Reading problems...what to do?

I couldn’t read at all at age 6 - I was the laughing stock of the neighborhood and a disgrace to my parents. My mother bought the basal reader and worked with me a few minutes a day. It cost just about nothing (in money) and a lot in love and concern. I did (and do) have a significant learning problem - probably related to very high fevers from three weeks of measles I couldn’t shake - but overcame it all without a fortune being spent. I am now the author of a reading program and lecture nationwide. Give her love, time, and concern. Find her advocates. DO NOT MORTGAGE THE HOUSE!!!!! Sincerely, Ken Campbell

Ken is definitely right about not mortgaging the house.

Please don’t blame things on age — this is something schools use as a cop-out. (School skipped my brother ahead because he was gifted, taught a hopeless memorization system which he couldn’t learn, then turned around and said he was too young - after *they* skipped him ahead. Then mom actually taught him to read, took a month.)

Yes, PG would help.

Yes, the material you quote is advanced for Grade 1, but not impossible with good teaching.

Yes, your child can probably catch up. APD will make it harder, but should be possible. The time to hold back is when the child is obviously pushing at her limits and wants to back off herself.

Suggestion: get a copy of the Saxon Phonics (I believe available on the internet). Go back and review/reteach the entire thing from the beginning. Any topic that is difficult — and the APD means some will be — supplement with other phonics material until well mastered. Spend twenty minutes a day and work step-by-step through the whole thing.
A second look like this can clarify things wonderfully. And as the background gets firmer, the class work will also pick up.
Also get some good basal readers (used book store is my favourite place) with nice limited vocabulary and lots of repetition, and as well as twenty minutes a day reviewing phonics, spend ten to twenty minutes a day reading connected text. No rush, no pressure, just reading for interest.

If you keep this up over the summer, she will enter Grade 2 ahead of the game. Many kids are getting by in Grade 1 with good memory skills and a memorize-regurgitate-forget pattern, and over the summer these kids regress; if your is maintaining and developing skills, she will do well.

Victoria’s plan is pretty much what my mom did. There was plenty of time for me to play, be in Cub Scouts, and little league. In reading, most often, more is not better.

If it would make you feel better now, you can request a psycho-educational assessment.

Another addition to the abovementioned, good suggestions: make or get letter tiles. They area available for purchase in teacher supply stores. I made mine from tiny sized white tiles purchased from Home Depot.

As you work back through the Saxon Phonics lessons, have your daughter construct, deconstruct and manipulate the sounds in the phonetically regular words.

Eg.: You might say something like:

Say the word “nut.” Have her say it carefully and attend to the sounds and their feel. Next you and she might fingerspell (make fist, stretch sounds of nut out n-u-t, while you lift a finger for each sound, thumb first). Then blend them together and say “nut.” After this I have the child select and build the word. Depending on what skills she has, you can then begin asking her to change letters to make similar words: change “nut” into “but” now change “but” into “bit.” Depending upon her facility with the sounds you may or may not want to have her first finger spell each sound. I always have them touch each sound, give the sound and blend back to check whether or not the word they built is the word they were asked.

This will build the phoneme awareness skills for reading. This does work. I personally have not found that the LiPs program, with its huge emphasis on feeling each sound in the mouth to be necessary for most LD children. Yes, a few sounds are really hard to hear, esp. when they are along side certain other sounds. In these cases I may ask them to say the word very slowly and pay attention to the placement of their tongue.

Thanks, Ken! By the way, my school just purchased Great Leaps (3-5) and I will begin using it next week!

Janis

Victoria,

As a matter of fact, I have the whole Saxon Phonics 1 Teacher’s Manual at home now. A teacher at my school wasn’t using it so she let me borrow it. My problem has been that she comes home with so much homework (usually a phonics sheet, one or two Saxon math sheets, spelling practice and reading aloud) that it is hard for me to get her to spend any more time than that. As you probably know, APD kids get pretty exhausted attending all day at school. So some nights she cries during the phonics or reading out of pure fatigue (and this is a very good natured child ordinarily). At our last meeting, I expressed that the first graders had too much homework, and that I would like some of it to be completed at school so that Anna could spend more time with me on reading at night. The teacher has been doing a little better, usually reducing the homework by one item. She does have weak memeory skills and I think will need V/V eventually to help with comprehension. But we must get the basic skills down first.

But my question is, do you think I should combine using PG with Saxon (if I could keep that straight!)? Or wait on PG until summer and work on Saxon now while she’s in it?

Thanks,
Janis

Victoria,

As a matter of fact, I have the whole Saxon Phonics 1 Teacher’s Manual at home now. A teacher at my school wasn’t using it so she let me borrow it. My problem has been that she comes home with so much homework (usually a phonics sheet, one or two Saxon math sheets, spelling practice and reading aloud) that it is hard for me to get her to spend any more time than that. As you probably know, APD kids get pretty exhausted attending all day at school. So some nights she cries during the phonics or reading out of pure fatigue (and this is a very good natured child ordinarily). At our last meeting, I expressed that the first graders had too much homework, and that I would like some of it to be completed at school so that Anna could spend more time with me on reading at night. The teacher has been doing a little better, usually reducing the homework by one item. She does have weak memory skills and I think will need V/V eventually to help with comprehension. But we must get the basic skills down first.

But my question is, do you think I should combine using PG with Saxon (if I could keep that straight!)? Or wait on PG until summer and work on Saxon now while she’s in it?

Thanks,
Janis

Thanks for this suggestion, Anitya! I was thinking letter tiles would be better than paper to do the phoneme manipulation that PG recommends (which is similar to what you are suggesting). I’ll check a teacher supply catalog and see if I can find some plastic ones. I have used ceramic tiles for multiplication facts and they are a little heavy!

Janis

Anitya,

She had a full eval in October, but at that time, she scored a 1.0 on reading on the WJ-R. She probably had to read one word or something to get that score! However, I am a little aggravated that they did not use the new WJ-III which would have given us scores on Listening Comprehension and Oral Expression, both areas where she might have potentially qualified for LD. But I am going to request testing with the WJ-III at the end of the school year. That way, we’ll also have a better idea of where she stands in reading.

Janis

Janis,

I think that is a lot of homework for a first grader. How is she doing with the spelling? My third grade son does not do spelling with the class. The resource teacher agreed that he needed to master reading first. This makes our life much less stressful frankly.

I would not even consider holding her back. We thought about having our son repeat second grade. We were going to move him to a parochial school (where my other kids were) and that was what they suggested. He wanted very much to be in the same school as his siblings but still he was very opposed to repeating second grade. Now in third grade (in public school), he is closing the gap. Your child has far less disabilities than mine (he ended first grade not reading) and mine is catching up.

You also can get a lot done over one summer so I wouldn’t worry too much. Also you might try and just work with her for 15 minutes a time on the weekends. If you think she might be confused with Saxon versus PG (I am not familiar with Saxon so can’t comment), you could just do AP type work with her. That would help too.

Beth

Thank you, Beth. The people at the speech/language/reading clinic also recommended that I not hold her back. They said proper instruction was the most important factor, which is, of course, true! Yes, that is too much homework. I had the perfect opportunity to say it in the IEP meeting without coming across as critical of the teacher who happens to be a personal friend. I told them that the “rule of thumb” was 15 minutes of homework per grade level. So an hour of homework is too long for any first grader, and horrible for an APD or LD first grader.

Spelling is very difficult. You should see her spelling words! Ugh! I have deliberated about dropping it, but she can do them with a lot of practice. They are part of the Saxon phonics, though, so I think something can be gained by practicing the words. Our main practice method is for her to write the word in color on a small white board and I immediately help her with error correction. She also traces the words on placemats made of something similar to burlap. This has been successful but time consuming. Her school day is 8am-3pm, which is already a long day. So as I said earlier somewhere, she can only take so much at night. It’s hard for me to keep her up with homework, plus do Earobics, plus work on phonics/reading. I can see the possibility of maybe homeschooling part-time, but I’d like to try everything else first. And the idea of doing more of the remediating on the weekend is a good one. She does not have homework on the weekend, thank goodness!

Janis

Janis,

I was able to get my son to pass spelling tests last year with an extreme amount of work. We did it in the sand, in shaving cream, in the air—you name it. But he didn’t retain it and it just stressed us out. I stopped doing it at some point and eventually had it dropped officially.

Your child is less disabled than mine but one thing that has really helped me is to take the long run view. I don’t worry about grades at all. My son barely glanced at his report card until this year (the school doesn’t give grades until third grade) and even now we really pay little attention to it. He just got all B’s (a first) on his interim report card but I just had him sign the form and didn’t make a big deal about it. I don’t want him feeling bad if it doesn’t go so well the next time. Schools don’t always ask reasonable things from kids (especially LD kids) and if it isn’t reasonable, we just don’t do it. While he is pulled out for language arts now, everything else is the regular classroom. I worry most about him learning to read and everything else is secondary.

I have also simply told teachers that my son isn’t going to do things. Last year we stopped doing book reports (one a week) because I told her it that our time could be better spent working on his reading.
This attitude has saved us both a lot of stress. When other parents were flipping out because their child couldn’t learn all the bones of the body, I just figured he wouldn’t flunk third grade because of it and who cares what he got in health for that marking period (he ended up with a C—guess they did lots of inclass work too).

Beth

Beth,

I am in agreement with your philosophy. Reading well is the most important thing. If something has to go, I will also request it. I put “modified spelling, if needed” on her IEP, so that we could reduce the list or eliminate it if necessary. I think when schools know a parent is informed, they will accept the modifications we ask for fairly well.

I have also de-emphasized the report card. I look at it, sign it, and send it back and do not discuss it with Anna at all. Her progress or lack of progress is determined by the appropriateness of her instruction in relation to her disability, so I don’t think she should be concerned about the grades (which were mostly S with some S-). However, if you read my post about “venting about grades” you will see that the school did something really stupid re: grades yesterday!

Janis

The advice you’re getting on dropping spelling is sound. The Annals of Dyslexia which I just got from the IDA has a wonderful article on spelling, noting that phonetic-pattern lessons are far more effective than randomly chosen lists, and that lessons on official grade level are simply not retained while lessons on actual achievement level help develop into the more advanced skills. So either drop the spelling officially (proved to be useless and a waste of time), or get alternate spelling practices on her real level, or as one parent suggested (and I’ve done this myself for my daughter’s handwriting) just ignore the grades.

If the oral reading homework you have is possible with help, then it’s worth doing, but if it’s another frustration, it could be (temporarily!) dropped officially or unofficially as well.

Once you stop stressing out over assignments that are not doing any good, you can replace them with work that does help.

re PG and Saxon, I haven’t used these particular programs, so I’m speaking in general terms.. I’d look at doing PG during a school break as a rebuilding effort, and continuing Saxon while she’s in school, to parallel what she’s doing during the day..

re fatigue — for a change of pace for both of you, would it help to get another tutor for some of this?

Victoria,

I think I agree about using PG during a break and helping her with the Saxon while she’s doing it in school. Saxon really is excellent for most children, mine is just a slow processor because of the APD and needs a little more practice than they provide. The Saxon is multi-sensory in that the children “code” the sounds with different symbols, something that makes having the teacher manual at home very advantageous!

Really, Anna is the most happy and compliant of my three children, and she will happily work with me when she is not too tired (unless the work is too hard and then she’ll get frustrated). To be honest, we live in a small town, and there are no O-G or MSSL tutors here that I know of. The parents who had outside evals and even know about such tutoring have to go out of town, and I think that would add to her fatigue. So right now, until I can get the LD teacher at her school trained in PG and Lindamood Bell Seeing Stars and V/V, I’ll have to do it myself! But believe me, I am working hard on getting the school to start using better methods, which will ultimately help a lot more kids than just mine, hopefully!

Re: oral reading, I think it would be more beneficial if she were reading things that were less difficult. I have brought some easier readers home from my school and she seems to have a greater feeling of success when she reads something well (which is just common sense!). There have been several nights that instead of reading what the teacher wrote on the reading log, I wrote in my own book instead!

Actually I have been talking to this principal about getting a phonetic spelling series for the school. After first grade, the teachers have just been making up spelling lists, which we know doesn’t teach spelling at all! Do you have any favorites that would work for regular classes but be good for LD children as well? (I’m looking at Sequential Spelling but I’m not sure if they’ll buy into it since it is designed for LD). I really need to subscribe to the Annals of Dyslexia, too.

Thanks!!!
Janis

Thanks for the vote of confidence. However I am not too much into programs — I use one or two basic reading and phonics programs and work from there according to students’ needs. And in the two hour a week tutoring we’re lucky to get reading and rarely get beyond basics (sound it out!) in spelling.

Other people here do speak highly of the AVKO sequential spelling — why not get the article from the Annals of Dyslexia (must be a library near you, or I could send a photocopy) and show it to your text/curriculum adoption people, and explain that the spelling system that has been proven to work is exactly what AVKO does, with no reference to LD?

But do note that it is strongly stated - and only makes sense - that kids learn nothing (or less than nothing, frustration) from working above their achievement levels, while if they work at their achievement levels, the advanced work improves too. This means that at least some kids in every class will need to have a different spelling list than the rest; however, if you buy the series and giv e every teacher a couple of levels, no problem, easier than making up your own random list.

Thanks, Victoria. I do want to get that Annals of Dyslexia journal, but the IDA membership page was unavailable yesterday. I know they have been redoing their web-site, so maybe that is why. If I can’t get it, I’ll definitely ask you about a copy of the spelling article.

Janis

Yes, they are, but they are cheaper and when you buy your own classroom materials, economy is the operative word. We just move them around the table.