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rose gardens
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| Posted: Oct 29 2009 at 5:37pm | IP Logged
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Becky Parker wrote:
| I'm bringing this back up because I wanted to relate a recent experience. I have always been a "phonics first" person. I've been working to teach my ds to read and it has been a laborious process. He is now in 3rd grade and is still struggling. The other day I printed off some sight words and told him we were going to start learning them, a few at a time. I explained that many of them were hard to sound out, but they are words he will read a lot as he reads more books. I thought we would start slowly... I handed him the list and he rattled off 20 of the words without even thinking about it. I was amazed! Further investigation helped me to see that he has many words memorized and can just read them, but the ones that have to be sounded out are the ones that slow him down terribly. Now I'm thinking that maybe I've been trying to fit my square peg son into a round hole! |
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That's interresting, Becky. I looked into another Lindamood-Bell program called "Seeing Stars". You (and others) might want to check out Bell's approach and some of their materials for your son.
That program works to develop symbol imagery phonemic awareness, sight words and spelling. I bought the training manual because I wanted to learn more about it. The manual included some info on how to incorporate some symbol imagery into their LiPS program, (which we are doing.) And it got me thinking more about sight words again.
I don't want my child to exclusively memorize words, (as many people with dyslexia do) but sounding out each and every word takes a great deal of time and interferes with reading comprehension. Plus some phonetically irregular sight words can't be sounded out--and even the phonetically regular ones could have more than one phonetic spelling. (The manual explained something I observe with my other non-struggling readers--words spelled wrong while being spelled phonetically correct. I printed a list from the internet of the 500 most common English words and started this morning reviewing it with them.)
Yet...when my son had serious confusion doing sight words on flash cards a year and a half ago, I first realized his reading problems weren't typical.
Many of the common sight words like "is" and "the" aren't easily pictured and according to Ron Davis, (author of The Gift of Dyslexia)that can cause problems for some "visual thinkers" who may be more prone to dyslexia.
I recently bought the Seeing Stars vocabulary workbooks for my son with the 500 most common English words. (They seemed fit in with Davis' theory of understanding what the words mean.) At some point, I want to re-introduce the most common words to learn by sight to help his reading fluency. But, I also want to use the Barton program with a strong phonics approach. I hope I can do both with my son.
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Keepmehome
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| Posted: Oct 30 2009 at 1:35pm | IP Logged
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I just wanted to point out that the Barton program doesn't start sight words until level 3. At this point, she introduces 14 ? sight words every 4th lessson. She has the students read the sight word page until he makes 3 mistakes. Once the 3rd mistake is made, you make reading flashcards with the three words the child did not recognize. In the corner, the child draws a picture to help him memorize that word. Next, she has you test the list with spelling. Once there are 3 mistakes, then make flashcards again. These words you write all the letters that are easily read with phonics in blue, and one letter that doesn't make the "correct" sound in red. There is some visualization work with each of the three words. Once the student spells it correctly after three lessons, then you retire that card and add another problem card. For example, "the" t and h would be blue and the e would be red. "Was" was a difficult word for my son to learn, but when he misspelled it, I would ask "Which letter is red?" He almost always was able to correct the 'u' to an 'a'. I found these lessons really helpful and once he started getting the sight words reading wasn't such a big headache for him.
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mathmama
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| Posted: Oct 31 2009 at 8:48am | IP Logged
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Becky Parker wrote:
| I'm bringing this back up because I wanted to relate a recent experience. I have always been a "phonics first" person. I've been working to teach my ds to read and it has been a laborious process. He is now in 3rd grade and is still struggling. The other day I printed off some sight words and told him we were going to start learning them, a few at a time. I explained that many of them were hard to sound out, but they are words he will read a lot as he reads more books. I thought we would start slowly... I handed him the list and he rattled off 20 of the words without even thinking about it. I was amazed! Further investigation helped me to see that he has many words memorized and can just read them, but the ones that have to be sounded out are the ones that slow him down terribly. Now I'm thinking that maybe I've been trying to fit my square peg son into a round hole! |
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Becky, this is so similar to my experience with my dd. I really felt like I was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. She is now learning words like crazy. When we read together I am so amazed by all the words she knows...and here I thought she couldn't read at all. She loves to write and now spells so many words on her own. I am so glad that I liberated us from phonics. And as I said before, I definitely believe that phonics has a place in our schooling, just not at this time.
Beth
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Land O' Cotton
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| Posted: Oct 31 2009 at 10:07am | IP Logged
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I taught my child to read with word families I had written on index cards. He picked it up quickly, and has amazed me with his ability to read just from those simple exercises. We also went over sight words which we call "those crazy words that don't play by the rules".
I guess we're actually going through things backwards, as I am trying to cover spelling with him through the phonics rules. I am using an old copy of The Writing Road to Reading that I found for a quarter, and this website which sounds out all the phonograms for you.
http://homepage.mac.com/ashleya/villa/spaldingmp3.html
This is helping us so much to make sure we've covered all the bases, and it great for review otherwise. I know we just never really covered all the phonograms as we should have, as my little guy just took off with reading and could read (but not comprehend) words on a much higher grade level at 6 years old.
I think some kids just take off on their own, and some kids just need that extra work to get going. All children are different and are going to respond to different teaching methods. I think it's great that we have access to so many kinds of things to teach with these days.
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ALmom
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| Posted: Oct 31 2009 at 1:14pm | IP Logged
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I just wanted to make one minor comment from our experience - and that is that with reading: readiness is a huge thing and it is not at all about the mental abilities as much as it is about the eye skills. You can work with all kinds of programs and if the child is not ready, none will work. Once they are ready and with a bit of sensitivity from the parents, my experience has been that any of the programs will work. We have done almost all phonics based programs - but we also read a lot of books with repetitive words in them, built words in families with a homemade moveable alphabet and even made silly words just combining sounds with folks asking if it was a real word - so how many of mine used the phonics to learn to read or the familiar words to understand the phonics, I don't really know. We kind of taught both together. Most didn't read until later - but they were also all far sighted well beyond the usual school age child (ie at 8 they were still far-sighted and for 2, they continued to get more so and thus needed reading glasses (by optometrists prescription).
The one thing I have noticed repeatedly is the issue of print size. The original mom who posted had a 5 year old. Now, all children start out far sighted, generally, and gradually the ability to converge eyes and do close work comfortably develops - and this happens at different rates for different folks. Most eye doctors never test except to see how well a child sees at a distance (or if they do it is a very quick and cursory check). I have 3 children who were far sighted for some time and 2 who require reading glasses and remain far sighted. Placing a lot of reading strain on a far sighted child is going to cause frustration and often they will know and understand far more than they can demonstrate using material designed for near-sighted or normal sighted folks.
Look at any reading program and notice in the readers how small the print is, how close the words are together, Reading one or two words at a time is a whole different physical eye skill than following horizontally and vertically with line after line of print. I have seen children who could read every word in a book, but not the book - just because of the eye strain. You can blow it up, write it large with better spacing between lines and suddenly it became easy. Also an awful lot of printed material is now using recycled paper, and while this may be great environmentally, it is a huge strain on my children's eyes because the contrast between the paper and the ink is not very good. Computers also tend to create eye strain.
When dealing with a younger child who seems ready and anxious to learn, be aware of the limits of the eye skills and allow for the natural development of these without unduly straining them at young ages. Self made cards are easier to use because you can write as large as needed. Doing sentences on a chalkboard - same thing, you can write large and space well. Reading a book like a picture book is much easier than a basal reader just because they crowd less print on the page, generally. Older books are easier on the eyes than more recently printed ones because the print size is generally larger. We have even noticed this in printed music.
Until the child has the ability to comfortably converge the eyes, focus at near distances, track horizontally and vertically and have sense of left/right and direction; reading is an almost impossible task or at least a frustrating and unpleasant one.
My current, very bright 7 year old has taught himself all kinds of things and we have used a lot of simple things to encourage his learning. He is not ready to sit down with a book and try to read it. (He will learn any number of things orally and memorized America For Me with all that advanced vocabulary with ease and just as quickly as both the 9 and the 12 year old. He will do all kinds of oral addition and subtraction and is just now beginning to try and write numbers. (He writes pretty large which is a hint both of far-sightedness and fine motor readiness). He learns German with my highschooler (the vocabulary from listening in) and some Latin. He just isn't ready to be working with a lot of close up stuff. When he is ready, he will fly because he has so much that he is learning. He has just started to express interest in letter sounds and in recognizing words (I have a lot of cards with words or objects that begin with certain letters).
Janet
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Stephanie_Q
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Janet - thanks for pointing that out! Another hsing mom had told me about that, as well and I knew, through Kindergarten, from our required visit to the eye doctor, that my struggling reader was still far-sighted. I should get her checked again.
But, that makes me wonder if kids whose eyes aren't ready to read are better at the "whole word" learning because they can remember the shape of certain words. I am extremely near-sighted and can usually guess what things are when I have my glasses off - but not always. My husband won't let me forget the time he was driving through western Nebraska and asked me, "What are those?" They were all over the field and looked bigger than cows so I guessed "Buffaloes?" No - they were big round haybales!) 
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mathmama
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| Posted: Feb 12 2010 at 1:28pm | IP Logged
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I just wanted to update on our progress. As I stated above we ditched the phonics and went on to flashcards using the Dolch sight words. We worked on the pre-primer and the primer ones. DD learned all the pre-primer ones fairly quickly and learned most of the primer ones. She also spent some time reading to us as best as she could. We took about 2.5 months off of school because of the birth of our third child and to deal with some serious health issues with our second. When we came back and started up with the flashcards again I noticed DD trying to sound out the words she didn't know. She also was trying to sound out and read words all the time (or figuring stuff out using context cues). At this point I pulled the LSFLF back out and she has sped through it. We started up with the pre-reading blends again and she really got them quickly. Then we went on to the next step (can't remember what it is called) where they sound out 3 letter words. This week we started the little books. She has done a book a day. The child who hated phonics now declares it to be her favorite subject. She is so proud of her ability to read the books (and so am I!). So, even though she is a very bright child who seemed ready I guess for one reason or another she wasn't entirely ready. Taking the detour with the flashcards was really helpful. We just needed some time away from phonics for whatever reason. Thanks for all your support!
Beth
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Therese 11/04
Anna Mary 6/07
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mathmama
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Just pulling this old thread back up one more time because I am one proud mama today  Today my Therese completed the LSFLF phonics program, 2 days before her 6th birthday (it would have been neat had it coincided with her birthday). She proudly received her certificate from the principal this morning and we had a photo-op. It is nice to see all of her hard work pay off. She LOVES to read now and can often be seen curled up on the couch reading. We are so excited to get started with Devotional Stories for Little Folks. Thanks again to all of your support while we were struggling 
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Therese 11/04
Anna Mary 6/07
Veronica 10/09
Theodora 11/12
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JennGM
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mathmama wrote:
| Just pulling this old thread back up one more time because I am one proud mama today Today my Therese completed the LSFLF phonics program, 2 days before her 6th birthday (it would have been neat had it coincided with her birthday). She proudly received her certificate from the principal this morning and we had a photo-op. It is nice to see all of her hard work pay off. She LOVES to read now and can often be seen curled up on the couch reading. We are so excited to get started with Devotional Stories for Little Folks. Thanks again to all of your support while we were struggling |
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  Love to hear the great progress!
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mariB
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| Posted: Nov 04 2010 at 7:00am | IP Logged
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I always thought phonics and phonics only. But my seven year old was just not catching very quickly. So, I pulled out some first grade readers from Seton and taught her some sight words. Within a couple week's time her reading has improved greatly. She has learned to not only sound out words but look at the word as a whole.
We use Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons, Plaid Phonics Book A (Just because she likes workbooks), Faith and Freedom Readers from Seton Press. I make flash cards with the sight words on them and also with the phonograms.
I thought I'd just mention this for anyone who is having the same problem. My other four children never struggled with reading!
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marib-Mother to 22ds,21ds,18ds,15dd,11dd and wife to an amazing man for 23 years
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4Real Forums : Language Arts Come Alive
Topic: does phonics work for everyone?--Update
