I’m so excited, I have to share this! Our family has had our foster son since last August which has been quite a challenge as he came from a residential placement prior to living with us. In any case, he has been in a structured, small class placement in our local middle school. Tonight, he asked me to read his social studies chapter to him. Usually, it is read to him at school. Although he is an excellent decoder, automaticity, fluency and rate are very difficult for him which impacts his comprehension. Since I am also an assistive technology consultant, I decided to use my bag of tricks with him. I scanned his chapter into a talking word processing program (text-to-speech) and he chose the best voice, voice rate, font, font size and spacing and highlighting color. He listened to the entire chapter, attending much better than he would have if I read to him and was very pleased with his ability to do it on his own once he was set up. I did have him stop the readback every few paragraphs and asked him questions to make sure he was comprehending the chapter and he was!
I watched as he tracked the words as the computer read to him (he needed to set the speed to a very slow setting because that worked best for him). It was incredibly exciting for me to see how well this worked and that he thought it was effective as well! He HATES to read anything because it is so laborious and he stuck with this AND then answered the questions at the end of the chapter. I love when things work and I had to share this with everyone. I just sent off an email to his teacher so that we can get some school buy in to this process. Right now, he has a one-on-one aide and I’d like to see that cut back so that he can be more confident in becoming independent.
Re: I have to share a success story
Anne,
There are a number of text-to-speech programs available - it depends upon which features you need. A free downloadable program is called ReadPlease at Readplease.com. It has it’s limitations but at least it gets you started. A step up from that is TextAloudMP3 available at nextup.com which is about $25. Check out the voice add-ons because the voice quality is so important. My students and my son like the NeoSpeech voices or AT&T Crystal or Mike.
Another option is Talking Word Processor from Premier Assistive Technology - readingmadeeasy.com. The best programs run several hundred dollars or more - WYNN, Read & Write Gold or Kurzweil 3000. They have incredible features but you may not need all the features. The last three are scan and read programs.
Most of these programs can be converted to MP3 so they can be downloaded to an MP3 player.
There are additional programs but this at least gets you started. A good AT specialist can help you figure out which way to go.
Re: I have to share a success story
KTJ,
That is so great that your expertise is allowing your foster son to feel some success! The load of reading assignments as kids get older just makes that sort of technology necessary. But I hope they are working on his automaticity and fluency at school. Do you know what they are doing?
Janis
Re: I have to share a success story
Janis,
I agree with you about concurrent remediation but I have to overcome his previous experiences. ( He absolutely HATES to read by his report). He was in a residential program for two years and has a lot to make up even in terms of learning in all subjects. We use Great Leaps at home because the public school isn’t well equipped to do this. I wanted him in a public school more for the opportunity to be around “regular” kids to offset what he experienced at the residential setting. He’s only been in public school since January.
Karen
Re: I have to share a success story
Karen,
I think it is fine to work on fluency at home. If you run out of Great Leaps passages at his reading level, the QuickReads books are only about $10 each and give many more passages. I think many kids would like the software version of Read Naturally, but it’s about $89 per level. I actually do fluency work with my own child at home just to be sure it gets done!
Janis
[quote:d8ea602c18=”KTJ”] I scanned his chapter into a talking word processing program (text-to-speech) and he chose the best voice, voice rate, font, font size and spacing and highlighting color.[/quote]
Could tell me how to get this program and its name. Its sounds interesting and I am not the best at reading out loud. This may be helpful to us.
Thank you.