How long does it take to get through V/V?

VV teaches them the techniques they can use to visualize for comprehension. However, the mastery of vocabulary and comprehension is a life long pursuit. It truly varies on a child’s interests, cognition, exposure to literature, TV, and many other variables that are unique to each individual.

Laura, when we went to Lindamood they gave us a recommendation for how long DS should do the program, based on their pre-testing. I would think 6-8 weeks if you are working everyday would give you a nice start….

It differs with every kid. I had one student, wonder if she needed it. However, her first efforts weren’t promising. Lots of prompting needed and she would give impoverished (in terms of image content) output.

After a few weeks, she was giving vivid examples. So in her case at least I think she needed “permission” to visualize. School is such an auditory place that I think it is actively discouraged. Strangely we hadn’t done much with the program (maybe to the beginning of the program), and she started giving MUCH better inference answers. I was startled one day to hear her say about a character in a story that she was “jealous”. This was a kid that would rarely make any kind of inference at all. IF you asked about a passage that described what kind of day it was but in the passage the kids were flying kites, she couldn’t much say. I really think she was wary of going beyond the text.

I dropped doing V/V. And I am certainly not saying she would be typical but just saying that you really don’t know. I think a LMB eval would be more revealing, but not everyone can afford that.

Good luck on your endeavor. I think it is an excellent program.

—des

I meant to say she was at the beginning of sentence to sentence with HOTS (higher order thinking)

—des

Thanks for the responses! I basically want to use V/V to the point where I can then go to OCN. (He seems to visualize pretty well with SS, not fully automatic, but once I get him started he begins visualizing pretty consistently and overall his spelling has made dramatic improvement).

When I had him tested at LMB, they told me he didn’t “need” VV or even OCN. But in general school performance he’s having a lot of difficulity with math. Actually, I’m really worried about a lot of things he’s having difficulty with. But I can’t just put a computer chip in his brain and change everything. I can only do so much.

By the way, might VV help with this particular problem: My son (9 years old, almost 10) is often very quiet, does not express opinions freely, and cannot always describe past or recent events in detail (and sometimes not at all!). One example of something that worries me is while driving in the car I asked him to name as many wild cats as he could think of. He sat and thought for some time (kept saying “hummm…”, but could only come up with three; Lion, Tiger and Cheetah. I finally started prompting him with things like; “The black cat from the Jungle Book was a black…starts with ‘p’?…”.

Then I asked him to name some wild dog species. He couldn’t name any!
I finally started prompting him with things like “What kind of wild dog do we sometimes hear at night on the hill behind our home, or sometimes see late at night in our neighborhood?”

It really disturbs me that he had so much difficulty with this.

Laura,

On Cloud Nine tells you to go thru sentence by sentence in V/V before OCN.

All I can tell you is that LMB did recommend V/V for my child and they estimated 80 hours for the whole program.

Janis