Sight Words

More questions than answers. Why is she in special ed? What are her disabilities? What help is she getting to overcome them? Does she have extra difficulties with hearing or language or second language or vision or health? What is her IQ and general learning ability? Why was she a total non-reader before this year — was it real difficulty reaching her, or was she more or less allowed to drop through the cracks? Depending on the answers, there are several different scenarios, anything from a slow learner who is doing as much as could be expected, to a gifted dyslexic who can master amlost anything once given a start.

On the sight words, I am a bit on the extreme, but then again my approach has taught an awful lot of kids to read after the sight word teachers had given them up as unteachable.
I don’t use sight words per se, period. I find that it is inefficient and confusing to teach reading twice over with two different sets of rules: these words you sound out by phonics but these words you memorize by sight and these words you memorize this year but next year we let you into the secret of vowel combinations and you are supposed to figure out the phonics from them. HUH? And really, put yourself in the student’s shoes — you are reading along and you come to an unfamiliar word. Are you supposed to sound it out or are you supposed to search your visual memory banks for it? How can you know which set of conflicting rules to use?
I teach kids to scan ALL words from left to right, period. I introduce digraphs and vowel combinations and variant vowel sounds informally from the early stages as they are met in high-frequency words, I teach phonics formally as well, and I show students how to sound out words and test variant vowel sounds. This consistent approach works very well, in generally I see much better than memorizing word lists.

Except for the formal phonics series, we never read word lists, and very rarely flash cards; I use very structured controlled vocabulary readers that introduce high frequency words and repeat them over and over and over again but each time in different context so it is the word form that is learned, not other details.

Over time — and the amount of time will depend on the student and any disabilities she may have — the student develops the ability to scan at speed until it’s *faster* than searching the overloaded memory banks for sight words.
No kiddding — just had a little girl working in her second language, eight months ago was barely reading primer level, today reading fluently a story at the grade 2 level, three or four multisyllable words pronounced smoothly with no trouble although (being second language) I had to go back and tell her what they meant.

Well maybe I am not as extreme as Virginia. :-) However there are few
words that are not decodable (something like 15-20%). These are mostly high frequency words: want, the, many, etc. Some of them are actually decodable but the rules to apply them are more difficult (for example “the” is an open syllable). So I go by the idea that either you teach a very high frequency word as a sight word if it isn’t decodable or won’t be decodable for a long time to come and is very very useful.

That said, I think flashcards are pretty useless to a lot of ld kids. Some multisensory techniques would be useful depending on the age of the kid, such things as writing in the air, writing on the table, deciding on a clue for the word that the kid associates with the word, that kind of thing.
We really aren’t talking about that many words!

But Virginia is quite correct that this sight word approach is often used on kids who are determined to be failures at phonics approaches. If the child has the requisite auditory skills (which can be taught btw), there isn’t any reason s/he couldn’t use a systematic phonetic approach ala Orton Gillingham, etc. I also agree that over time, most words will/ should become “sight” words, but that will come with time and repeated reading.

—des

Again, my position is on the far end of the spectrum, but honestly, after seeing programs that were supposed to include “phonics” fail time after time because they are just too undirected and wishy-washy and self-contradictory, I have found that simple and direct works where everything else has failed. It also works fast and easily for a first-time method if you don’t aim at failure first.

Des, I am surprised that you think there is such a thing as so-called “non-phonetic” words! The very worst words in the language are “one” and “once” where a w sound intrudes out of nowhere, but even in those the consonants are still a guide.

The word “the” (NOT pronounced “thee” which sounds silly and unnatural) is perfectly regular! It starts with the regular digraph th as in this, that, these, those, they, them, mother, father, brother, … Then the e is the standard muttered vowel, the most common sound in spoken English, and since it is very very common for a final e to be silent (cake, here, kite, hope, mule) or muttered (candle, bottle) if you juet tell the child this is an e that stands for no special sound, almost silent, you’ve got “the”

The word “want” is a regular variant. The letter a stands for three sounds, so-called “long” in acorn and cake, so’called “short” in apple and cat, and the third “broad” as in arm, ball, talk, father, and water. The letter combination wa is very often this third sound as in water, wash, walk, waffle, watt, watch, and want. And all the consonants in “want” are perfectly predictable.

The word “many” has two regular consonants, a regular final y sounding ee, and a minor difficulty of an irregular vowel, the letter a pronounced more like “short” e. Which is harder to learn, that a vowel sound may sometimes not be exactly what you expect, or to memorize several hundred words with no guidelines?

I do *not* expect a kid starting out in pre-primer level to be able to sound these out independently, but I do ask the child to say the consonants in order as I point and I demonstrate/model sounding out the vowels. This way the idea is natural that yes, we use a left-to-right decoding system and our language is a logical code, not half the words coming from Mars. It works, honest.

I think I pretty much stated that “the” was a regular word (as a closed syllable)— when pronounced “tha” well is a little less regular—but then I don’t think I have run across a kid who couldn’t read it. I suppose the idea of the sound being one of the more common in English, I guess I’ll get there whenever I come up with someone who can’t read it. :-)

I don’t think there are very many semi-unphonetic words in English, I think the estimates are maybe 15%-20% of common familar words that have been used and morphed over the years. LONG words are pretty much completely phonetic and one could argue as to which words are regular and which aren’t. I think I have seen several words that are minorly irregular, and usually it is the vowel. Too bad the vowels can be the hardest part for dyslexic kids. I think some words are taught as sight words more out of convenience than anything, when the decoding rules are harder and the word is of very high frequency, making sentences to practice reading fairly difficult if they aren’t including. I’m sure one could get by, so I’m hardly knocking your position. I have heard statements like English is completely unphonetic, etc etc. Phooey! There are NO words that are completely unphonetic, as far as I know.

I am very much closer to your position, I see no reason for hours and hours to be spent on attempting to memorize a fairly small no. of words, but perhaps a little time, sans the flash cards. I see no reason to give up on a kid by teaching them ala sight word techniques ie Reading milestones, Edmark, etc. which I have seen recommended in some circles.

I was reacting more to the idea of NEVER teaching them, than to the idea of very limited teaching of them. I go for the idea of very limited teaching of sight words. It definitely is not a huge priority.

—des

Well, actually, I run into a LOT of students who can’t read “the”.
They look at it and say fairly randomly either “a” or “an” or sometimes “thee”.
Or sometimes “and” or “them” or “can” or “of” or “for” or some other word they have supposedly learned by sight, whatever floats to the top of the swamp of confusion.
This is one reason I put my foot down and tell them to look at it and sound it out period. When they are making wild guesses at the most common word in the language, their reading method is proven to be ineffective.

Oh yes, I certainly see this all the time as well. However, I am not sure they CAN’T read it, but I do agree it is a habit of guessing at text. If they are freely allowed to just read “a” for “the” pretty soon “is” becomes “on” and “house” is “horse”. And I also agree with stopping the habit. Even though as a good reader, I have been known to read “a” for “the” and vice versa.

BTW, in teaching the small no. of sight words, I don’t advocate looking at them as a whole ala the look/say school. Basically I believe in teaching them to sound any word out and lookign at certain words and figuring out which parts do not quite “play by the rules”, at least the rules they have learned. If , for example, the word is “want”, I wouldn’t advocate looking
at the word as a whole and guessing at it based on configuration clues, but rather sounding it out to the best of the person’s ability, you have all regular consonants. Now you just need to look at what the vowel is doing that is different. (Later they will learn that this sound of the vowel is a regular, if less typical one.) This is quite different than sitting down with a bunch of flash cards and memorizing long strings of words as complete units. Also many if not most high frequency words are VERY regular and normal and no reason that they should be taught at all differently (such as can, did, will, etc etc. that I have seen lumped together as “sight words”). There are so many darned words on these lists that are absolutely ridiculous to have someone memorize in any respect.

The difference in what I am talking about and memorizing based on configuration is quite a strong one. For example, “want” could never be confused with some other similar looking word with 4-5 letters starting with a “w” and ending with a tall letter. And it’s not confusable with “went” as the vowel sound in “went” is totally a regular one. Various multisensory hooks might be used to tie the word to that spelling— but you still need to analyze the actual word. Most irregular words are only irregular in one or two letters and often just one. Pretty nuts to have all those decent decoding clues to be disregarded for 1-2 letters!

I actually don’t think we do things so differently, Virginia. Probably more difference in your explanation of it than anything else.

—des

Yes, there are two quite different meanings attached to the phrase “sight words”. Interestingly when I was re-reading the NRP report a paragraph jumped out at me where they also make the same distinction, a distinction they call “methodology” versus “process”.

The process that we all aim for as an end result is that the student will simply look at the page and know what the words are, with the mechanical issues so automatized and so far in the background that reading is an issue only of comprehension. When you can look at a word and know it as fast as you can say it or respond to it then it is called a “sight word” in this sense.

The methodology meaning is a whole different story, where as you say, long lists of words are put on flash cards and drummed into memory purely by rote and with undirected scanning. Words that are chosen (by whatever rather arbitrary process) for this drill list are called “sight words” as well.

Because of the confusion of the two meanings, and because the second meaning tends to take over from the first and lead to re-implementation of counterproductive strategies, I put my foot down and won’t use the phrase at all.

Yes, I noticed the difference in the report. I see no purpose in the whole thing as described as a methodology— at least in the usual methodology and the way very many perfectly fine phonetically regular words are turned into memorizable units (did, can, when, will, etc etc) which can and will be turned to confusable guessable words. Actually the use as a process is the way Seeing Stars uses it. This is for kids who are great decoders but decode every single word they read continually. At some point you need to be able to read at a glance. But nowhere does LMB suggest you use SS before you learn to decode the words. And nowhere
does SS completely eliminate the phonetic elements. Some words are taught as “words that don’t play fair” but you still work on the parts that do “play fair” afaik.

Also the words on most of these lists are high frequency but they make no distinction between words that are highly regular and those that are not. I have yet to see a really good list that screens these words out or even makes an attempt to screen them.

I’m willing to change the terms completely— would be quite happy to— to get away from any idea that one should just sit the kid down in front of ANY words (the few irregular ones or not) and flash them at them.
So I see your point Virginia.

—des

Closed syllable?????? Go flog yourself with a flashcard :) It would be an Open syllable, ending in a vowel!!!! Before another vowel, we give it the fujll long E and it’s “regular” — assuming you ahve learned the two sounds for /th/.
But… you know… I never learned that there were two sounds for th, I just correctly applied them. Which goes to show you that yes, indeed, a certain amount of htis whole phonics thing *is* intuited by… oh, yea, the hyperlexic people who teach themselves to read when they’re two.
I have been known to use flaschcards a lot … hey, I make ‘em and sell ‘em — “drillable syllables.” We used ‘em as well as whole word flash cards in our extremely phonics-oriented Orton-Gillingham teaching to develop automaticity.
However, in my experience as well, my kiddos who didn’t generalize the stuff on their own had very limited success transferring flashcard reading to real reading. You gotta get ‘em into text, that stuff with meaning and all that.

We didn’t call ‘em sight words… we just said we were working on instant word recognition or the Sacred Automaticity. Which always made me want to re-write teh Kingston Trio’ s version of John Henry (Auuuttooo….mation!”) to fit the phenomenon….

OH MYYYYYY DES we have the same number of posts as of right now……no, I’ve passe dyou… hmmm…. shall we get lives???

Hi,

I haven’t posted for a long time, but was reading the sight word discussion and had to comment.

I too see kids misread all the “little words” continually, including “the.”

But the one that sticks in my mind when it comes to sight word drilling is the boy who read “when” as “then.” I stopped him by indicating “when” with my pencil and he studied it for several seconds before proclaiming in an irritated voice, “That IS ‘then.” After which, he muttered “when.”

That memory sticks with me, and is the reason I will never trust sight word instruction. It does far more harm than good, in my opinion. I don’t know what means he was using to differentiate “when” and “then” but it certainly wasn’t the phonics content.

Rod

Hi,

I haven’t posted for a long time, but was reading the sight word discussion and had to comment.

I too see kids misread all the “little words” continually, including “the.”

But the one that sticks in my mind when it comes to sight word drilling is the boy who read “when” as “then.” I stopped him by indicating “when” with my pencil and he studied it for several seconds before proclaiming in an irritated voice, “That IS ‘then.” After which, he muttered “when.”

That memory sticks with me, and is the reason I will never trust sight word instruction. It does far more harm than good, in my opinion. I don’t know what means he was using to differentiate “when” and “then” but it certainly wasn’t the phonics content.

Rod

>[quote=”Sue”]Closed syllable?????? Go flog yourself with a flashcard :)
It would be an Open syllable, ending in a vowel!!!! Before another

Woops! Too bad that isn’t my only mistake like this on the board.
Virginia makes me nervous, what can I say. :-)
Uh, oh! And here I am certified by Susan Barton. Better hide this post. :-)

>vowel, we give it the fujll long E and it’s “regular” — assuming you ahve learned the two sounds for /th/.

But yes, I agree it is “regular”. I think I stated that some words are really really useful and the actual rules ala OG might be taught at say level 8. If you wouldn’t have to do sentences and phrases, it wouldn’t be an issue. But if you want to do some of this you need enough words and the words to flow enough, certain words are pretty useful. I don’t think I have yet taught the two sounds of /th/, except for the kid I have done LiPS with.

> But… you know… I never learned that there were two sounds for th,

Well it seems that that particular problem may be more easily intuited than others. I didn’t teach it but no one so far has had trouble with then or them for example. If I got someone I would go ahead and teach it.

>a certain amount of htis whole phonics thing *is* intuited by… oh, yea, the hyperlexic people who teach themselves to read when they’re two.

Well that would be me. I did. I just don’t assume that everyone is able to do it. Hyperlexia is prolly overrated but I am sure good at puzzles. :-)

> I have been known to use flaschcards a lot … hey, I make ‘em and sell ‘em — “drillable syllables.” We used ‘em as well as whole word flash cards in our extremely phonics-oriented Orton-Gillingham teaching to develop automaticity.

Yes, but that is still after you get some degree of solid phonetic background. I am basically speaking of very beginning instruction. I think the post was dealing with someone who has very limited skills.

> We didn’t call ‘em sight words… we just said we were working on instant word recognition or the Sacred Automaticity. Which always made me want to re-write teh Kingston Trio’ s version of John Henry (Auuuttooo….mation!”) to fit the phenomenon….

You’re very bad…. :-)

>OH MYYYYYY DES we have the same number of posts as of right now……no, I’ve passe dyou… hmmm…. shall we get lives???

I doubt it will happen any time soon. Are lives complicated?

BTW, I have less of a life than you, as I have not been on the list as long.

—des

(des, you are talking to Victoria, not Virginia…just thought I’d mention it!)

Rod…so good to see you around here again!

And I agree…no sight word teaching for me, but rapid decoding or automatic word recognition? Yes, that should be everyone’s eventual goal.

Janis

Des — yes, well, it is Victoria, not Virginia. Don’t worry about it. I get called Virginia, Valerie, Veronica, … a couple of school librarians saw me every day for a year and still called me Valerie. Then my daughter is Grace and some people get the classic names mixed …

Scared of me? You should see me — chubby, blonde, unfocused, thick glasses, always looking a bit like a lost owl, dressed in old jeans and painty sweatshirt — definitely not an authority figure. :D

Rod — yes, the argument about whether the word says when or then, been there, done that — or a really common one I’m seeing here, for - from - of. I’ve been in that fight so often that I’ve become really stiff-necked about these issues.
I have a couple of students whom I have finally told “Look, if you say it wrong five times, you’re going to say it right six times before we move on.” They have spent so many years practicing mistakes and just rolling over details.
And I found a good example — a present FOR your girlfriend or a present FROM your girlfriend? If you read that one wrong either way you will be in really hot water.

Victoria, you’re blonde?! Funny how we image internet friends having no idea how they really look! I pictured you with dark hair for some reason!

Janis

Scottish border county ancestry and one look at any member of my family will tell you that the area was settled by the Vikings, although I’m the short one. Tough, smart, hard-working, hard-headed, don’t start too many fights but often finish them, and never dare us to anything. :D

>Des — yes, well, it is Victoria, not Virginia. Don’t worry about it. I get called Virginia, Valerie, Veronica, … a couple of school librarians saw

As long as it’s not late for dinner, I guess. :-)

>Scared of me? You should see me — chubby, blonde, unfocused, thick glasses, always looking a bit like a lost owl, dressed in old jeans and painty sweatshirt — definitely not an authority figure. :D

Not really. But if I were a student of yours, I would definitely watch my p’s and q’s as well as my “a’s” and “the’s”. :-)

>And I found a good example — a present FOR your girlfriend or a present FROM your girlfriend? If you read that one wrong either way you will be in really hot water.

Good example! I try to tell them why I worry about “the” and “a”, etc. Doesn’t always work but at least they know I am not some batty ole.___.
(Might think that anyway :-)).

But it is hard work. After guessing for years and years and years (in some cases), all of a sudden they start having to actually READ the words. Susan Barton talked about where she gets quite chummy with her students and is able to introduce some levity of loudy clearing her throat when one of these little words gets read incorrectly. :-)

—des

Loudly clearing the throat is nothing! I’ve been known to scream in pain, weep, make a loud buzzer noise, shake my fist over the kid’s head (at a good distance and all in fun!), beat my head on the table, tear at my hair … they may laugh but they do get the point.

I picked up a very effective technique from “At Last! A Reading Method for Every Child” by Mary Pecci. Rather than to teach words by *sight*, we play a game called “What’s the clue?”. You *tell* the students each word rather than have them struggle to decode them. Then you ask, “What’s the clue?” and they sound and underline all the sounds they hear in the word from left to right. They just ignore the letters they don’t hear. It’s like a fun puzzle. For example, with the word *have”, they would sound and underline h a v only. You may also be interested in the following link - http://www.OnlineReadingTeacher.com/linguistic_exercises.html - which contains a great collection of phonetic exercises for independent decoding.

Stephen — I appreciate your ideas, but quite seriously, this technique is about the worst thing you could use with most of the students I work with. These students have bad habits of guessing inaccurately, have become very skilled at faking and imitating rather than working independently, and have very little self-confidence as learners. Telling them the word first just reinforces all their learning problems and bad attitudes. They need to become independent, and they *need* to struggle a bit in order to learn that you can struggle with something hard and then succeed. There is an old English expression “Killing with kindness” and I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing.

I have to agree with Virginia here. If you teach the kid to decode then the text should be truly decodable at the level that you are working on. For example, if you are working on CVC (consonant vowel consonant) words then the words and sentences you use should also be CVC. True it’s not so exciting reading. Perhaps barely intelligible, but they will get to a point of reading more difficult words gradually and then they will really be reading, rather than guessing.

I will never TELL my student a word. If I help it would be more like “take a look at the vowel again”, “what sound does this letter make”, etc etc. The kid will ALWAYS sound it out. But the words will always be within the student’s known ability to sound them out.

I don’t allow guessing. Right now I have a kid who is so good at guessing it is more a disability at this point than dyslexia! He just starts putting in any old word. The schools are reinforcing this tendency by encouraging him to make the best guess etc. I wish I could take this kid out of school reading instruction time because it is really doing more harm than good.

—des

Sorry Victoria. :-)
Just guessing.

—des

I agree, too, just waited for someone else to explain it. :)

Janis

Well, I seem to be making a name for myself here as someone who will jump in feet first where angels fear to tread.
Thanks for the support.

Critics of sound/symbol instruction are quick to cite the word *the* as evidence that systematic phonics has significant limitations. I submit that the Alphabetic Principle (one symbol for each elementary speech sound, or phoneme, in the language) is alive and well.
Systematic phonics is not delimited by the Alphabetic Principle—it augments it.

I have used the discussion on this thread not so much as to lecture readers, but to put my observations in some semblance of order.

Systematic phonics promotes the essential habit of inspecting the letters (graphemes) in words in a left to right order and associating those letters with sounds. Beginners advance from single letters (t in top, and h in hop) to combinations of symbols (ch, re, bl, and ,yes, th). *Th* has can be linked to two major English sounds: the sound of escaping air as in *thin,* or the humming sound as in *then* and *than*. Many *th* words can be decoded readily by applying either sound.

Try the two sound links of *th* with *the*. The difference is so slight that most English speakers will be able to use phonics to decode *the*. The final *e* sound is likely to intrigue etymologists more than it will bother beginning readers. Most beginners soon recognize the word *the* as much from its frequency in print as anything else. They do this with Exit, Stop, and MacDonald’s. It remains important to alert beginners to the sound/symbol association in *the* to help to prevent miscalls with *a* (very common) and with other *th* words. I am in 100 percent agreement with Victoria that beginners should be required to pronounce words accurately. Guessing is not acceptable.

There are other sound (or silence) associations for *th*: isthmus, clothes, thyme, and possibly other words. It will be a long time before beginners will be faced with these rare sound links.

The term Sight Words might convey the idea that all high-frequency words must be memorized when the truth is that most are fully or substantially phonetic. I like Sue J’s term: Instant Words.

Arthur

Around here I would guess that most of the people would agree. I think you do often explain it better than I would, for example.

—des

I teach reading to middle school LD students and I have found my biggest problem to be getting students to stop guessing what the word is. Last year I began asking them to do one thing when they did not recognize a word and doing this one thing really helped them to figure out the word. I was amazed how such a simple question helped my students to begin to focus on the parts of the word. I would tell them to look at the first part of the word. I would say that at least 95% of the time the student could say the word. I think that my students were so used to someone telling them the word that they stopped and waited. I do not allow anyone to tell someone a word that they have trouble with. Sometimes I have to put a word on the board and we decode it together. I think we do kids a big disservice by telling them words they do not know. It takes me months to get them out of the guessing and/or waiting for help habits.
Nan

I don’t give words if they should have the decoding skills needed to figure that word out.

However, I’ve grown to appreciate the value of sequencing and mastery through the years. If a student isn’t yet competent in short vowels & silent e words, then spending a minute figuring out a multisyllable word is not going to have the practice and reinforcement necessary to actually remember how to do it, will detract and distract from comprehension, may well confuse the knowledge the student is currently trying to construct at a more basic level, and uses valuable time (that could be spent with quick review of five examples of a rule that’s almost mastered).

Another tactic I used is to give the word… but put it in the ol’ notebook of words to learn and spend time on it later (as well as with other similar words). This is especially good for the irregular words of life — “deadly” will be joined with breakfast and healthy and wealthy and instead.

The past 5 years in a High School Severe to profound class, we have used a 15 min. Reading & Comprehnsion program. Most students could not remember their names or where they lived. As long as the child or adult could mimic a word, we worked one on one.
First 6 Flash Cards were used, no more. When reading, 5 verbal prompts were used: repeating till each page was read correctly. A comprehension work book is also used.
The book has real life experiences, no mystery or animals that talk.
Half way through the program the students began sounding out words on their own. We gave them phonic worksheets. Unfamiliar with the ABCs, their accomplishments were aabsolutly amazing.
I just needed to share. Everyone that started this program is now reading.

Doxie, this is a board for learning disabled students. Not that your post is not welcome but the comments you make are not really too relevant for dyslexic and students with normal intelligence.

By severe/profound you are talking about kids with limited intelligence and perhaps language. All sight word programs can give some such students very limited reading skills (prolly 1st to 2nd grade level). (Sight words will never get you much past a 3-4th grade level, even with excellent visual memory and high intelligence.) Some kids will start figuring out some basic phonics- first letter corresponds to certain sound, even some with very low IQs, as you discovered, but this is hardly the phonetic skills needed to read words past a very basic vocabulary.
The thing is they won’t get them. For example, they can learn “cat” to “cow” to “cab”, but they’ll never figure out and go from the word “table” to “constable” to “incurable” or learn to read words with schwas (maybe “button” but not “atomic” or “Alaska”or “alabaster”). But there is every reason that learning disabled kids should and can either learn the rules or presented enough examples to get this.

Also 15 minutes would generally be an inadequate amt. of time to teach a dyslexic kid to read what amts to a whole language (as opposed to “whole language” :-)).

I’m not knocking what you are doing at all!!
I used sight word “reading” with autistic clients (in the low- medium functioning range). I think it did encourage their verbal skills so I would recommend it. Esp, when used as you say with real life and relevant activities and experiences. (Reading recipes, directions, etc.)

However, I feel it has limited application to learning disabled children with intact or near intact intelligence.

—des

>The past 5 years in a High School Severe to profound class, we have used a 15 min. Reading & Comprehnsion program. Most The book has real life experiences, no mystery or animals that talk.
Half way through the program the students began sounding out words on their own. We gave them phonic worksheets. Unfamiliar with the ABCs, their accomplishments were aabsolutly amazing.
I just needed to share. Everyone that started this program is now reading.[/quote]

des, I did not understand that this was a board for only normal intelligence. Our program has been used since 1990 with limited and normal intelligence.
We have one boy that reads at high school level and is great at sounding out words. His IQ is 55. His rating is so low because of severe brain damage, scattered intellegence and physical disabilities.
How ever with reading, he reads words I don’t even know and he knows what they mean. He loves Physical Science, American History and Lang Arts.
When I say “the book has real life experience” I mean: the story is about real people, real situations not a purple dog that talks.
I’m sad to say that this boy, I talk about, is not able to make a cake or follow directions. He is able to carry on an intilligent conversation.
All this accomplished beginning with 15 min. 4 days a week.

It’s not that there’s a restriction — it’s just that we hope you recognize that the general folks here are dealing with learning disabilities, since it’s a learning disabilities site, and that a program that is simply wonderful for a different group of students may not be effective for LD students.
And specifically, in this case, a painfully common problem with learning disabled students is that our students are *expected* to figure out that ‘sounding out” thing with programs similar to the one you describe… only IT DOESN”T HAPPEN. These kiddos with many other strenghts and skills are limited in what they can do — not by their disability directly, but because they were taught with materials and methods that did not address their need for explicit instruction in sounding out words, so they’re trying to read middle and high school and college materials — and not understanding why they’re failing those classes.
It’s extremely important to realize that the degree of difficulty a student has in language or reading skills may have nothing to do with what the appropriate instruction methods will be.

>des, I did not understand that this was a board for only normal intelligence. Our program has been used since 1990 with limited and normal intelligence.

Well the definition of learning disabilities is one that assumes normal intelligence, sensory and environmental experiences. You are welcome to post here of course, it is just that the students you work with are not learning disabled. The schools, etc have made these distinctions blurry by trying to be politically correct, calling them (and everything else “learning challlenges). You are certainly welcome to post here. It is just as Sue says, that these types of programs have limited to no applicability to dyslexic kids.

>We have one boy that reads at high school level and is great at sounding out words. His IQ is 55. His rating is so low because of severe brain damage, scattered intellegence and physical disabilities.

The abilities you describe appear to savant abilities in reading. Sounds like hyperlexia. That is they are an unusually high ability in an area. The ability is seldom entirely functional. For example, he reads, but what is his actual comprehension? He can’t follow written directions to me is a sign that he really can’t use his reading in a particular functional way, although the enjoyment itself is something. I had autistic adults who could read the newspaper. Of course they didn’t know who the president was, or even what the president did, but they could read about it. You might even have given them some comprehension test and as long as it was strictly factual they could do it.

These same techniques used to teach this boy would have limited application for dyslexic kids who do not generalize decoding rules well etc. This above student obviously learned to decode in an unusual way and not like a normal or ld student would. I think that Sue covered that whole question nicely.

—des

Thanks guys, for all the info. This will help me alot.
I will be starting a new job this fall. I’m hired to work with Elementry Regular Ed students, one on one, with an Academic Therapy.
It will not stop their regular classroom work or classroom expectations.