Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do next for my son? My son is 8 yrs old was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder 3 years ago. We have pursued outside help and help through the school. He has completed about 120 hours of private Lindamood-Bell LiPS instruction (previously Auditory Discrimination in Depth) at great expense to us. We have the first disk of Earobics which he also does at speech/language class at school. He has been through three months of private speech therapy (expense to insurance and us) and has been in the school’s Multisensory Teaching Approach (MTA) dyslexia program for 1 and 1/2 years. He is also in a written expression class at school. He has also been diagnosed as ADD and is on Adderall. I think most of his attention problems are related to the LD, but the Adderall does help him focus better and I consider it a “necessary evil” at this point until we can better address the LD issues.
His reading is doing quite well (although not quite to grade level but close). However, his spelling is extremely poor. The school has been helpful, but I don’t think they know what to do to help his spelling along any quicker. I took him to an audiologist to be tested for CAPD and was referred to a specialist and the insurance says it is not covered. I figure either the school or the insurance should have to pay for it. I am still trying to figure out how to fight this one.
Luckily, our son is still happy and enjoys school. I worry about how his disposition will be if he continues to struggle so hard. We will keep working on that as well. Any suggestions anyone has would be greatly appreciated.
Re: Spelling difficulties
I think spelling is an issue that’s difficult to remediate. There’s certainly no quick cure or easy fix. The good news is though there’s Spellcheck and as kids grow older and read more, the spelling of words embeds.
If it gets in the way of his writing, let him dictate to you or any willing typist. My son is the worst speller I’ve ever seen and I’ve taught school for 20 years. The biggest problem it has posed is that it does get in the way of his writing but dictating to me has kept him feeling fairly confident and kept his grades up around all the teachers who insist that “spelling counts”.
Re: Spelling difficulties
I would recommend getting hold of the book “Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language Skills” edited by Judith Birsh (Birsch?). This book is a goldmine of very useful information, and the chapter on spelling is excellent. The book costs about $60 at Amazon, but you can probably get it through inter-library loan.
Another book that can be very useful for spelling is “Words Their Way” by Bear et al. It includes explanations of the various stages of spelling development, and explains many different activities you can do at each level — games, word diaries, word sorts, etc. — all designed to awaken sensitivity to written words. This also is available from Amazon.
Mary
Re: Spelling difficulties
At the private clinic did they do anything with Seeing Stars? This would help in conjunction with the LiPS of ADD program. He needs to have his symbol imagery reinforced along with hiis phonemic awareness. Have you thought about an Assistive listening device to use in conjuntion with the medication to help him focus in the classroom? My daugher is Add-inattentive and hearing impaired and is on meds… The assistive listening device is what helped her focus from kindergarten through 5th grade but even it wasn’t enough. Since she has been on meds the change in her school work is phenomenal. Plus she has had years of tutoring with LMB methodology. I am a graduate student in speech pathology and I was also trained in LMB methods my Phyllis Lindamood. As Susie says, spelling is the last to come, but you can assist him by doing lots of dictation and correction with incorporating the Seeing Stars program.
Re: Spelling difficulties
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions and imput. I will seriously consider all you had to say. No, he did not do the Seeing Stars program. I have been investigating the program and trying to decide if it is something that I could learn and then teach him myself. I turtored him for quite awhile in the LiPS program and figured that I could do the Seeing Stars program as well. What do you think? The Lindamood-Bell instructor who we took him to before was a friend of my sister who lives 3 hours away from us. She gave a quite a discount, but it was still very expensive. She just had her second baby and is currently not working so going back to her is not an option right now. There is a center in Dallas, but without any financial assistance from school or insurance, we would not be able to afford it right now. That is why I was hoping to be able to do it myself.
We asked to have him evaluated for the personal listening system but they came to evaluate him just before school ended and I have not heard anything official yet, but I got the impression that the district’s assistive tech person that evaluated him only saw the ADD and not the learning problems. They ought to know that dyslexics can be good at hiding it for short periods of time and that a one time short evaluation is not the same as working with him regularly. (I also don’t know what they were working on when she came, could make a huge difference.) I hope she takes what the teachers had to say more seriously. Thanks for any further imput.
Re: Spelling difficulties
I started with the Seeing Stars program with my son. We stopped after awhile because while he was making great progress with the symbol imagery, he didn’t have the letter to sound correspondence down enough. In other words, he could visualize letters but was having trouble telling me what sounds they represented.
But anyway, I think you can do it with the manual. It is very readable and interesting.
Re: Spelling difficulties
As a Reading Teacher, I feel that students should not be punished for what is beyond their control. That means not having points taken off for spelling errors. Mind you, this is my personal opinion. Give kids the best strategies we can offer, and there are some good programs out there. Give them a hand held or computer spellchecker and a pocket dictionary. But a dyslexic child should not be punished for bad spelling any more than an ADD child can be punished for being disorganized–it’s PART of the disability!!
Re: Spelling difficulties
Hi,
I have been where you are…I taught my daughter to read with the LiPS program but I could only take her so far. I needed to be her mom because somedays it was a three ring circus. It was the most frustrating thing that I had all this knowledge but she hit puberty and refused to work with me. I had to pay someone else to do what I was being paid to do with other kids. It has been a 3 year battle to teach her to read fluently. The biggest piece to this puzzle was that she was ADD inattentive and I didn’t get my head out of the sand until last summer when I realized that I too had ADD. Now I am older and wiser and she has been on meds for about a year. We have reached the point where she is mature enough to let me be her teacher/mom again.
Seeing Stars is good to use in tandem but I think he is probably still shaky in his vowels, and multisyllables and you need to go back and hit on this too. Does he know the complex syllables, ending grid, prefixes and suffixes?. Does he still pull out the guessing hat when he is reading? Does he spell very phonetically or is it all over the place with no rhyme or reason? How does he do with word chains with omissions, substitutions, etc.. I have articles where an Assistive Listening Device was used with kids who are ADD and their attention and scores went up because of the assisitive listening device. I know they work. My daughter used one for 6 years becuase of her hearing impairment. It helped her to focus but she was still ADD and the older she got the worse it got. There is a great study in the Annals of Dyslexia circa 1993 that I came across today about the connection between ADD and reading and writing disabilities. Kids with ADD are at a greater risk for this…
Spelling is almost always ‘way behind the reading, for lots of good reasons. (No context clues for whether it’s spelled right, and if you’ve been spelling it wrong forever, nothing “looks right,” among other things.) Go SLOW and thoroughly and it gradually gets better… and never assume the kid sees patterns that others of us pick up intuitively, like why starred is different from stared.