>One thing I know the LMB people are doing now as opposed to several years ago when I took their training, is to use Seeing Stars much earlier with everyone, even those who need the phonemic awareness part. >
Did you take the LiPS and Seeing Stars training? I had LiPS and now I’m thinking whether to get the SS and On Cloud Nine training or to just get the books.
Does LMB think a child should finish the Lips program first before starting SS? I have a student now that finally learned the letters and sounds of the alphabet through the Lips program and I am thinking of using SS in January after the holidays because he really has difficulty with symbol imagery. I have finished reading the SS manual and it seems pretty straight forward.
Barbara, I don’t think you need to take the SS training or the On Cloud Nine training either, esp. since you’ve done LIPS so you know the general LMB philosophy. Both SS and On Cloud Nine are very simple. If I remember correctly, SS was just a half day course and it was a VERY easy half day as compared to the LIPS sessions. I never took On Cloud Nine, just worked from the book. Both SS and On Cloud Nine are styled similarly to V&V.
Even when I took their training several years ago, the LMB people believed you should start SS as soon as you’d gotten through most of the consonant pairs and the vowel circle in LIPS but long before multi-syllable work. But now they seem to start SS almost as soon as a student knows a few consonant pairs and a few vowels. They feel that the very best method is to do both LIPS and SS simultaneously. I started doing that myself recently and I agree that it works well.
Sounds like your student is more than ready to start SS. Kids (and teachers) like it better than LIPS. You can make it into more of a game. You’re right about SS being straight-forward - you’ll have no trouble. One thing I’ve learned, though, is to not insist on the child air-writing if they’re balking at it or consistently writing way too big. The older kids seem a little embarrassed at air-writing and so they do it in a silly way. I get much more success with most kids by having them “table write”. For some reason, it seems to not assault their dignity in the way that air-writing does for some kids.