Need advice on making best use of the summer

Of course every child is different but I really can relate to your post. 4 years ago I was in your shoes and we tried a number of interventions. I did a lot of research and bounced around a fair bit, and overall I think we made fairly good decisions based on the emotional needs and academic needs of our child. But looking back I think we might have made more progress if I had been willing to abandon summer camp for one summer and do Lindamood Bell intensively. We did a short but intensive LMB course when DS was in 3rd grade, and it was honestly the first time I could observe a change in his reading. Tutoring (which we began in 2nd grade) certainly helped him tread water, but he never started to close the gap. I also did great leaps with him at home with little effect.

To me , the difference is the intensity. The tutor used OG , and I know that Great Leaps is scientifically sound. The LD school my son now attends uses similar materials. The reason LMB was so effective was because he went for 4 hours every day for 4 weeks straight.

If you have the opportunity to do LMB, or some other camp experience that offers remediation I would do that. One good summer of intensive remediation may give him a leap up that is hard to create with weekly tutoring. Just my 2 cents…..

thanks for your input! Did you do LIPS or V/V? I’m really pretty pleased with the progress he’s made in reading — Wilson is definitely working (bad thing is he can’t read what he hasn’t gotten to yet and he’s only on book 3!).
What I’d really like to get from the summer is a big leap in understanding language and expressing himself. He can’t seem to organize his thoughts to express himself well, and he seems to have the same problem receptively too — doesn’t always get what you’re saying the first time.
His articulation is fine and he can understand fine as long as you speak slowly, simply and clearly (I would say that he has auditory processing problems but he doesn’t seem to have trouble processing/distinguishing specific sounds as much as language when the words are all strung together. Hard to describe. same thing with speaking — it’s clear enough word by word; it’s when he has to speak in sentences that he’s a little slurry).
Which LMB program do you think will help him? I searched the archives and I haven’t seen any posts from someone who has done the intensive V/V. Wonder what kind of results I could expect. I’d have to live in a city 3 hours away with all three children — 7, 5 and 3. Needless to say DH absolutely has his foot down “No!” unless he can be convinced that this will be lifechanging for our son (he doesn’t even know what it costs yet :))
Of course i would do anything if I thought it would help…
Oh and someone on the teaching board recommended The Listening Program. He did that every day for a year and a half, from ages 4 to 5 1/2. maybe he was too young but I could see no discernable results from it.
mary

neither. My son did Seeing Stars. He had already begun to decode and this was the next step.

From what I understand V/V is a great help for helping children visualize what they are reading and this in turn helps with comprehension.

It sounds like your son has auditory issues and maybe (?) your focus should be there. have you done any auditory training? I’m just tossing off what’s on the top of my head.

Again, each child is different and there’s no way to tell over the internet what therapy is most appropriate. But what I would tell you is that you should take advantage of the summer and do it in the most intensive fashion possible.

It does sound like he has auditory processing issues. The speaking slowly suggests that he can process language but not at a normal rate. That is the sort of language issue that FFW is really good for so that would be my two cents.

We did the regular version of it after First grade and it made a big difference in receptive language. Now at 11 my son still isn’t great at following directions but I think some of that is attention. But his receptive language skills otherwise are above average. When he was 6, he never eavesdropped. Half way through FFW, he suddenly was picking up on conversations that weren’t directed at him. Now he hears what we say in the next room!

We did four weeks of intensive Seeing Stars last summer and it did boast my son’s reading. We did not do LIPS with LMB—we got the decoding down using phonographix (PG) and then used Seeing Stars to get the symobl imagery. It is simply the best program around for that—while there are a number of other good programs for decoding. I also know that the LMB people won’t put your son in V and V until his reading is on grade level. My son tested as needing V and V also but his tolerance and our budget could only take so much. They would have had him doing four weeks of Seeing Stars and four weeks of Visualizing and Verbalizing.

I honestly think too that V and V would be jumping the gun for him. You have to make sure he is processing as well as he can be remediated before you move on, in my opinion. If he isn’t processing language, it doesn’t matter that he can’t image it.

Beth

P.S. My son did TLP also but at about age 8 or 9. I never saw any observable effects either but I saw a big difference in his ability to make progress in therapy addressing his deficits. We had hit a wall in therapy that TLP allowed us to get through. My other two cents is to do it again before doing FFW, if you own it and can work it in.

Beth

Gosh I appreciate everyone’s input so much! I can’t believe I am just now discovering this board — I’ve been obsessed with finding the best treatments for my son for a long time and it seems like there are a lot of people just like me here!
Beth I did a search on your posts because your son sounds so much like mine (did you know that you’ve made about 900 posts? obviously couldn’t read them all..). SO ENCOURAGiING that your sons listening/receptive language is above average now. That would be sooooo nice!
I’m wondering what NN is. Is it NeuroNet? I found that website but couldn’t really get the gist of what it is —do they evaluate and then give you a home program to do yourself? The description of what it is suppossed to help sounds a lot like my son but I’m a bit scared of the home therapy thing. I did an intensive home therapy program with him for two years through NACD. Now I’m into paying people!
Interactive metronome sounds interesting and there is a provider very close to me (actually the same one who does the FF). I could try that easily this summer but one of your posts says that the child must want to do it — can’t imagine me discussing this with my son #1 and feel sure he would say NO #2.
The responses I got here and a couple on the Teaching Reading board made me think maybe I should wait on V/V. Now I wonder if I should cancel the evaluation with LMB which he’s supposed to have in two weeks?
My thought has been that I want to do everything I can as young as I can to avoid problems down the road if possible. Summer is still three months away though and his reading is really improving (although like your son he sure doesn’t want to read on his own). I would bet he’s a first grade level although I know there are kids in his class reading Hardy Boys and other chapter books like that and we’re sure not there, but he can get through the LMB first grade level readers that I ordered.
Oh and another question — I’m not sure whether he needs Seeing Stars or not. He certainly confuses words like the course description says but symbol wise I’ve always thought he was ok — like he easily learned his letters/sounds at a young age and he does well with sight words (altho must say he seems to need a lot of repetition to read them in context as opposed to just learning them on a flash card). Also Beth — a bit bothered by your saying that the Seeing Stars didn’t really stick with your son and that he reads slower now than before? I don’t have any options in my city for continuing any LMB therapy altho I know we will continue the Wilson tutoring 5 days a week for at least the next year or two. I don’t want to do anything that won’t last.
Just wondering is I should spend the $600 on an LMB evall now or wait…I’m sure they’ll find SOMETHING that I need, but since i think Wilson is working I don’t think I would go for LiPS unless it would really help with expressive language or something like that. I have wondered if LiPS would help him ‘feel’ his speech better so that his speech fluency would increase? He has low body awareness (he even drooled a bit until he was about 5) so the idea of helping him be more aware of sounds in his mouth intrigues me too.
Just doing FF again doesn’t seem like enough bang for a whole summer — Has anyone tried the second FF? Maybe we could do that too.
thanks so much
Mary
also would still love to hear from someone who has done the intensive V/V at a LMB center

900 posts! Well, that is almost embarrassing!

Neuronet is a therapy that works teaching the brain to do low level tasks automatically. The developer happens to live in the Ft. Lauderdale area where I live so we have been very fortunate. It is a home based program where we go every couple weeks. We have done just about every therapy program around and it is def. the one that has made the most difference in his overall functioning.

Interactive metronome def. was worth it for us too. It is narrower in focus than NN but more precise. Both use timing as an important element. I think your son is a little too young to do IM. My son was 9, I think. He certainly could not have done it at 7.

We did FFW and some vision therapy the summer after first grade. That was more than enough when you are doing FFW 2 1/2 hours a day.

My son did not read nearly as well as yours did at that time. But still I am not sure I could have managed much more with him, except perhaps daily reading.

My son skipped a lot of words and misread them. Nothing we did seemed to help that. Seeing Stars did but it slowed him down. So he is more accurate but slower. We have returned to doing NN and hope to get the speed there. Speed is very difficult to get for dyslexics if you read the literature. Accuracy, while difficult for us, is often much more easily obtained. We had tried some exericses for automaticity a while ago with NN but his visual imagery was too weak. So now that we have that piece down, we are going to try again on the timing issue. Our NN therapist says the remaining timing issues are motor, which are easier to resolve than the vision.

I do think SS helped him and it was a piece we could not have got any other way.

My son has motor based issues and because of that I do think that NN and IM have been most successful at addressing his underlying deficits. We tried LIPS one summer and it was a dismal failure. Now this was not at the clinic so I don’t know what would have happened there. But my experience was that because of my son’s motor issues he didn’t gain information from feeling sounds in his mouth. Instead, it became one more level of information to memorize. Our NN therapist told me that LIPS was developed for a child with a slightly different profile than mine and if you combine that with an inflexible therapist (she was a slt who worked in the schools and had a set way of approaching things), well it was trouble.

That experience was part of why I waited until my son was ready for SS until we did a LMB intensive.

No matter what though I do not think you could possibly do FFW and LMB in one summer.

You have to think that you are going to work on remediating underlying deficits one piece at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Seriously, we have been at this now for almost five years. Now that shouldn’t discourage you. My son had very serious multiple LDs—both dyslexia and nonverbal—and would no doubt be in a self contained classroom if I had not got involved. He was among the more severe of LD kids. But now he is getting As and Bs on his report card in a pretty demanding parochial school (day to day grades wildly fluctuate still—spelling this week was a 61, last week was a 88).

We may do V and V next summer but that won’t help your decision making.

Beth

That is wonderful to hear that your son is doing so well! Really encourages me. I feel like we have done nearly every therapy around too but I’ve certainly picked up a few things on this board lately!
When my son was 14 1/2 mos old a development center at the university here said “he has very very mild cerebral palsy. Treat him like a normal child, you might want to look into OT or PT; he’ll probably catch up by 6 or 7 and will probably always be a bit clumsy. thank you very much”
Needless to say I freaked and we have been doing everything I can find since then. If they said once a week, I said how about three?
The devel. center said his speech was normal, but even though he was my first child I knew I knew that something wasn’t right. We got speech therapy for about two years (complete waste of time IMO); same with OT and PT. That’s when I switched to NACD (a very alternative sort of thing which normally I would have told you was soooo not me) because I just felt that we needed MORE of whatever it was that we needed.
He has never had the characteristics of what you would normally think of as cerebral palsy — not more one side than the other or anything like that. He runs, writes, talks all normally but it does come out in little things.
Like in Fast Forward he had a very hard time with the release motion in Circus Sequence — he just couldn’t make his finger hold down and then release when he wanted it to. The therapist has to put her hand over his.
Anyway I could write a book about him, but all that to say his problems are motor based too and agree after looking at the IM I’m not sure he is ready for it.
How did you spend 2 1/2 hours doing FF???? My son’s program was just 50 minutes and he got very restless doing that (he’s on Adderall but we had late afternoon appt time and it had worn off by then).
Thanks again for your comments. Now I’m really leaning toward waiting on the LMB until next year. Guess I’ll sleep on it.
Mary

Mary,

I was wrong about the 2 1/2 hours a day. I checked and it is five out of six games each day, each which are 20 minutes long. It just seemed like 2 1/2 hours!!!

My son couldn’t do more than 2 games at a setting. So we did two first thing in the morning, took about an hour break riding his bike and then did two more. He did one more after dinner. I was working in the afternoon or doing 2 after lunch probably would have been ideal.

There was a woman whose daughter is about my son’s age who used to post a lot on here who did NACD. It is a very intense program which makes everything else look easy, I think.

Your son is still young and I have no doubt he is doing as well as he is because of what you’ve done with him. There are programs available though that require a little older child. That should be hopeful to you–because it means that there are still things you can do.

I think I worked the mouse with circus sequence. In fact, my son used to lay on the floor and tell me the sequence of the sounds!! (We did FFW as a home program).

Beth