, himself a successful dyslexic, was informed and hugely empathic; (2) the promise that all kids would get 50 minutes a day, five days a week of LIPS/Seeing Stars in small groups; (3) the promise that all kids would get 50 minutes a day, at least 3 days/week, of the Wilson system, again in small groups.

That sounds strange? Why are they mixing LiPS and SS with Wilson? I know that was NOT your question but imo they are little conflicting. I would not do OG simultaneously to LMB. The scope and sequence is very different. I have never heard of that.

> Well guess what? The reading teacher, a 10-15 year veteran of local public schools, thinks Wilson is boring.

OG is not a barrel of laughs but it works (hence my request for games, which I think a teacher would gather after a no. of years). Neither is LiPS.
This the reason that whole language is so popular, lots of creativity allowed and so on, but it doesn’t teach kids how to read.

I agree with your statement that this is piecemeal and actually not productive. I just wonder why they thought of combining them anyway.
The damage of what you mention is that the teacher is encouraging guessing while the LMB teacher is trying to discourage it!! You want to
stop the kids from guessing. Still if a dyslexic kid is getting 50 min of LMB a day then I think that is very good.

>clock five or six years and find a place where my son could receive good old, boring, systematic and direct OG style instruction, so he’d be in a different place now.

Is the kid getting the LiPS/SS?
Again i see no purpose in combining the two except to confuse.

>Apologies again for the vent. The topic just struck me in a bad place.

No, I don’t think that Sue was suggesting that since it is boring that they shouldn’t do Wilson Fundations. Sue’s resource room page (www.resourceroom.net) has lots of OG references and info). Fundations is different than the regular OG program in that it is an OG based reading “readiness” program that uses the principles of OG in place of typical reading readiness and early reading activities. This is wonderful for LD kids. The question is that since this is used in a regular school (typically though not always with “high risk” kids), how does this play to the non-LD kids, the kids who will pick up reading anyway? My contention is that it would be (I don’t know much about Fundations specifically) be LESS boring to typical and bright kids. (Ever see the typical reading readiness programs??)

I have a video of regular classrooms doing LiPS and unless these were very staged (which they didn’t seem to be) the kids were VERY engaged!
Since LiPS takes apart the language well it is really stuff that is actually quite challenging (it was a bit challenging for me to learn it I can tell you that!). I don’t know why you would do it with typical kids as it seems pretty overkill, but I believe some schools and areas have a very high risk for reading failure.

When I heard Susan Barton a few weeks ago, she felt that structured phonemic awareness activities in early grades would enable many milder dyslexics to learn to read normally (I suppose if not then handed the whole language nonsense).

—des

This is for guest mom. I’ll be repeating a little of what des said, but I think it bears repeating. You would certainly NOT use Wilson and Lindamood Bell programs at the same time! That was a misguided promise at best. So if the kids are getting consistent daily LiPS and Seeing Stars, that is wonderful. I think individual is best, of course, but small groups is okay. If they are not doing it close to an hour (or more) daily, then it is not enough. That’s what I’d push for, more time with the LiPS and SS.

I looked carefully at programs before deciding on which ones to spend my hard-earned money for training. I did choose LMB over Wilson. My own child is LD at a charter school (not an LD school) and I encouraged them to train in Phono-graphix and LMB, which they did. So consider yourself fortunate as very few schools LMB.

In relation to the original question, that’s SUPER if they are going to use Fundations in regular classes! I do think it is designed to be fun as well as instructive. But as Sue, I think, said, teachers must be well-trained and buy into the whole idea. If not, they won’t implement it correctly. None of these programs will work well if not implemented as intended.

Janis

Don’t apologize — it’s far more effective than me saying “as an instructor, it has been my experience that doing the program systematically is extremely important.” It is. Once I realized that yes, I was bored… but my students weren’t, to be honest… I grinned and bore it.
I did, however, have the unlikely circumstance that I wa sone of 6 teachers doing the same thing, and the totally structured, “boring” teachers… dang it, they *always* had the best results. I would not have believed it — I’d have thought the “boredom” factor would have been too important; would have thought that no, they really don’t need THAT much review!! … well, need is a tough word to define — all I know is the numbers didn’t lie. The kids with the boring teachers that did *all* the repetition and review, even the ones who weren’t “that” bad off reading wise, gained more in any given year than those stuck with us more casual teachers… and believe me, it was relative. There was a *lot* of communication and sharing of lesson plans — you did not stray far!

I just have to add, though… that Wilson and LiPS don’t conflict that much — if you went with one for the main structure and borrowed here and there from the other. I stole from my LiPS manual often and well when I wanted to bring in some of their “how to make the sounds” speech stuff for a kiddo who needed it.
But — the systematic scope and sequence is what makes it work for the kids who really struggle. Alas, if the teacher doesn’t grasp that no, these guys DO NOT make intuitive leaps about reading and fill in teh gaps that non-dyslexics would, then she’s never going to “get” how to make a structured program work… so actually, she might as well be doing comprehension stuff.

>I just have to add, though… that Wilson and LiPS don’t conflict that much — if you went with one for the main structure and borrowed here and there from the other. I stole from my LiPS manual often and well when I wanted to bring in some of their “how to make the sounds” speech stuff for a kiddo who needed it.

Yes, but I would argue that it is very different for you to borrow a bit of this and a bit of that, than one teacher teaching one thing and you another. I think Wilson and LMB are very different but it would be acceptable if say at the point where letters are being introduced if the teacher has them air write or even uses the terms “tip tapper” and so forth. Heck I borrow right and left. The thing I have problems with is two different teachers teaching their own thing and they presumably don’t know what the other is doing.

> But — the systematic scope and sequence is what makes it work for the kids who really struggle.

Exactly what I am talking about. And then there is the thing of in one the schwa maybe in the fourth level and I am not sure where the schwa is in LMB so there you are and where is the kid in all that? I would say maybe confused!

As far as apologizing for being boring and structured, I think that the complaint has been made re: Open Court that it is the most “boring” of the reading basals and yet I hear time and again that it is one of the best. OG is certainly no barrrel of monkeys (nor is LMB) but you can’t knock results.

OTOH, I think your initial point about Fundations was that it would bore the normal or fast learners needlessly. I just don’t think that at that level there is much of an issue. It’s about time, imo, that reading readiness has some sort of point to it that is, as the popular jargon goes, “research based”. (hah, as I’ve said before, not research based by way of the research says it doesn’t work :-))

—des

Thanks des, Sue and others, for letting me vent and even validating some of it. Thanks too for reminding me that we are so lucky to be getting LiPS five days/week. I’m fully aware of how unusual this is. des and Sue, combined you really circled in on the integration problem—because two different teachers handle the Lips and the reading class, integration of the programs is much more difficult. Anyway, thanks again. I really needed to be reminded of the the benefit of having LiPS every day. Cheers.

If two different teachers are using the two different *good* programs *well*, above Grade 2, no, it wouldn’t be a problem, in fact the two programs would feed back to each other. I say above Grade 2 because kids facing this whole reading thing for the first time have enough on their plates as is, without being handed two different systems. But above the beginning level, hey, the kids have seen all this stuff for years anyway, just all in bits and pieces (as unfortunately that one teacher is doing.) If one program presents the schwa before the other, good; the kid will get the idea in the first program and will reinforce it when the second one gets there. This can actually be an advantage. The problems occur when a teacher skips all around, as is happening there, or when a teacher assumes that things have been taught somewhere else and omits developmental stages.

As far as teaching basic phonics and phonemic awareness to non-dyslexic children YES!!!! No, if it is reasonably well-presented they won’t be bored and frustrated; they will be fascinated. What a wonderful game, to be able to take language apart and put it together and to be able to figure out reading on your own. With any halfway competent teacher, kids just eat it up.
So, maybe it’s boring for you as a teacher — so what? You know how to add already, but if you are at all responsible you still drag through the boredom of teaching all those addition facts, don’t you? You know how to write already, but if you are at all responsible, you drag through the boredom of teaching the kids how to form letters one at a time, don’t you? I hope and pray … So, drag through some lessons about sounds that you already know how to do because the kids don’t. Your reward is the excitement on *their* faces. That’s why you’re a teacher or a parent, not just to amuse yourself.

I get very very very frustrated with the “good enough” argument. Kidas who aren’t dyslexic can memorize and fake their way through the beginner books enough to look like they are reading, and that’s “good enough” so they don’t get taught phonics. They can memorize enough words by sight and maybe the initial letters to circle enough correct answers in Grades 2 and 3 and that’s “good enough” so they don’t get taught phonics. When they read slowly and spell terribly and make constant comprehension errors and have trouble with math and science and study skills and they don’t want to do any schoolwork in higher grades, no, the problem could never be that they don’t really know how to read, could it? We have so many intelligent students out there who are handicapped by weak reading skills. Science and math grad schools cannot find enough qualified students from North America and are filled with students from elsewhere who score higher on American English tests that kids who were educated here. But the problem could never be that our average and bright kids can’t actually read those tests, could it?
Why not actually teach reading to all kids and let the skilled ones learn more skills?

[quote=”victoriah”]If two different teachers are using the two different >*good* programs *well*, above Grade 2, no, it wouldn’t be a problem, in fact the two programs would feed back to each other. I say above Grade

Yes and I think this is a case of teaching to disabled students, and how confused will they be by divergent approaches.

I am a bit confused by the “guest” saying LiPS is taught by one teacher and reading by another. LiPs is early reading skills, ie the phonemic awareness and decoding principles. (Unless it is used for speech correction, which I suppose it could be without any letters being used.)

>As far as teaching basic phonics and phonemic awareness to non-dyslexic children YES!!!! No, if it is reasonably well-presented they won’t be bored and frustrated; they will be fascinated. What a wonderful game, to be able to take language apart and put it together and to be able to figure out reading on your own. With any halfway competent teacher, kids just eat it up.

As I observed on the LiPS tape I have. The kids mostly apparently normal and non-Ld (or these were VERY large classes of ld kids) were apparently very involved, with many of them holding their hands up and very very engaged. I sort of think of LiPS as linguistics 101 for kids. :-)
I don’t know how well Wilson does this but with an engaged teacher I agree with Virginia.

>So, maybe it’s boring for you as a teacher — so what? You know how to add already, but if you are at all responsible you still drag through the boredom of teaching all those addition facts, don’t you? You know how to

Well I have sort of thought that this thing to constantly amuse the kids was some sort of sign of dumbing down the curriculum. I don’t mean making things interesting, having games and activities, or anything like that. Just this, we must have the kids constantly playing at everything.

I’ve wondered that my lack of “I make learning fun and entertaining for your child” means I won’t get as many clients. You know how do I compete with “Learning is fun with my singing and playing thru phonics approach”. :-)

Maybe it’s part of the guilt parents have of working long hours or something.

—des

Well, I get the clients who are truly desperate, those who have reached the end of their tether with years of fun and games but the kids still can’t read/add/write/speak the language. They do appreciate me when the kid actually starts to learn and progress and even sometimes shows a positive attitude. It’s a small but steady clientele.
In general I figure that my job as a teacher and parent is to work myself out of a job, i.e. most shouldn’t need me any more after a year or two, and I do get a fair turnover there.
I am however mad enough to spit at a local “learning center” that is telling my clients that they have wonderful miracle programs and taking my students away after I have done all the hard slogging building foundations and breaking attitude problems, and then the center gets all the credit when the student blossoms.
When I started teaching in the mid seventies, I was a fish out of water; I was an academic teacher in the heyday of the fun and games philosophy. This contributed a lot to my cynicism about many school systems. I tried to figure out what I should be doing, and looked back on my own and family’s experience with teachers. The shining lights, the ones we thank God we had a chance to learn from, were the “boring” teachers:
Mrs. Ross, who taught a class of nearly forty third-graders to write copperplate with dip pens and inkwells, who taught us to add and subtract multi-digit numbers and to be accurate with carrying and borrowing, who taught us French grammar and how to conjugate large numbers of verbs, and who in the time left after that and reading and writing English too, taught us to read music and sing in chorus.
Mr. G, who gave spelling tests in French as a second language and expected us to know that vocabulary and those verbs upside down and backwards.
Mr. A., who taught a class of perfectly ordinary (unselected, working-class) tenth-graders formal Euclidean geometry and how to construct a logical proof.
Mrs. Seidel, who taught a class of perfectly ordinary tenth-graders to look for symbolism in Tale of Two Cities and to know poetic diction (what’s an anapestic hexameter?) and to proofread our essays or else.
Professor Rhodes who taught calculus and figured that you should be able to do two hundred different kinds of problems without looking them up in a table.
None of these classes was wowie-zowie exciting or totally new and different. To an outsider they would look pretty boring. Possibly the teachers were pretty bored at times — reciting the addition tables every day, reciting the conjugation of the verb etre every day, teaching the same geometry textbook for twenty years (it was a good textbook — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, was the idea), teaching the same peotry for ten years — the teachers must have occasionaly felt biored. But they kept up the work because they were doing something worthwhile for their students.
On the other hand, some of the very very *worst* attempts at educational experiences I have ever had have been people who tried to make the class “exciting”. One of the funnier ones was a class for art teachers where the professor kept telling us over and over again how wonderful and exciting the course would be; several of us agreed privately to just go to the studio and do things and completely ignore her, which was much more interesting. One which is funny in retrospect, although a disaster for our program, was a professor who was supposed to teach a curriculum preparatory for the grad school qualifying exams in math; he told us the first day of class that all the stuff on the curriculum was too easy and boring and so he wouldn’t teach it, but would do other things that he found more interesting instead; I left the program without passing that exam, which I had no clue about, and therefore didn’t finish the MA or go on to the PhD; don’t know about the rest of the people in my year, but of the previous year 100% (five out of five) left the program, which says something about “exciting” teaching methods.

Yes, I too have found that even if they’re not desperate, there’s a certain respect for “okay, let’s just learn this stuff.” And I work with older students, so the really playful stuff that is just not in my scope of thinking (I was never like that as a kid either — I skipped that stuff) isn’t missed.
It’s not just that there’s a myth that learning “has to be entertaining.” It’s running deeper — it basically has to let the “learner” be passive except when just so joyfully stimulated…

There’s also this odd misconception that well, since Johnny is constantly frustrated in this course of program, and that is, truly, wearing his self-esteem down, that we need to abandon things that are difficult.

What about breaking it down into smaller pieces so that Johnny can be successful with it? Stop teaching it at the frustration level — let him master things and know it. (Granted, sometimes you do, really, need a different approach, but this idea that Everyone Will Complete This In One School Year is preposterous.)

In a post on a reading teachers list, somebody was denigrating Accelerated REader (a consistently controversial topic) and said “since when do Joy and Test belong in the same sentence?”

Call me a hopeless geek, but when you are confident, a challenge *IS* fun and a joy. Demonstrating your skill is very fulfillng! (Isn’t any sports event a test? And don’t people insist that they are FUN FUN FUN… even at the professional football level?) If a test made you think hard, work hard, and produce good results… that is a joyful experience.

Well I had a new client initial interview. He is in 7th grade and reads at the 3rd grade level. I told mom (and the kid) flat out that I was not going to entertain him and that this would not be all fun and games; that it was hard work; although sometimes we did have games and activities primarily this was going to be work, but I could really teach him to read and spell. I think this played well for this particular parent.

Yes, I do know of centers or tutors who will sing and dance your way to reading success (or so they say) or who will “make your child feel better about learning”. I hope that in the course of things that my students will feel more confidence, but it is based on a real thing (improved skills) rather than a phony thing, ego pumping or other nonsense).

—des

I have learned, though, that I need to build in “proof of progress” into the lessons and make sure to call attention to things that the studsent couldn’t do before that are easy for him now (some poeple even do before and after videos or audios). Whne you’ve had years and years of “proof” that you can’t, it takes longer to unlearn that.

<<This is for guest mom. I’ll be repeating a little of what des said, but I think it bears repeating. You would certainly NOT use Wilson and Lindamood Bell programs at the same time!>>

When I went for my SS training, we were told that it could be used by itself and with LiPs or it could be a supplementary reading program that could accompany other reading programs. I use Wilson as my main reading program in the resource room, but I also use Seeing Stars as a supplementary program. Whereas Wilson is strictly a multisensory reading program, SS works on strengthening both visual and auditory memory. It also teaches the vowel teams, which wouldn’t be taught in Wilson until much later in the program. If I depended on Wilson alone, I would probably not see obvious results on individual standardized reading tests such as the WJ-III and WIAT etc.

My students really like the Wilson program, too. I haven’t had one kid this year tell me that it’s boring. Some of my kids are so desperate in wanting to become readers that they’ll stand on their heads if it would work. Then, again, I’m having a very exceptionally great year as far as the students go.

Marilyn

Your comments on combining SS with other methods are noted. I also saw these in the manual. Theoretically you could mix SS with virtually anything as it is not a decoding program. SS, to my knowledge, is building automaticity in reading by helping the student visualize various patterns. However, I thought the situation was that the program supposedly combined *LiPS* and Wilson. This is two programs austensibly designed to primarily address decoding (and with LiPS heavily deal with phonemic awareness). One major difference for example, is that LiPs does not believe in the use of keywords, they feel a keyword is only useful if the kid has enough phonemic awareness to use the keyword, whereas Wilson uses them heavily. I could see a kid going to his LiPS class after Wilson and saying “a apple /a/” and then in the other trying to figure out where /a/ is on the vowel circle. I think this would be a bit confusing to a normal learner.

But LiPS and SS or SS and Wilson, yes. I plan on pulling in some SS when my student gets some basic phonemic awareness in.

—des

To Sue about the joy of learning — yes, I have had some trouble crystallizing this thought into an easy-to-explain summary, but I have had for a long time the suspicion that a lot of modern teaching programs are *cheating* the kids out of the joy of learning. If you do a spiral curriculum in math and you rush through the same twenty topics every year without ever really understanding them, you never get the fun of saying AHA! Now I get how it works! If you do reading “instruction” by reciting books by rote memory and sort of kind of recognizing words by sight until you can sort of kind of read, you never get the fun of saying AHA! Now I can do this!
I have a large number of students who have spent years and years doing things in class that are supposed to be fun, and they are bored out of their trees. They also have no learning or study skills. I am thinking of two particular examples who have had eight *years* of French instruction two to three hours *daily*, and who cannot make up a simple sentence in the language. It certainly isn’t a language disability; one spoke more French than English on entering school and forgot how to speak it under the influence of his classes, and the other is perfectly bilingual in English and Urdu. I am teaching them formal grammar out of an old-fashioned drill text, and they both *like* it. They both say that for the first time in their school careers they actually know what is going on. One in particular had what seemed to be a terrible memory problem — we did the same thing over and over for weeks and it seemed to slip right out of his head. After some talks with him and his mother, it appears that he had a hopeless teacher in Grade 1 and not so good in 2, and among other things he never learned the days of the week or the months of the year, in either language. So I am going back and doing the recitation and memorization he never did then. Lo and behold, his memory is improving all over. His comprehension and other things are improving too.
This goes back to my point about “whole-language” activities being perfectly good activities, just often applied at the wrong place and time. This kid had years of “reading” fun and entertaining library books — unfortunately he had tuned out of the language and couldn’t read. He had years of all sorts of fun comprehension games and activities — he had just lost the basics and had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. If he had only learned the phonics rules and vocabulary and a little basic sentence structure first, he might have gotten some good out of his schooling.

Hi, Marilyn…good to see you!

For the record, I use Seeing Stars following PG for the kids who need it to make decoding more automatic.

I was just puzzed at the idea of using two different decoding programs (LiPS and Wilson) at the same time. Seems like you’d want to use one effective method intensively instead of a little of this and that.

Janis

<<I was just puzzed at the idea of using two different decoding programs (LiPS and Wilson) at the same time. Seems like you’d want to use one effective method intensively instead of a little of this and that.>>

Hi Janis!

I think I’ve posted this once before, but I had great luck last year doing approximately three months of LiPS—enough time to introduce all the sounds, the vowel circle and lots of tracking. Great improvement on the LAC test after that. Then I switched to Wilson. This child made great progress! But I agree with what most people are saying, here. I wouldn’t use LiPS and Wilson at the same time.

I have a new student in the Resource room who passed the LAC test with flying colors, but can’t read beyond the primer level. I was thinking of trying SEEING STARS first, and then switching to Wilson with her. My suspicion from psych. testing and my own testing is that her problem may be more visual than auditory, although on the DTLA-4, both were weak. I can’t wait to start working with her!

Marilyn

Marilyn,

I’d seriously recommend that you ask her mom to take her for a developmental optometrist evaluation before you start working with her (or as soon as possible). I’ve just spent a slow year with a child who I finally screened and found that he has very poor visual tracking skills. Seeing Stars just won’t fix a functional vision problem. Great PA and reading that poorly has to mean some other issue either visual or attention most likely.

Janis

I think it would be fine using LiPs then Wilson, but that wasn’t what the person who posted described. She described two separate teachers teaching the same kids at different periods.

BTW, back to the initial topic, if the intial person is still reading all this. :-)
I saw Fundations at a IDA conference. It looks like a good beginning reading/phonemic awareness program with enough fun stuff for the whole class. I do not think it would hold back the non-disabled kids.
However, one thing I did not see in the manual that I would have liked to have seen was a “make this easier do this” “make this harder do that”.
(I seem to remember that kind of thing was in the ancient hx Peobody Language Development Kit circa 1848 (or so :-)).

Some cool things. Cool puppet and small puppet for kid to use; writing “easel” for kids to write on; keyword cards (very nice cards, pix); combines reading, penmanship; etc.

—des

Janis:

<<I’d seriously recommend that you ask her mom to take her for a developmental optometrist evaluation before you start working with her (or as soon as possible).>>

To be honest with you, that’s not an option. Anything that the school suggests must be paid for by the school. Also, I think there are visual memory issues—not functional vision problems such as tracking. There are also auditory memory issues as well. But, like I said, she did well on the LAC test, so phonemic awareness is probably not an issue.

Marilyn

Well, you’re not going to go wrong with Seeing STars and it will be interesting to see if that opens up doors for her. Wonder where things are breaking down!
And Wilson won’t be a mistake, either — could be breaking things down and making the connection between the sounds that she does understand will open the doors.

Sue:

<<Well, you’re not going to go wrong with Seeing STars and it will be interesting to see if that opens up doors for her. Wonder where things are breaking down!
And Wilson won’t be a mistake, either — could be breaking things down and making the connection between the sounds that she does understand will open the doors.>>

I love challenges like this! :) Interestingly enough, she has worked with two very well qualified reading teachers (I believe that both are certified reading clinicians—at least one is), and she hasn’t made much progress. She also receives ESL services, but I don’t think the Spanish/English thing is the issue, either. I’ve had many students whose first language is Spanish make a very easy transition to English reading (decoding). Hopefully, a multisensory approach will make the big difference.

Marilyn

Yes, the thing about a good, truly multisensory program is that since its’ tapping all sorts of input channels, one of ‘em is more likely to work — adn a good teacher will figure out what works and zero in on that channel and start building.
Share what happens — what’s hard, how teh difficulty manifests itself — fifty heads are better than one :-)