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Rhyming

Submitted by an LD OnLine user on

I have a 5th grade student that is extremely dyslexic. He can not even rhyme. :shock: I’m using the Wilson program with him, and also doing Sounds and Letters as time permits, (rhyming, sound deletion etc.) I think last years teacher had him working out of a reading book on his own while she ignored him. He has been in special ed since the second grade and reads at a second grade level. Which is disgusting, because he is bright, cooperative, and has supportive parents.

I’m a second year special ed teacher, and want to bring his reading level up as much as possible. I know that being able to rhyme is the first step in learning how to read. What rhyming activities can he do on his own while I’m working with another reading group?

Also, when I do blending drills with him he can correctly identify the sounds, but can’t always put the correct sounds together. For example he may add a sound that shouldn’t be there. He may know that it shouldn’t be there, but can’t say the word without it. What causes that? What can I do to help him?

THANKS

Submitted by victoria on Thu, 10/14/2004 - 6:16 PM

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Yes, I work with this kind of student all the time and there are many positive and productive things you can do.

Right now I have a student like yours, very bright, who has been left alone up to Grade 8 with a Grade 2 reading level, and I agree this is shocking and unacceptable. I am so glad you are doing something about it.

First, however, I am going to disagree strongly with your statement that learning to rhyme is the first step in learning to read. Rhyming doesn’t hurt, but it isn’t central. For more detail on this look at the National Reading Panel report and other articles on the LD In Depth page on this site.
As far as I can understand it, when people decided to teach reading by sight without phonics, they ran into difficulties getting kids to generalize and figure out new words, so they moved to rhyming as a way to teach phonic patterns without teaching phonics — sort of a back door approach. Well, it is easier and faster to go in through the front door rather than all the way around the back, and a kid with difficulties will most likely do better with the direct method.

Years ago in my first year private tutoring I had three of the most severely disabled kids I have ever met, plus the most extreme gifted non-reader — beginner’s luck. One was an eight-year-old boy who had a very confusing language deficit. In that time and place he was just warehoused in the mentally retarded group, where the teacher took the higher-functioning half and the untrained aide took his group (illegal but happens all the time). The aide insisted that before starting the reading progrtam every kid had to master every single thing on the “readiness” list — despite the fact that at the top of the list was written clearly the statement that a child was “ready” to read when he had mastered the *majority*, not all of the topics. Well, one of the topics my student could not do to save his life was to rhyme, and another was to stand on one foot (probably vestibular isues). He was at a mid K level, knew most of the alphabet but nothing past. This kid, when he talked, appeared to just babble. When you sat close and listened for a bit, words came out of the babble, and if you listened a bit longer a story came across, with all sorts of detail. As I said to his mother at the time, there is definitely someone at home inside there, just that the messages get very muddled going across.
I sat down and proceeded to teach him directly, using a combination of phonics and high-frequency texts as I keep recommending. He learned, and in six months was reading at a good Grade 1 level, I’d say 1.6, and also printing very nicely. He was able to move into an LD class the next year, a big step up from low EMR. But he still couldn’t rhyme to save his life.
The gifted non-reader could rhyme; he could also hold an adult conversation, tie you up in logic knots, play on your emotions and distract you — just nobody had ever taught him to actually *read*.
So I’d skip rhyming except as a side issue, and put more work into direct instruction.

I hear good things about Wilson and that is definitely a positive start.

I have a lot of kids who insert sounds. There does seem to be a kind of language perseveration — once they make a mistake they can’t seem to drop it and re-start. My present adult student is a real trial with this. I stop them and make them start over. And over. I tell them that there is no “t” there, break their repetition process, and re-start again. And again. If the student cannot get the word alone, I model it *with* him; he has to say the sound (and only the one sound) that I am saying, as I point to the letters. This is extremely difficult at first; the student is used to just running over errors fast and he and some teachers play wink-wink we didn’t see it so it didn’t happen — a way to get apparent success and fake self-esteem in the short term, at the cost of long-term total failure. I find that once I insist on correct reading for a few hours at first, the student grumbles but reduces errors a lot; then I have to keep it up for a long time (months at a minimum) until correctness is a habit — backsliding is common.

A lot of this comes from guess-and-rush, so I never, ever give a time limit for reading and in fact I make students slow down. Some students get very confused by the teaching of blends as single units — after a whole hour of “br”, then they turn big into brig, thinking that is what they are supposed to do. I make a point of sounding each letter left to right, period, and noting ony digraphs that make *different* sounds from the individual letters.

With students like yours, I go back to the level of both phonics and reading that they have really mastered, way way back, and then work up from there. In your case, Wilson may be good for some things, but may be too advanced for him to get the basics he needs. He may need supplemental work in things that you have assumed — single letter identification, fact that vowels stand for different sounds (my present Grade 8 kid is really bad on this), tracking left to right, etc.. And ALL the students I have had recently have had terrible problems with directionality ion printing, writing upside down and backwards and lo and behold reading and spelling in random order too — odd how that connects!

I would suggest that while you are working with other groups, you give him some work to do that reviews basics and that he can succeed in 90% on his own. Both basic phonics workbooks and basic reading comprehension workbooks, at around a 1.5 level for his mastery level, would be good. He needs the review and solidity of skills. Then you work with him to bring his skills up, using material from the same program if possible (but two different programs are Ok if they are both systematic) but at a higher level. As the year goes on, both your teaching level and his independent work move up step by step. Most kids take pride in doing their “easy” review work quickly, and you insist that he keeps 90% correct (or he has to redo the page) but then you praise him highly for how much he has covered. Using a good developmental program that breaks things down step by step, he can do three or four or more pages in a class, and *without noticing it* (this is the big trick, that the progression is gradual and logical enough that it’s “easy”) he builds up to a much higher level — we hope Grade 3 or 4 — by the end of the year.

I have a collection of posts that I’ve made here on teaching beginning reading; I send these out to anyone who wants them on request. Just email to [email protected]

Submitted by des on Thu, 10/14/2004 - 11:28 PM

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Well I agree with Victoria that rhyming is not so critical. But it is a useful skill. You can teach it explicitly and visually. One thing that is in Barton reading to pass along.

You can use the letter tiles that you use for Wilson. Start out with a word like “mat” and spell it out with the tiles. You keep all the tiles out and add one like “c”, right above it. You can then help the child see that rhyming is really just replacing the first sound. The couple kids that I taught rhyming in this way were very excited about it.

As for blending. I would start with a VC word. If he can’t do that sort of word, he isn’t going to do anything else. You can also do this using multisensory techniques like sliding your finger under the letters as you say them— you can use nonsense words as many VC words will be pretty well memorized by your kid at this point. For example, “ab”— you extend the sounds aaaaab while sliding your finger under the word.

This is a tricky problem as I am pretty sure the kid in question can NOT hear that there are two sounds in “ab” and can’t really pulll those apart.
Something like the Sound REading CD (fairly inexpensive) or Barton Reading Level 1 (really good but more expensive) would no doubt help with that. Difficulty rhyming and blending are symptoms of poor phonemic awareness. Unfortunately Wilson was developed before a lot of the new research on phonemic awareness, so it is a bit lacking in that area, imo. So with some kids they may just need more work.

—des

Submitted by caron on Tue, 10/19/2004 - 3:08 PM

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Victoria and Des,

Thank you both so much for sharing your expertise. One day I hope to be as knowledgeable as the two of you are.

Yes, I think that using the tiles will definitely help with rhyming, phoneme insertion and deletion. Also, I won’t dwell on the rhyming.

Who makes the Sound Reading CD?

Also what reading comprehension, and phonics workbooks do you recommend for seat work?

Too bad you don’t live in my area. I would love to visit and watch the two of you in action teaching reading.
Thanks so much,
Caron

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 10/19/2004 - 7:56 PM

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The Sound Reading CD is available from http://www.soundreading.com . For a 5th grader, I would recommend getting the teen version of the CD. It starts at the very beginning, but omits the babyish graphics that appeal to younger students. Most children, even teens, do not complain about working with the SR CD, and I have seen it help a lot of children. It is well worth the investment.

Most children can work through the CD in about 14 hours, but it can take longer. It starts at a kindergarten level and works up to about a mid-3rd grade level, including some basic multi-syllable word attack skills.

Nancy

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