Can anyone recommend...

and worked very well for us. If your dd is reading on a 2nd grade level or better, you can probably skip the manipulatives (a lot of work, but very helpful for beginners) and go right to using a white board and markers. The book is written specifically for parents who want to tutor a child, and doesn’t assume any prior teaching experience.

The website for this methodology is http://www.readamerica.net, which has a bulletin board for questions and problem-solving.

Mary

http://www.resourceroom.net/Surfin/index2.asp#phonemic has a list, though some are places to go for tutoring. Consider this an investment.

If Reading Reflex isn’t enough, contact me and I’ll give you a list of other programs that take longer but can be helpful in difficult cases,

Can you recommend a program that would benefit a teenager with severe reading difficulties?

Four and a half options:

1) I haven’t seen it, but many people who post here are very positive about Wilson Reading, which is an adaptation of Orton-Gillingham for older kids. If you do this, you have to get the teacher’s manual and do ALL of it. This is where a lot of beginners fail — they pick and choose what they want to do or what is fun or what kakes sense to them, and unfortunately the part that is most needed is the hardest part, right? (You learn very little in most education courses, but the one little thing about teaching methods that most decent teachers learn is that a well-written curriculum hangs together and something you don’t see the point of in Chapter 2 may be the foundation for something vital in Chapter 5.)

2) You can get the Laubach workbooks (NOT the new Challenger or Venture programs, which have adopted a lot of the whole-language stuff that has failed these people in the first place); these are aimed at the adult non-reader. Level 1 is pretty trivial but worth reviewing. Again, follow the directions and do ALL of it.

3) Look at Shay’s old posts on the Teaching Reading bulletin board. A few months ago she outlined her program for working with Grade 11 and 12 non-readers using Phonographix plus some other programs and after the skills are developed working on reading real books together. She is a successful teacher and gives much good advice. Note especially her comment about students falling back on bad habits and having to work over themk when they move up to real books.

4) I use the same phonics workbooks and basic readers with older students as with younger. I tell them that since they are older they will be able to go through this review quickly, but it’s important to get the beginner stuff right before we go on to the harder things. Most of them are grateful for the chance to catch up on what they missed, as long as you talk to them like yough adults and help them use their analytical thinking skills to understand what is going on.
Occasionally I get a dyed-in-the-wool guesser who can gabble through easy books but stalls out on anything above Grade 3 or 4. In this case I review phonics from the beginning, stressing it even more in fact, but for reading I choose a book of interest that’s really too hard, say Harry Potter for one example, and make them read word-by-word orally, and forcing them to use phinics because it’s too complex to guess.
I’ve posted some lesson plans and suggestions several times — please try the search button here and on Teaching Reading so as to avoid re-typing the whole thing.

4 1/2} As Shay has done, you can use a combination of programs and books and methods to suit your personal needs. Just remember to focus on one thing at a time and to complete one idea before going to another, or you can end up skipping around forever and getting nowhere.

Another option is Ann Tuley’s _Never Too Late To Read,_ which also outlines using ORton-Gillingham for teens/adults, but isn’t as detailed as Wilson (and doesn’t provide the materials so you’d have to make them). It’s available from York Press (www.yorkpress.com). It basically describes the same very effective program I used in the college-prep LD school where I taught — the obvious difference being that I didn’t learn it from a book, but from other teachers with a solid year of team teaching and lots of cooperation. Having 6 or 7 teachers means an awful lot of creative input.

I also get very honest with older students. Many of them balk at the beginning — often they really, really don’t want to show how poorly they read. Once they find out that no, they are *not* the worst, stupidest, most hopeless case in the living universe and that I don’t roll my eyes when they can’t spell where, I just tell ‘em… then they settle in and want to learn the stuff.