Question

Hi PK,

Before you dump your life savings into LIPS, do yourself the favor of taking a look at Reading Reflex, by McGuinness. It’s a parent guide to teaching reading which addresses the phonemic skills and teaches the phonetics. You will find the transition very easy from Writing Road to Reading because both methods approach the grapheme-phoneme relationship in nearly the same manner.

Reading Reflex is much more child-friendly, however, and relies on none of the rules of Writing Road to Reading. (The rules in Writing Road to Reading are the most reliable ones I’ve found….I just don’t find it necessary to teach them.)

I would also stay with the letter formation advice given in Writing Road to Reading….insist upon each and every letter being formed exactly the way it instructs. If you try Reading Reflex, just cover the proper letter formation as you encounter each one in that curriculum, but fall back on Writing Road for the technique of forming them. Though I have no evidence for this, I think it helps build visual perception skills that help in reading.

Good luck…..LIPS is a good program, from what I’ve heard…just expensive…..Rod

Rod is correct, but I would take it even further.

Get a very very traditional handwriting program. You can do printing and then writing, but in this situation, after age 7, going straight to cursive is often better.

Teach full formal cursive writing, with NO pen lifts within any single word. This enforces directionality — the letters will line up wrong if formed incorrectly.

My wonderful teacher in Grade 3 (Mrs. Ross, bless her memory) had the class use dip pens and inkwells. As she said, if you made a mistake, you’d know it. Montessori also used a similar tactic. You see, if you push bottom to top with a real pen, the nib sticks in the paper. From Grade 4 we were *required* to use fountain pens - Scheaffer sells good inexpensive cartridge pens which are still my tools of choice for writing forty pages a day of notes in tutoring. No pressure is required and you get rid of the writer’s cramp and the ugly wrist-twist.

Work with him both directly and indirectly — do formal writing training, forming letters left-to-right and top-to-bottom, twenty minutes a day five days a week for a few months; and after he has a decent introduction, when he is doing writing for other subjects correct him as you do in reading, stopping him before he practices a mistake. Long, yes, but pay now with good teaching and you won’t have to pay later with unreadable writing and failures in high school or college when he can’t take notes.

Rod, LIPS is only as expensive as you’re willing and able to pay for it. I’ve gotten along just fine making my own materials. I bought the LIPS book, made tiles using the blank sides of Scrabble tiles, use flattened marbles bought very cheaply from American Science & Surplus instead of blocks (they don’t HAVE to be block shaped!), and got everything else (vowel circle pieces, consonants, pictures, nonsense words, chains, etc) out of the manual which provides a complete master set.

If I wanted to be a big spender, I could’ve bought a video. But the manual is comprehensive. It includes word-for-word sample lessons for everything taught. It also includes lessons of how to handle errors made by students. The first time I taught LIPS, I just followed along lesson-by-lesson using the manual. It’s not hard to do.

Of course, when people think of LIPS, they’re often thinking of the LMB regional centers which have phenomenal success rates for those who can afford to go. Well, ANY decent program of ANY name would see great success rates if they followed the LMB model of intensive one-on-one therapy for 3-6 hours a day for up to 6 weeks. But LIPS can be done “on a shoestring” by a parent armed only with the manual. It’s extremely similar to Reading Reflex in the ease with which it can be taught. I think that people think LIPS can just be done in the regional ctr. setting - not true at all. It’s every bit as available to the individual as is Reading Reflex. It’s all in the marketing.

Thanks for all the advice. It’s given me a lot to think about. Esp the cursive. We have tried a bit of cursive for fun and he said “Um., I like this. It feels good.” Which we generally take to mean , Bingo!! The thing is he fits the profile on LB website so well and he’s still not really reading… seeing the sounds as words… so we’re hesitating now and working on math skills until the Lips manual comes. And yes I thought I’d look at it and see if the retired teacher friend who introduced me to Writing Road to Reading and I can figure it out ourselves before we commit to the regional clinic. I guess i’ms so afraid of screwing him up anymore that I’d almost rather pay the experts than risk blowing what seems to be his best chance at really being able to read and enjoy it someday. Which is sort of a hidden question. I know we’re really grateful for any advance but are there dyslexics who go on to really enjoy reading or is it always going to be a chore for him. It’s just he was really looking forward to learning to read by himself. He’s Loved books since babyhood.

Hi,

Thanks for making that clear Joan….I was referring to the cost of attending the clinics, which I’ve heard is many thousands of dollars…many, not a few.

As to marketing, LIPS and Phono-Graphix are quite similar in that regard. I’ve never seen marketing ads for either one in the popular press….both seem to spread by word of mouth.

PK, I realize a good part of your question was about letter formation, and can understand victoria’s advice in that regard. However, you also said that phonemic awareness was a problem. And this is the bigger of the two issues when learning to read.

You will find in Reading Reflex, and also in Writing Road to Reading I think, that they advise printing letters until the grapheme-phoneme relationships are secure. In particular, in Reading Reflex, each phoneme is pronounced aloud while it is being written (a process they refer to as “mapping.”) By printing each grapheme (sound picture, in Reading Reflex) you will be able to tell that your child is correctly linking “sh” with the sound /sh/, for example. If the child writes in cursive, the boundaries between sounds are harder to assess.

I think I agree with victoria about 95% of the time, but I’d wait on the cursive for now, for what I think are valid reasons. I don’t know what LIPS advises in this regard….Joan?

Again…good luck….Rod

Well, Rod, I usually agree with you.

My point on the writing is to cease practicing and ingraining errors as an important basic step. Although I forgot to throw it into the above post, the idea is to teach writing by kinesthetic awareness rather than by visual guessing; kinesthetics will almost always give the right form and avoid the b-d-p-q etcetera problems. Cursive style will break out of the bad printing habits and give good smooth kinesthetic feel.

In Europe (including Montessori, who has an excellent track record on phonemic awareness) cursive writing is taught from Day 1; most Europeans have no idea how to print. This doesn’t seem to interfere with the fact that their schools usually score higher than US on most testing.

If you are working on individual phonemes, the cursive letters can be written separately, as they are also in algebra (using cursive, as my excellent Grade 8 teacher taught us, is an excellent way to avoid your algebra confusing s with 5, t with +, y with x or 4, z with 2, and so on.) It is a bad habit to separate cursive letters in words in general, but OK in a special case like reading/spelling lessons.

Basically, the jury is out on the issue of cursive writing. I really think it depends on the child. The issue wasn’t brought up at the LMB training programs I attended. We WERE told, however, to prepare all materials in print because, of course, most of the reading an individual will do over a lifetime is in print. But, in terms of what a child wrote, they didn’t seem to mention one or the other. Perhaps they address this in their course on dysgraphia.

But I do agree with Victoria about the ease of cursive writing in terms of flow and minimizing of all the steps that can go wrong in print. Every time you print, your hand has to lift up, then get put back down onto the paper in a very specific spot. It requires an awful lot of motor planning and control. Cursive is easier motor-wise. However if a child is having a great deal of trouble with symbol recognition, having two sets of symbols - one print, one cursive - for the exact same sounds can be problematic. You have to decide which is more important for THAT child at THAT time.

That’s why I think it must be on a child-by-child basis. There’s a great deal of discussion going on within Montessori circles about whether or not to require cursive writing in the early levels. Montessori has two organizations - Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) and American Montessori Society (AMS). I’ve worked in both types of schools. AMI tends to insist on cursive whereas AMS schools don’t seem to have a preference. The best solution I’ve seen is really a compromise - use the D’nelian (sorry, I can’t spell it) alphabet. It’s almost cursive yet retains enough of print for kids to recognize it as such. In my experience, children who learned that alphabet seemed, as a rule, to have less trouble making the switch from one to the other as required by reading or writing. There’s a flow to D’nelian (somebody PLEASE spell this word right for me!) that’s very much like our standard cursive.

I believe I’ve seen it with an a in it, D’Nealian or DeNealian.

I got to dislike this style intensely when I worked tutoring kids from a system that had the most disconnected curriculum planning ever seen.

This was the system where I got a kid who had A’s and B’s to Grade 3 but couldn’t read a primer, where they simply omitted two chapters of the French curriculum (the senior and junior high disagreed about who should teach it, so nobody did), where teaching the alphabet wasn’t officially on the kindergarten curriculum but tested for placement in Grade 1, and so on.

In handwriting, in Grades 1 and 2 they taught standard disconnected ball-and-stick printing, in Grade 3 they taught standard cursive writing, in Grade 4 they didn’t teach much of anything in writing, and in Grade 5 they introduced a sort of italic sort of D’Nealian, and after Grade 6 they dropped the issue of handwriting entirely.

The end result was that the students developed writing that can only be described as half-assed. Excuse the phrase but it’s the only description that comes even near the mark. The writing was not printing, not cursive, not italic, but some weird combination of whichever forms the kids could remember. Kids formed the letters whatever way they could figure out, top to bottom or bottom to top, as the mood occurred to them.Some of the letters were joined to each other and some weren’t, some were lower-case and some capitals, all in a mush (much like the parent’s description that started this thread, but this was an entire school system where half the kids worked like this!!)

No surprise, the general academic standard of the town was very low, dropout rate high, and those kids who tried to go on to further education and training had a hard time of it. The horrible handwriting certainly didn’t help in their studies and careers.

Anyway, when I looked into the D’Nealian, I was very discouraged. It had been introduced in the schools as you are thinking of using it, as a retraining system to help kids who hadn’t learned the standard cursive forms. But without very intensive reteaching, it added another layer of confusion. And on the issue of joining letters, even if well-taught it was a nightmare; some letters always or almost always join, others never or hardly ever join, and some join to certain companions and not to others. So with every letter you write you have to remember not only how to form it and how to spell the word and choose the right letters, but also what the next letter is and whether or not this is a legal join. As there are 26 x 26 = 676 possible letter-to-letter combinations (OK, probably only 300 or 400 commonly used, but still … ) there is no way any kid is going to remember the rules and use them accurately. And with the sometimes-join-sometimes-not pattern, words are broken illogically into non-meaningful non-phonetic chunks, making re-reading impossible.

Sorry to go on so long, but this is one of those things you may not think about too much until you have gotten down the road with it, so I just want to mention some of the pitfalls on the way.

I can’t spell it either but will say that it is much harder to learn in K. Both my kids were taught that way and for kids with small motor delays (my son) or not strong (my daughter), it is tough. Yes, it is easier to switch over to cursive but hard to learn to start with.

Victoria,

I need to clarify. It’s not a program that I’m considering using for LD kids. I had 11 years experience working within a Montessori school that used D’Nealian exclusively in preschool and on into the 6-9 class. In that population, and because it was exclusive, not switched from one type of writing to another, and it was structured well, the children did well, even those with motor, planning and sequencing issues.

My comments about Montessori in general reflect the dilemma that, although Montessorians generally think cursive is best right from the beginning, we HAVE seen individual cases where that’s not so. And the question then becomes “Would this child be better served by using print exclusively?”

I’ve seen the “Use print exclusively” argument. One proponent was John Holt. He was a good person, but his ideas of scientific verifiability are weak. He had a flash of inspiration one day and decided to take notes in a seminar entirely in printing instead of in cursive. Because he, personally, felt within himself that he was writing faster (no actual timing or comparison) on that day, he decided that printing only would be a good policy and he started what I can only describe as an anti-cursive campaign.

With that level of reasoning going on in the literature, it is hard to separate out facts from random opinions or received dogma.

Cursive is definitely harder to read — the letters are less distinct and the joins can disguise shapes. *Properly-written* cursive should be faster and less fatiguing than printing because you don’t have the repeated lifts and re-placing of the pen, and you can use your whole forearm instead of twisting your wrist. So there are pros and cons to both.

Personally I went to almost all printing after teaching young children for a while, and then went deliberately back to cursive when I went back to university and was tutoring university students and was writing over forty pages a day (with the trusty fountain pen to reduce fatigue even further.) I tend now to start writing notes in print but after five or so pages wake myself up and switch to cursive. Again, pros and cons to both - print is clearest for students to re-read the notes but cursive allows me to write notes for two hours straight.

One thing I’ve noted with some young children is a tendency to focus on trivia to the exclusion of the main message. For example one school system was teaching a more or less standard print style but with a few joins to lead presumably to cursive later. The lower-case “a” was ball-and-stick but with a little curl at the end of the stick, as in cursive. Several students focused determinedly on this curl and wrote the actual letter minuscule, pinpoint size, and then the curl the whole line high. For this kind of child the plainest, most unornamented style of print possible would a good idea.

I tend to try to encourage students to work within the system — whatever style the system is teaching is what they will be expected to read on the board and in group work, and will not make their work look odd in a stack. If they just can’t get the system, then case-by case choice.

I had a similar experience regarding the use of cursive myself. From the time I was in about 8th grade right on up till the age of 40, I printed. I preferred print, thought cursive was fussy. I began teaching in a school that required cursive in the early grades. So very grudgingly, I started to write in cursive once again. Wow! I’ll never write more than a sentence or two in print again. I’ve found that my hand doesn’t tire with cursive as it does with print. I never knew, till I made the switch, that printing was fatiguing. This may sound surprising based on my previous posts about the use of D’nealian alphabet. For purely motor reasons, cursive is better than anything. The only reason I can understand the need for print is for kids who struggle with visual memory. Two alphabets to learn, for those kids, can be too much. In my experience with them, everything improved when these kids concentrated solely on print in their reading and their own writing, this despite the drawbacks motor-wise. So I think D’Nealian MIGHT be a compromise in these cases.