My daughter is in 8th grade and is essential still not reading. She seems to have absolutely no phonemic awareness. She seems to not even see the order of letters in a word.
She is currently not in school (due to extreme school anxiety) and is being privately tutored (at schools expense) for 3 hrs a day. We are waiting for the results of a psycho neurological eval. She is also getting visual therapy 2X a week. She is suppressing her left eye - has amblyopia
I am lost as to a plan for her. I do not think the public school will ever be able to help her. We have a lawyer involved. Does anyone know of a school that might deal with this kind of severe dyslexia - she is diagnosed as having alexia without dysgraphia. She can not read but is able to write but cannot read back what she has written!!!!
word blindness
Thanks
we have tried some of those things but honestly, I don’t think anyone has stuck with it long enough - it has always been a balancing act between learning and the stress that it brings.
Is there a program or school that you can recommend - we live in CT. We are looking into out-placement from school
Re: word blindness?
Absolutely, time is of the essence. A few hours here and there are just enough to increase frustration and anxiety. You need someone who can be quiet and calm and take the long view, if it takes a year to complete the primer, it takes a year — and if you don’t spend that year on the primer, well, what has been accomplished? Yes there are times to give up and take another tack when something is clearly failing, but many people don’t give a method or program a chance before they jump to something else — or they see a little success so they quit and do something else; all of this increasing frustration and anxiety of course.
I’m sorry I can’t recommend anyone (except myself … or maybe a few of the other posters on this board) to do this. It takes a combination of knowledge of effective methods of teaching reading, experience teaching and lots of approaches ready at the fingertips, and practice dealing with student feedback. Didn’t used to be that rare a bird, but as the teaching of reading methods has gotten less and less attached to reality, it’s getting harder and harder to find one of those just plain reading teachers.
Get back to me and our other constant posters for advice, and keep looking for someone who doesn’t promise miracles, just hard work and slow but steady progress.
Re: word blindness?
Actually, someone I know had a daughter who sounds like yours in that she reached a point where she could write very well, but could not read back what she had written. In this case, the mother had gotten trained in Level 1 Orton-Gillingham and had used this approach for a year or two with her daughter. When the mother went back for Level 2 O-G training, she learned that she had incorrectly proceeded to teach code even though her daughter had not mastered the basic skills of segmenting, blending and phoneme manipulation. After another two years or so working on developing those skills, her daughter could finally read. Now, at 15yo, the daughter reads grade level material (but is still a slightly slow reader).
In your daughter’s case, I think before trying anything I would consider putting her through a program such as PACE (Processing and Cognitive Enhancement). PACE has an auditory processing skills section that does a lot of work on developing segmenting, blending and phoneme manipulation skills. If your daughter does well with this program, then I would move her into that company’s Master The Code reading program.
Even if your daughter does not do well with the auditory processing exercises in PACE (the child has to reach a certain level with these before he/she can move into MTC), she likely would benefit in many other ways from its broadly-based cognitive skills work, including development of better self-esteem. In this case, after PACE I would consider getting an Orton-Gillingham tutor (one trained through Level 3) for two or three hours a week. In our metropolitan area, there is a private school for LD students that uses Orton-Gillingham for its reading program (students divided into small groups of 3 or 4 for the tutoring). This would also be effective.
If your daughter has no phonemic awareness at all, I would also seriously consider look into whether she has a form of APD (auditory processing disorder) that is likely to be responsive to sound therapy. TLP (The Listening Program, http://www.advancedbrain.com ) is an easy program to do at home, and TLP followed by FastForWord (http://www.scilearn.com ) is often a very helpful one-two boost for children whose reading development has been held back by APD.
Nancy
Re: word blindness?
My two cents: Don’t do PACE without doing The Listening Program first. Your daughter will make faster progress in the auditory exercises if she does TLP first.
We did it without it and it was painfully slow. Later we did TLP and I went back to try the auditory processing exercises. My son did in minutes what used to take him days to master.
Beth
Have you tried teaching her to trace letters and recognize them by feel as well as by sight? This can then be extended to tracing/recognizing words as well.
Have you tried going back to the very beginning, to the pre-primers with large letters and strictly controlled vocabulary? Admittedly the topics are inappropriate to her age, but this is an extreme situation.
Have you tried taking things down to the absolute basics, working on say one letter and one high-frequency word and nothing else for a day or even two?
For phonemic awareness, hav e you taught her orally rhymes and tongue-twisters and other wordplay?
These are the places I would start. After trying the simplest of basics, I’d go on from there depending on what I found.