LIPS

Others can prob answer this better than I, but I can offer another solution for the expense. It is a Lindamood-Bell Program. Acess their website and they give a pretty good overview of who needs it and what it does. The clinics seem to give very good results but are extremely expensive. They offer workshops for training parents and teachers. What we’ve done is form a cooperative of dyslexic parents(homeschoolers and reg schoolers) to send a retired teacher to the Lips, Seeing Stars and Testing workshops for the training to become a tutour. We will then get our tuition free or reduced to the value we contribute to the trainig nad want the tutouring.

Lori, PK’s idea is super! In case you don’t have the web-site, it’s:

http://www.lindamoodbell.com/

Janis

Read: Why Our Children Can’t Read And What We Can
Do About It: A Scientific Revolution In Reading
By: Diane McGuinness, it is the best book I have read on dyslexia and the author discusses the Lindamood Lips program at length.
My daughter followed the lips program with a tutor trained in Lips, not at a registered lips clinic. It is a multi-modality approach to learning where the child learns phonemic awareness by feeling the the sound as it is made by the mouth and lips. They give names to the different phonemes, eg. p is called a lip popper because of the way the mouth pops when the sound is made.
It also taps into the visual modality when the child uses blank colored blocks to represent the phonemes in words. They practice using the blocks, e.g.. show me the sounds “p i t”, the child puts down 3 colored blocks to represent the 3 sounds, the teacher might say, now make it say “s i t”, the child removes the 1st block and replaces it with a different colored block. Now make it say “i t s” , the child removes the 1st block, adds a new block to the end, etc.
I found it very effective with my child. Sounding out was always impossible for her prior to her Lips training. She was able to memorize sight words, but that only got her to 3rd grade level, making her 3 years behind her grade level. After lips she was able to tackle long, multisylable words with ease and confidence, when before she always saw the 1st letter and guessed. After 6 months of training (3 hours per week)she can now tackle 600 page novels and enjoy them. The degree of success you can expect depends on the child’s disability. I would think a child with only auditory problems would benefit more quickly than one with visual, or both visual or auditory problems.

Thank you all for the valuable information on LIPS and alternatives. Hopefully something will work and my daughter will eventually learn to spell. Lori

Lori,

Are reading and spelling both a concern or just spelling? There is a spelling program for LD called AVCO Sequential Spelling. You might want to check it out.

http://www.spelling.org/Default.htm

Janis