D ick and Jane books

Yes, I do use Dick and Jane books on occasion as extra practice readers, and I use an even slower and more detailed repetitive series for basic teaching (more recommendations below) — but I do also work very hard on sounding out even these high frequency words as well.

Be careful of your definition of “learned” or “knows”. If she remembers fewer than half of the words the next day, well, the learning is still on shaky ground and needs some more backup. Good start, now time to get it down for good.

When I am working with these high frequency words and controlled-vocabulary pre-primers, here’s what I do to bring things together — this is an adaptation and extension of the way these readers were taught originally —
Get a whole bunch of the large 5 x 7 file cards (ordinary 3 x 5 will do but larger is better) — usually at the dollar store or the office superstore. Get a big fat wide-tip black marker.
*AS* you are reading the book, when you meet a new word, stop at the end of the page and print it in huge (1 inch to 3 inch) letters on the card. Huge letters to improve visibility and to make air tracing easy. *Lower-case* for natural reading — books are 95% + lower-case.
*Do* finish the page first to get some sort of continuity of story line, but do the new words page by page as they come up, not letting a big backlog build up — the idea is to focus on *one* word at a time. Print in your neatest clearest printing, following a good printing guide that you use to teach her to write as well.
With a smaller marker of a different colour, mark proper directions beside each letter with a dot to start and an arrow to guide direction.
Have her say the letter names (I’m assuming she knows names) as you point to each letter. Then sound the word out for her, pointing at the individual sound patterns as you do “look — llllll - oo-oo-oo - k-k-k-k” (pen or finger looping under the double o to stress that the two o’s make the oo sound.) Have her say the separate sounds *with* you (this is *not* a test or a challenge for her, but a teaching/learning experience).
Have her trace the word with her finger, watching carefully that she is working in proper left-to-right and top-to bottom direction. The first time she traces it, have her say the letter names “ell - oh - oh - kay” and the second time, the sounds “look — llllll - oo - k-k-k-k”. Again, not a test, you say the names and sounds *with* her until she can say them herself. Say the word in letter parts, then say the whole word, then in sound parts, then the whole word again.
You take about three to five minutes doing this, really looking at each new word in detail and going over it several times. Then on to the next page and one more new word.
After you read the story you do the workbook if available, and/or you write the words in a notebook and have her copy them. You can illustrate them with cartoons both for amusement and to help her remember. If she can’t write notebook size yet, have her write them on a whiteboard big and loose (and watch those directions!)
In one session you can read four or five pages of connected text and get anywhere from two to five new words. OK, not a lot — but that’s the point!! Take it easy and get it solid. A couple of words a day for a year equals over six hundred words, a Grade 1-2 reading vocabulary and a good skill base for anything further.
These cards you make are NOT flash cards! you are NOT coaching her for speed!! (Think how well that hasn’t worked already, and don’t repeat the pressure that has caused problems before).

You can keep the word cards in a file box, but even better you post them on the wall with thumbtacks (so you can take them down and work on them) and she can go over the wall and read them both in order and randomly.

After you have ten or so words on cards, you start playing games with them:
Arrange the word cards on the table and make simple sentences and let her read them (help as necessary, but encourage her to be independent and take pride in what she knows. Be patient and let her take her time!).
If she misses a word, point to the first letter and hint at the sound; then the second and so on. This encourages her to track left-to-right and use phonics to unlock unknown words, but you give her support until she can be independent.
Have her make different sentences. If she is not sure how to start, ask her who she wants to talk about (Sally). What did Sally do? (jumped) Where/how did she jump? (up and down). After a while she will make sentences of her own.
If she can write fairly easily she can copy a few of these sentences in a notebook and make her own little story.
Have her change parts of sentences using the cards — Sally jumped, Dick jumped, Jane jumped, etc.
Cut one card across into strips and put s on one, es on another, ed on another, and ing on another. Change dog to dogs, cat to cats, etc. by adding the s and taking it off again; then change jump to jumps, jumped, jumping, go to goes, going, etc. Have her make sentences like we jump, he jump*s*, he *is* jump*ing*, we jump*ed*. As she reads, stress accuracy and don’t let her skip little words or endings. It may look like something small now, but later it will come back to haunt you.
Evey day you read a few more pages, if possible one whole little story, you learn a few new words, and you practice with the set of words built up already, reading, making up sentences, spelling, writing — just a *little* bit at a time. Little bits add up to big weights in time. (one sheet of paper versus a package of a thousand sheets …)
You praise her regularly about how fat the card stack/wall is getting and how many stories are in the notebook, of course.

The really really basic readers I use, even more basic than Dick and Jane and very effective in teaching high-frequency voacbulary, are the OLD Ladybird Key Words series. These have recently been reprinted by Penguin in England (NOT US Penguin who apparently have never heard of their parent company). I use 1a, 1b through 6a, 6b, plus if at all possible the workbooks that go with them. They can be ordered from penguin.uk (note the .uk) The postage charges are horrible, but for a kid who isn’t reading they are worth their weight in gold, so I recommend highly that you get them.

Parallel to this, I do phonics. Even if it doesn’t seem to connect to the reading at first, give it time and steady work and things will come together in time. It really *is* important and better to do the basics now at the time to do basics than have to go back, as I often have to, and re-teach them to a thirteen-year-old stuck at Grade 2 level as I am doing now.
You will use the phonics in spelling when you get there. No rush now, but DO spell out each word as you learn it — a tremendous time-saver later as the spelling is somewhere back in the subconscious.

There is a very very basic phonics series that I don’t often use, but which is good for someone who needs to go from the very ground up. It is the “Road to Power and Confidence” (two books, Consonants and Vowels), available from phonovisual.com Price is really low; delivery is slow but worth waiting for. While you are at it, also get the small consonant and vowel charts, an invaluable reference for later and a big help for spelling.

Once you have built up some recognition vocabulary and some knowledge of the relationship of consonants to sounds, then you can start playing connection games — look at the word cards and find all the words that start with d or whatever; all the words that *end* with d or whatever; rhymes which are words that have the same ending but different starts; and so on. Later when you get to vowels you can find words with the same vowel *sound* (be careful of the variant vowel sounts as in cat, cake, car — the point is to learn to distinguish between letter and sound, a concept that will take time but she can do it).
You can start a “dictionary” notebook with all the a words on the first page, b on the second, etc. This is fun, a way to see vocabulary growing, and a way to get more practice and phonics connections.

There is another phonics series which I recommend highly, which I would start with after she has a good start on this whole idea (six months to a year down the road), Check and Double Check Phonics from scholarschoice.ca (note the .ca) They are inexpensive and ship quickly all over North America. Even if she has done the others above, I would start right in at the start of Book 1 and get a really solid review and reteaching — this is the key to learning something difficult, to approach it multiple times on different levels.

By the way I don’t work for any of these companies, wouldn’t be so broke if I did.

You’ve got some great ideas in there. I’m going to print it out so I can have it handy. However, one of our biggest problems is that she cannot recognize letters and the sounds make absolutely no sense to her.

She knows maybe 5 letters but can’t tell me what their sounds are. She is just somehow memorizing what the word looks like. I don’t claim to know how her little brain works but it’s obviously doing something.

She’s just recalling the “look” of a word. This is not really helpful for reading, and in fact can cause problems when a child relies on this strategy for help down the line because it results in guessing. Down the road words such as “bad” and “bed” look very similar, so the child starts relying on context to guess the word rather than sound it out. Having done remedial work with older students, I can categorically say that it is more difficult and time-consuming to get rid of that kind of entrenched guessing habit than it is to teach a child to read.

Have you tried Reading Reflex? This uses a multi-sensory approach to learning sounds that can be very effective. For example, its “mapping” exercise has the child say a sound while writing the sound. This combines kinesthetics (writing the sound and saying the sound) with vision (seeing the sound) and auditory processing (hearing the sound). It also teaches half a dozen sounds first which can then be immediately used to build real words and read real words. For example, the child starts manipulating sounds very quickly to form words such as fat, cat, sat, mat, tam, etc.

Nancy

Jeannie — I can really understand where you and your daughter are coming from, wanting her to read and have success. I also agree with Nancy that learning by guessing is a dead end, and a really nasty one down the line.
This is why I recommend working on *all* fronts — yes, DO learn the words in a nice limited-vocabulary book (I do strongly recommend you get those old Ladybirds 1a and 1b to 6a and 6b and the workbooks — same idea as Dick and Jane but even more detail and repetition).
But *along with* learning those words by appearance, learn the letters that build them up and the sounds those letters stand for.
The approach I outlined above is gradual and gentle. You don’t drill the kid on the alphabet until she can do everything perfectly, nice as that might be it isn’t happening. Rather, you teach the alphabet *within the context* of the words she is learning and the stories she is succeeding in reading. The constant repetition of the alphabet will sink in when there is a context to hang it on. You don’t do phonemic awareness exercises in isolation until she is frustrated and sick of them, rather you practice stretching words out long and slowly so she can hear each part, and you demonstrate hundreds of times a day how to segment and blend *and* have her model it with you, until she can do it on her own. You don’t demand that she do high-level phonics when she cannot, you start at the lowest simplest level of identifying the same beginning sounds, and you work *with* her on it until it makes sense. The idea is like teaching swimming by gently holding the child up in the water until she can stay afloat on her own.
This is a labour-intensive way to teach and can’t be done too well with a large class, and it is not necessarily the best way to teach a kid who does have good auditory and visual processing and thus needs less support; but when the need is there, a dedicated parent/tutor can make it work and work well.

Have you asked for my reading notes/book in progress? I have more practical suggestions and outlines in there, including a long description of an effective way to teach the alphabet. Email [email protected]

Jeannie, it’s so great that she is starting to recognize words. But I can tell you that Victoria and Nancy are right, she is going to need to learn the phonics and alphabet before too long. My 13yo started reading by recognizing the words and using context. He is dyslexic and dysgraphic and wasn’t diagnosed until he was 9 so I didn’t realize that that was what he was doing. It took a lot of remedial work (which we are still doing) to get him to actually read what is written and not just guess.

Victoria was kind enough to send me her notes/book in progress to help with my 7yo (thank you so much!!!). We are using a lot of her ideas to work on letter/number recognition, phonetic awareness, and handwriting. It is slow going (we cover three letters and then review and sometimes it takes more than a day or two to get a new one down), but I am seeing steady progress. And I know that even though it is taking a little while now, once he gets it it will be with him from now on. She has some really cool ideas and they work.

My mother also got the [i]Dick and Jane[/i] books at WalMart. I don’t remember how much they were, but they had like five or six different titles in stock last time I checked.

I am trying to teach her her letters and sounds. We keep plugging away at it but sometimes it just feels like an uphill battle. She just can’t seem to memorize any of it. I’m not sure how she manages to recognize those few words and yet none of the letters in those words.

It’s discouraging.

If you haven’t yet done so, you might want to join the ReadNOW list at http://groups.yahoo.com . The dyslexiasupport2 list there can also be very helpful.

You didn’t mention how old your daughter is, which programs you have tried, and whether or not your dd has been evaluated by an occupational therapist for sensory integration disorder. Just offhand, the fact that she is able to recognize the shapes of words but cannot make sound/symbol correlations indicates to me dyslexia, a paired association memory deficit (I think a neurologist could assess for that) and/or sensory integration disorder.

Nancy

Jeannie,

I know how frustrating it can be. I managed to teach Daniel a few sight words before I got Victoria’s notes and learned how to teach him the basics. I couldn’t understand how he could recognize the words and not understand how they were made either. And it was so frustrating talking with his K teachers the last two years because none of us could figure out why he wasn’t learning. I mean my 13yo even got a handle on reading his second year in K and he’s dyslexic and dysgraphic. I just knew that Daniel’s testing was going to end up showing that he was mentally retarded. But it turned out that he has multiple developmental delays and OT issues. He is 7 but he thinks like a 5yo. So I had to rethink the way I was presenting the material to him.

What seems to help the most is presenting things where he can use the most of his senses possible. Like he sees the letter, he touches the letter and traces it with his fingers, and he hears it when I say it and when he says it. I use sand paper to make the letters in a notebook for him (he doesn’t have enough coordination at this point to cut them out himself) and that’s how he touches them. Also we have handwriting without tears and we use the wood pieces to help show him how the letters are formed so he gets to manipulate them that way too. He also takes a stab at writing the letters. You still can’t read most of them at this point, but he is using the correct strokes to make them so I expect the writing to get better as we go through his occupational therapy and he gets better muscle control.

There is a workbook that Victoria recommends to help them learn the phonics side of things in her notes, I can’t remember the name of it right off the top of my head, but I haven’t had a chance to order it yet for him because he’s had to have a lot of medicine for his medical conditions lately. I’m using a lot of workbooks that I’ve gotten from dollar stores and WalMart with him for right now and that seems to be working. The trick for him is to teach the letters in such a way that after he learns a few they can be made into words that can easily be accompanied by pictures so he can make the correlation between the letter sounds and how they work together to make words.

There’s another Yahoo group that I’m a member of, Homeschooling Extraordinary Kids at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HomeschoolingExtraordinaryKids/
It’s a goup of homeschooling parents of kids with LDs and gifted kids. They have a lot of good advice to offer and have helped me a lot.

obesestatistic (you do need to change this peudonym — I don’t want to call you that!) thanks for the ad.

The workbooks I recommend highly are Check and Double Check Phonics from scholarschoice.ca (note the .ca, not com). Honestly, they are *cheaper* than most of what you get at Walmart, and ten times better. They are more complete and comprehensive, include more word-building and analysis exercises, and have a continual built-in review (the check and double check part). Good quick delivery across North America too. If you don’t want to use a credit card, send a check or money order.
For really really basic work, even before the C&DC Book 1 (or in parallel with it for further practice), there is a another set, also very inexpensive, Road To Power And Confidence, two books, Consonants and Vowels, from phonovisual.com Slow delivery but worthwhile.

JeannieM, speed is not the issue. Learning, getting it right, retaining the knowledge for life, and being able to use it — those are the issues. Yes, so many people go rush-rush-rush and try to sell you things on the basis of speed. I always remind people to keep in mind “What’s the value of a fast mistake?” And you know, many of those kids who *appear* to be learning fast now are going to forget just as fast; teachers go over and over and over things for many years, so if you get it right the first time even if it takes all year, you will be ahead in the long run.
Again, which is better, to “cover” the whole reading curriculum in six months and fail it, and then repeat that failure three times more; or to cover just one chapter in a month and get it learned for life, and be reading fluently two years down the road? (or even three or four years?)

Please take my previous long post and try the read-trace-spell-say-sound-sayagain-workwith approach with a few words a day. Honestly, it does work.
Slow but sure wins the race.
If you do even one single word a day you build up 300 words in a year, a respectable Grade 1 vocabulary. If you do just two words a day, you get 600 words in a year, a very good Grade 1/ passable Grade 2 vocabulary. Build it up brick-by-brick.

Email me at [email protected] and I can email you the entire book-in-progress