v/v

Regina,

I answered this somewhere else, but V/V and PG are two entirely different programs. PG teaches decoding (basic reading skills) and V/V teaches strategies for comprehension.

Janis

It provides structure words that help a person create comprehension. The 12 structure words that LMB uses are: what, size, color, number, shape, where, movement, mood, background, perspective, when and sound. These words go in a progression from easier concepts to more difficult concepts. The first 6 structure words are more concrete and the other 6 words are more abstract in nature.

VV is a comprehension program that would help students with memory comprehension. However, VV is not a decoding program. PG is for decoding.

I pg better with phonological awareness problems are is lips?

LiPS has more multisensory activities and Socratic discovery of language patterns and attention to things like how the mouth makes the sounds than PG. The authors of PG firmly believe that what they do is enough, and will take care of the problem, and that all that other stuff is clutter. So, there’s no yes or no answer. The bottom line is that whatever one works best for your kid is the one that works best.

My son has been taught using PG, including a PG intensive and a teacher trained in it. His reading still isn’t at grade level though. This summer I have hired a LIPS tutor and she did a whole bunch of pretesting. He scored perfect in blending and segmenting. His sight vocabulary is grade appropriate—grade 4 but his decoding is terrible. I know he has been taught over and over again the things he missed. He looks like a kid who has never been explicitly taught decoding—I am sure the slt couldn’t help but think that but it is not true. I am hoping that the more multisensory approach of LIPS will help his retention. This is clearly a big problem for him.

On the other hand, I have started teaching my 5 year old using PG. It is working very well.

Beth

It depends on the severity of the child’s disability in phonemic awareness and decoding. I have used both programs and the kids that are more severe usually need a more intensive program like LIPS. But I wouldn’t know what the child needs unless I did an assessment and did some trial therapy. I can usually get a gut feeling about which approach to use with kids after working with them and seeing their strategies that they use to decode.

I have used LIPS with High School Students and they finally understood things that had baffled them for years.