Rod,
I just wanted to tell you that it appears you were right on the money about my son’s vision therapy. I asked for a referral from the therapist we’ve been seeing for Neuronet therapy. We talked today and she told me that she didn’t think the OD we had been seeing was that good. She thought he helped but didn’t incorporate enough body work to totally resolve all problems. So I now have an appt. with the OD with whom she has worked closely.
The OD we are seeing doesn’t do vision therapy but she thinks she, in consultation with him, should be able to incorporate vision work into his Neuronet therapy. In fact, today she modified one of his auditory tasks to be visual as well.
Anyway, you were the impetus for me checking into this more and I appreciate it. (BTW, the original guy had COVD certification).
BTW, I checked my son out using Reading reflex’s pretests last night. His blending and segmenting were perfect. His AP scores dismal (3) and his code knowledge in the lower range of good. So his code knowledge isn’t as bad as I feared. PACE is def. responsible for the improvements in blending and segmenting and hopefully will be able to bring up the AP score as well. We haven’t got yet to the tasks similar to the AP test. He can manipulate sounds as long as he sees the words but he is clueless auditorally.
Why can’t this ever be easy?
Beth
Re: Blending
Jane,
My son seems to do OK with blending. It is in manipulating phonemes that he has trouble or what PG folks call auditory processing
I would be curious though what you learned about blending strategies.
Beth
Re: Blending
How is his actual reading? When he says the sounds, does he get the word right? If not, what does he do?
Re: Blending
Thought you might both want to know that their article on this topic appears on www.readamerica.net on the Parent and Teacher page. I also heard from my intern that a memory researcher at one of the Florida universities is researching this angle to blending. I believe the first paper is due out this year. I believe Carman McGinness is an author on the paper.
Beth have you talked to your PG tutor about the PACE blending scores? I attended the PG2 master teacher training with Geoff and Carmen this summer, and according to them, short term auditory memory is not the same as blending. They present a pretty solid arguement. This alarmed me, because I had been previously doing all the things wrong which they desribe as examples of teaching and encouraging poor blending strategies. So I went home and did it their way. I do believe they are right on this one. Anyway, you should touch base with the folks at Read America, or with your son’s tutor. Good luck.