Follow up reading Program after basic OG

Well, I have my own approach to multisyllables built up out of several different pieces plus experience. I use a good series of phonics workbooks which go much farther than is common, definitely some OG influence in their planning; books 3 and 4 spend a lot of time on multisyllables. If you were to use these, I recommend a quick review of book 2 to get into the program, then books 3 and 4 in depth. Plus I do a *lot* of guided oral reading and vocabulary development. I am doing this now with a student in Grade 5 and one in Grade 8, with very positive results with both of them. If you are interested in my old posts outlining how I do this, just email me a request at [email protected]

I have used Rewards and I think you would find it useful. It combines the best of OG and Phono-Graphix, though, so it is not a pure OG approach. Rewards allows division of syllables into “chunks” a la PG rather than “syllables” a la OG. In my opinion, this is actually a sounder approach (no pun intended!) to teaching reading. Syllables are not crucial until you get to spelling. The spelling component in Rewards is minimal, and is mostly in there to reinforce the reading aspect.

All of my students have gained at least two years in reading level and two years in fluency level with Rewards, so I recommend it highly.

Rewards can be finished in less than six weeks if you work on it an hour a day five days a week. After that, you can follow up with a good spelling program. I have had good results using Spelling Through Morphographs from http://www.sra4kids.com (and their Direct Instruction “Spelling Mastery” is supposed to be excellent also). I prefer separating reading and spelling since reading remediation can usually proceed much faster than spelling remediation.

Nancy

Another possibilty is Megawords, that is more closely OG. For both Rewards and Megawords you need to be at least at a 4th grade reading level. BTW, I haven’t actually used Megawords. It is nicely priced from EPS (www.epsbooks.com) ,esp. for a single student. There was a recent thread about it (in this forum), which you may find if you look for it.

—des

I should add that you could easily modify Rewards to use syllabication instead of “chunking”. It’s just that you would need to add those rules, as they are much more specific than “chunking” guidelines.

Nancy

Nancy,

My son too reads at about 5th/6th grade level but the difference is he is in fifth grade (was retained in fourth when we switched him from public to parochial school). He has had tons of remediation—last year alone did PG intensive and four weeks of Seeing STars (LMB). My question is whether kids like him—who eventually do get caught up—learn “normally” or you really need to follow up with still more explicit instruction like Rewards if they are going to continue to progress.

Beth

Thank you Des, Nancy and Victoria for your suggestions. I will look into the MEGAWORDS program also. I really would like to stick with syllable division simply because he had such success with OG and we had tried PG in the past with not much progress.

If I were to use REWARDS would I need an additional program to work on fluency? My son’s tutor also used Great Leaps with him and he was very successful with it and loved “competing” against himself. I was thinking of continuing with Great Leaps - but if the REWARDS has a similar aspect I wouldn’t want to burn him out. What do you think?

THanks,

Pam

Beth,

I have been able to work with and observe only a limited number of children. From what I have observed, some of the children are able to keep up once they achieve grade level or above in reading. These seem to be children who aren’t severely LD to begin with, though. Severely LD children seem to benefit from continued occasional interventions until they reach a high school reading level.

Most children reading at a 5th/6th grade level would experience significant improvement from Rewards no matter what their age, so I think it would be a good idea to plan on that program sometime in the future. Especially for LD children, I think it gives them a *tremendous* boost in self-esteem and motivation when they achieve reading levels significantly in advance of their peers. They are so used to being behind their peers, or having to work furiously to keep up, the boost from reading at a higher level can be magical. Still, that needs to be balanced against burn-out and remediation fatigue, so I would exercise some caution on when and how Rewards might be done.

Nancy

>If I were to use REWARDS would I need an additional program to work >on fluency? My son’s tutor also used Great Leaps with him and he was >very successful with it and loved “competing” against himself. I was >thinking of continuing with Great Leaps - but if the REWARDS has a >similar aspect I wouldn’t want to burn him out. What do you think?

In my opinion, doing both programs would not burn him out. Typically you would spend no more than one hour on a Rewards lesson (I break up the longer lessons, #13-20, into two sessions each to keep each session under an hour). Great Leaps takes only about 10 minutes. It would be easy to do both in one day.

Alternatively, you could drop Great Leaps during the time you are doing Rewards. If you schedule out an hour per day for Rewards five days a week, you will most certainly be finished with the program within 6 weeks. At that point you could assess whether Great Leaps is needed or not.

Another alternative is to simply do Rewards sessions once or twice a week, and use Great Leaps on the “off” days. Teachers have reported that using Rewards even intermittently (once a week or less) results in measurable progress.

Rewards is considerably different than PG. You might want to hold off on adding syllabication to Rewards until you see how your son does with it. You could follow up Rewards with Megawords if you think your son needs additional work on syllabication.

In my opinion, the fluency work in Megawords is not nearly as effective as that in Rewards. Rewards works on timed readings of full texts. In contrast, Megawords works on timed readings of lists of individual words. Great Leaps would be better than Megawords for fluency work, I think. However, Megawords offers the OG-type work with syllables, etc.

Great Leaps takes so little time that I would consider doing it in addition to any other program. As long as your son enjoys Great Leaps, I would continue to use it. It could even be the “reward” exercise for doing the other program first!

Nancy

Nancy,

My son certainly was severely LD so your advice is useful. I had not thought of continuing work until high school level of reading, although it makes sense. He is doing well but just this morning he read Daytona Beach instead of Dania Beach. He obviously guessed on the second part of the word and filled in a beach with which he was familiar (he was reading a map showing where the coast line here was being refurbished). It is things like that which make me think we aren’t out of the woods if the goal is totally functioning member of society.

Beth

Well I haven’t looked at Rewards that closely. Really the “rules” in syllabication aren’t so much verbalized, but give structure to where you would normally put a syllable. There isn’t a high memory “load”. I’m not sure where Rewards puts its chunks, I know that in some cases PG puts them in very non-OG places. But then Rewards isn’t PG either.

BTW, I think you could get samples of each and see which might best meet your needs— go to www.sopriswest.com, then to www.epsbooks.com (or vice versa :-))
You will be able to download or order (without more than paying shipping) samples. I think this would be helpful in your case.

—des

Nancy and Des,

Thanks again for the additional information.

After looking at both REWARDS and Megawords I think I will go with REWARDS - my son also has severe handwriting difficulties and is not super fond of worksheets!

Thanks also for the suggestions on continuing the use of Great Leaps. Nancy, your suggestion to break up the REWARDS sessions and do only a few a week and supplement with Great Leaps sounds like it would be the perfect thing for my son.

Just projecting into the future a bit … . when we are finished with REWARDS what should I continue doing with him to keep up his skills?? Even though he is now reading on 5th/6th grade level he still does not read for pleasure on his own … He enjoys books that we read together or that he and his tutor read together - but he has yet to really pick up a new book on his own and read it himself … so I really can’t count on him keeping up his skills by reading himself independently.

He also is the kid that needs A LOT of review and repetition - and he does not really resent all the repetition even at his age. Would it make sense to keep doing fluency exercises (Great Leaps or REWARDS) once or twice a week? What else do you suggest?

We have been so focused in the past in getting him the proper instruction so that he could learn to read that I feel lost on what to do afterwards - especially since reading to him is probably never going to be something he does for fun or on his own unless he has too!!

Thanks so much for your time and such valuable advice!!!

Pam

Yes, Megawords is a worksheet approach that requires a lot of handwriting. Rewards is mostly oral work.

I think the best follow-up to Rewards is to require daily reading. For a child who doesn’t like to read, I think 20 minutes per day is good. For a 13yo, you may feel the need for more, in which case I would break up the sessions so not more than 20 minutes at a time is required. The reading material should be right around grade level, and your son should have some say in which book is chosen.

What I have found is that there is a sort of critical “take-off” point that needs to be reached before books are read for pleasure. I think it involves getting the reading process sufficiently automatic that the child can finally forget about the mechanics and focus on the material itself.

Sometimes the delay in developing sufficient automaticity involves vision skills. If you haven’t already, you may want to get a developmental vision evaluation to see if tracking skills, saccades, etc. are where they should be for your son’s age. When the problems are subtle, simply practicing reading day-in and day-out for a long period of time can develop the necessary skills. When vision problems are more than borderline, though, specific exercises can greatly speed up the process.

In my experience, it commonly takes a year to two years of daily reading (once a child can read at grade level or above) before the “light bulb moment” occurs when a book is picked up to be read for pleasure. Especially with bright children, it can take quite awhile for reading skills to get up to the level of reading material that is of real interest to the child.

Nancy

The workbooks that I use for multisyllables, Check and Double Check Phonics from Scholar’s Choice (scholarschoice.ca), require only a low to moderate amount of writing. In many cases the writing load can be reduced further by not copying the word out after dividing it. I normally recommend the writing out as a memory aid, but when it is especialy difficult we skip it. Usually a page can be done in five to ten minutes and is not too tiring. We often do two or sometimes three pages in a session, although one page is enough if you have daily sessions.
I recommend Book 3 and Book 4 for multisyllables, with a strong recommendation to review Book 2 for vowels unless the student is very very solid on the vowel patterns. The books are very inexpensive so this extra review is not a big problem. You can parallel review in Book 2 and new work in Book 3, ten minutes of each per day.

Definitely, you should be doing daily oral reading to build up skills. A student isn’t going to read for pleasure until he is reading with comfort and control.

One thing I do to make reading more fluent and more enjoyable is to back up and read things that are on the student’s mastery level rather than the (always difficult and stressful, by definition) instructional level. We also stop frequently and discuss what we are reading about; I choose books that are as interesting as possible so they are worth discussing. After getting into an easier book in this way and finding that he can actually learn about fun things from books, the student is often motivated to move up into a harder level.

I have used megawords and have found it very useful. You might also want to look into the Wilson Reading System.

Perhaps you are already doing this, but I find the most growth by reading a very high interest novel with my son. They read a paragraph or a page and then I read one or two. I talk about many things as we read, ideas that come to me, plot considerations, cause and effect, and just editorialize sometimes. It is QUALITY time. There are some really great books out there for this type of work. Ken Campbell/ author - Great Leaps

I woudl definitely, absolutely incorporate that “authentic” reading element. Our kiddos just don’t automatically transfer skills, and besides, the whole point of learning to read is to be able to read, not to be able to do Orton-Gillingham exercises :-)

Another really good extension of O-G is soemthing called “the word workshop” ( http://www.thewordworkshop.com/ ) which teaches how to work backwards to figure out longer words. An O-G teacher designed it; it also has software to go with it, which thankfully doesn’t try to do much more than include the audio version of the words — means you really can figure out whether you got it right or not.

(that was me…)

I would suggest you take a look at READ RIGHT (ww.readright.com) for the fluency piece. Their approach is different. My son has had marked improvement in his fluency. Plus, I think it would work well with home schooling since the tutoring is over the phone (YES) in the comfort of your own home.

>He also is the kid that needs A LOT of review and repetition - and he >does not really resent all the repetition even at his age. Would it make >sense to keep doing fluency exercises (Great Leaps or REWARDS) once >or twice a week? What else do you suggest?

There is a book called The Six-Minute Solution available from http://www.sopriswest.com . Their search engine leaves much to be desired, so here’s the specific link to the book (you might need to cut and paste to use it): http://www.sopriswest.com/ERP2Web/e2wItemMain.aspx?functionId=009000008&parentID=019003974 . This book contains one-page readings for grades 1 through 8. It’s set up to make timed reading easy. The child is expected to re-read the page several times, and chart improvements in accuracy and speed. This might help with the needed repetition and practice.

Sopris West has come out with other versions of Rewards — Rewards for Social Studies, Science, etc. — so if you feel the need you can continue the program into different subject areas. I do not like the social studies program as much as the original program, but it is still a good program that provides a lot of reinforcement. It incorporates some writing of paragraphs (which you could skip), and puts more emphasis on comprehension questions than the original does.

Nancy