hi—I have a 10-year old LD student who continually blends onset-rime, like with h-ope, sh-ip, etc. We’ve been working together (orton approach) since the summer and no matter how much I review and have him practice, even saying the sounds quickly in isolation, he can’t blend automatically. We do timed word and phrase lists, and on these he’ll do okay for a bit, but later revert to teh same labored blending. Any ideas for helping him become more automatic? WE do a lot of controlled text reading, speed drills, tons of review, and phoneme manipulation work.
he may have a processing disorder as well
Have you tried using music with him to help him? I would also suggest using an approach I use with kids who have motor speech problems, called Melodic Intonation Therapy. The gist is when I am teaching a kid to blend sounds and they aren’t getting it I grab their hand and we move it along with watching me say the words and this seems to help them get it. He may be one of those type of kids that needs to move his body to get his brain to process and blend the sounds together…
Another thing is using something like Read Naturally in a simplified version.
I think you might take him back farther to VC “words” (a-t, i-t, and some nonsence like o-p— in fact, you might reall need lots of these nonsense “words”). You can make it more OGish by assigning an arbitrary sound to a different color block or tile, “this says ‘a’ and this is ‘b’ ‘a’ ‘b’, have him repeat, and then blend— he can pull the tiles togehter. Sometimes it helps to show that that the sounds go from one position in the mouth to another, however, I have yet to do this with someone I did not do LiPS with. I think it would work. Go with these til that is automatic, then go on to CV words (no, to, fa), and then to CVC words. When blending is not automatic it can break down very quickly.
I think the problem is the student does NOT really know how to blend. It breaks down because he does not really know it.
—des