My son has a written expression disability. That label may be write because I have seen the numbers from his testing. The coding scores is an 6. Anyway, we had him enrolled in private OT and vision thearpy two summers ago. The OT and vision thearpy occured over the summer for two years. We had him retested and his coding score came up to a 7. Little by little, we are chipping away to help him to the best of our ability. He can read at grade level. His verbal thoughts are strong. His comprehension is good. Verbal comprehension and making inferences are his strength. He is not good at spelling. If I aid him in spelling by sounding out the words he does okay. He just does not have any phonemic awareness. Does anyone know what I need to do to help him.. I would like a at home program. Thanks.
Re: phonomenic awareness for middle school student
Thanks for the reply. My son uses the alphasmart for writing assignments. He did not use it with the cowriter. I read about the cowriter on this bulletin board. Were you pleased with the results? Yes, he can read the words and knows which ones are appropriate.
Re: phonomenic awareness for middle school student
Microsoft Word has half-decent spellchecking — and if you “right click” on a word that it’s given that nasty red underline to, it will give you options and all ya gotta do is click on teh right one and it just plugs that in so you don’t even have to retype. This is a well-loved feature for college students ;)
TextHelp! is more sophisticated “software for dyslexia” that works in conjunction with Word (www.texthelp.com). You can get it with different levels of features (word prediction, text-to-speech, etc). This is also popular with the college students.
"word attack" for older students
There’s a good workbook (also software but either one is fine by itself) on dissecting longer words at www.thewordworkshop.com .
In my opinion, trying to hone in and break down the sounds and retrain his brain to process phonemes and identify them could be a real exercise in frustration for a bright kiddo who processes complex, abstract information *fine* — if it has meaning. (I could be wrong… if you decide to put the kiddo through Fast ForWord I”d love to know the upshot) So I would approach it through words with meaning - that need to be read accurately to be understood.
First of all, he must be pretty bright if he has good reading comprehension without the phonomic awareness.
My daughter, age 9, 4th grade, is reading at grade level, but her comprehension is at a much greater level.
She uses assistive technology in the classroom and at hme. There is cowriter, inspration, draftbuilder, etc. The school introduced this to her in 2nd grade. She began on an AlphaSmart; however, she needs the auditory feedback (it only has visual) so it didn’t work. Would you son be able to tell which word is correct visually? If so, the AlphaSmart with cowriter applet might be enough. We are providing a laptop for her use either this year or next year. Just a thought on avenues you could take.