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2E - Best Programs for Young Dyslexics


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If you have a younger dyslexic - 5, 6, 7 years old, what have you used with success for reading & spelling?

 

My younger son is struggling. His brother is a stealth dyslexic and just did not struggle to read in the same way. We have not had much success with a lot of programs like Barton, Read, Write, Type, and today Lexia Core 5 because the programs assume a certain age or level of experience and use for remediation rather than initial exposure. I'm thinking that this is an issue because so many dyslexics get diagnosed later, but for those of us who catch it early, it is frustrating. The other problem is that some programs keep hitting the dyslexia - asking the child to pick out "does" from a list like this:

 

deos

dose

does

 

Ds gets it wrong every time because of his dyslexia, then the computer adapts and sends him to remedial lessons, where he looked at me today and said "I'm not stupid - I know what they want me to do; I just can't do it because of my dyslexia! This is the worst game ever!"

 

Any ideas what to use with a younger dyslexic who is not behind exactly, and doesn't need remediation, but does need instruction targeted for dyslexia?

 

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Ds is doing really well with AAS, but it just doesn't go fast enough for reading. Does is a spelling word at the end of level 5, for example, but he needs to know it for readers now. We dropped AAR 1 because the fluency sheets were overwhelming for a dyslexic - just too many words on one page at a time and the pace was quick, but maybe I need to revisit the idea now that he is a little older and has progressed more.

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Mild dyslexia here with younger ds along with functional vision issues....

 

AAS

 

For reading, we used K12 phonics K and 1. I know that sounds crazy, but the mix of phenomic awareness activities and spelling nonsense words with the letters really helped. I will say that I brought other resources in, but that was our framework. I am glad I paired with AAS to reinforce the rules introduced in K12.

 

If you want to get it inexpensively, get the teacher manual. Next priority would be the readers. The student pages aren't aimed at the struggling student and the tests are easily replicated from the teacher manual on a wipeboard.

 

I brought O-G/Spaulding knowledge to the table in whatever we were doing, and utilized the AAS tiles. I would say we used tiles for 75% of our lessons and did a few minutes of sightwords work daily---a bazillion games (pinterest) and flashcards.

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Whoops, forgot to mention that we tried Dancing Bears. He HATED it with a passion - tears, the works. Those little check boxes made it impossible for Mr. Perfectionist to do the page even if I refused to check them. It did help him progress though so I wish it would have been more of a long term solution. I'm looking at We All Can Read too - anybody use that one?

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My daughter took off when someone gave us some dilapidated copies of the American Language Series (Fun in the Sun, Scamp and Tramp, etc).  I'm not entirely sure if it was the books or if things just sort of clicked around then.  We couldn't handle word lists (Dancing Bears, AAR, etc), but what I did was typed them into Word, increased the font size and increased the blank space, and gave it in various formats (shorter lists, fished for words, etc).  Not a very sexy alternative, but it was the best I could figure to do to adapt good programs.

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Ds is doing really well with AAS, but it just doesn't go fast enough for reading. Does is a spelling word at the end of level 5, for example, but he needs to know it for readers now. We dropped AAR 1 because the fluency sheets were overwhelming for a dyslexic - just too many words on one page at a time and the pace was quick, but maybe I need to revisit the idea now that he is a little older and has progressed more.

Does he know any diacritic markings? I take a pencil and mark the word (or above the word) for the pronunciation.  Wilson used the markings.  Actually, Wilson taught the student to recognize a CVC word (and other types).  Have you thought about just shortening the lists and maybe playing games?

 

Prior to 2nd grade, DS used Lexia software at home, and I am not a fan of it.

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His reading level is pretty good - maybe 2.5/2.6? He is reading Sonlight Readers 2 - Owl at Home, Firecat, etc. He has read all the Little Bear books (which he loved), all the Frog and Toads, and is about ready to start on Amelia Bedelia. He is so verbal and whole to parts that he actually does better just reading than with the phonics programs we've tried. He still struggles to retrieve the correct vowel sounds frequently though. Echo reading is a great technique for him.

 

Lexia placed him in the last unit of 1st grade but that was mostly due to his inability to pick out sight words and to arrange sentences in a paragraph in the right order.

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Maybe the reading comprehension tests with the McCall Crabbs/McCall Harby works would place him higher?  Might be interesting to see...  Given what he's reading (for pleasure?) I would say they would.  And given that the things he struggled with on that lexia test are EF issues, I'd say screw it.  Sure work on EF and get him eval'd but that's not the same as actual reading comprehension.

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We have paired AAS with CLE language arts (which is heavy on phonics in the younger grades)

The combination of the two is the only thing that worked for my daughter.  However, I will say that she has to work behind grade level ( she is 9 and just finished the 100 level of CLE)  We had tried it when she was younger, and she just was not ready for it.  Now she is using it with great success.  This past year she went from only reading BOB books, to being able to read The Magic Tree House books. 

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Copy or cut the Dancing Bears book up and cut off the check boxes.   Cut up the pages so it's not so much at once.  If straight from the book you'd have to be careful of what's on the other side of course -- if you wanted to keep the other side since you could focus on the types of pages you felt helped him most (drop the timed tests for example). 

 

Do the same with any other programs you already have that you feel worked in some way (other than Lexia or other computer based where you might not have the choice) - pick out what works and skip what doesn't.  Something like picking out the word -is it even helping him? Apparently not - so drop those exercises.    Come at that a different way.    To me, some of the parts of reading are like math facts - you keep working on them but you go on at the same time.    For something like differentiating "deos, dose, does" - maybe do a few Barton level 1 type exercises or LIPS is good for that too (or maybe it's a visual processing thing?)-- but whatever you pick, once he understands how the exercise works -- then just keep nibbling away at it a couple minutes a day while you keep moving forward with the parts he is getting.

 

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Wilson sells the FUNdations program that is supposed to be for younger kids. He might be beyond it, however, if he's already in easy chapter books like Frog & Toad.

 

I'm trying to get my little one into the closest Scottish Rite clinic because they offer Fast ForWord at no cost to the family. It's too early to tell if she might be dyslexic but she seems to struggle with auditory processing and discriminating between sounds. /k/ vs. /t/ and /b/ vs. /d/ vs. /p/ in particular she frequently mixes up. Lindamood-Bell LiPS is something I have my eye on for her, but if she can do Fast ForWord then I may not need to do that.

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How old is he?  

 

By the time my ds was able to read at 2.5 level, the best thing we did was to have him just read series books with me, working aloud to increase his automaticity and fluency.

 

He read some things that were easier than Magic Tree House (such as the Buddy Files) in between that and his reading program, but MTH when he got there was particularly good at taking him all the way from a grade 2 level to a grade 4 level. So, basically, we were continuing to work the www.highnoonbooks.com system of repeated practice for fluency and automaticity, but with regular books once he no longer needed the carefully sequenced progression though patterns of word types.

 

I'd suggest also looking at the Highnoon website placement page, and see that your son can read all the levels that would be their sound out chapter books (which would be around equivalent to being ready for grade 2 books like Buddy Files and MTH). If he can't you might consider those for practice and getting totally fluent at CVC, CVCe, r-controlled vowel, etc. levels. Some are meant to be okay for older kids who are remediating, but some have younger child or dog main characters--they were recommended as particularly 2E suitable, and are particularly also strong on being really really carefully controlled as to their increasing difficulty. 

 

Now at age 12, he can do things like pick out does from your list, but it took a few years of reading practice to get there--any program that featured doing that sort of thing, or nonsense words was not a good fit for him.

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PS I would not recommend the Highnoon Intervention program if you son is younger than 7 however, only the read aloud chapter books if he still is not fluent and automatic at the levels they cover.

 

Can you explain more of what you mean by:

"because the programs assume a certain age or level of experience and use for remediation rather than initial exposure" --

 

Comprehension at too high a level? Or characters in stories too mature? Or typescript too small?  Or?

 

 

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If he is still at the level of needing books for practice to become fluent on basic patterns, but if the HighNoon chapter books are too mature, or whatever, Modern Curriculum Press has a some that are with pictures and big type that would perhaps be better for a younger child, however, they do not give the volume of practice that the HighNoon ones do.

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I'm not sure about the 2e but I can address what I did for a young child with early signs of dyslexia. We started with LiPS. We did that for pre-school and kinder. Then we moved onto Barton around mid kinder or first grade, but I modified Barton slightly. We did all the real words and only did nonsense words if she needed the extra practice. (She was just learning to read so I wasn't worried about her reading from memory.) I also used Seeing Stars workbooks to address common words that may or not be spelled phonetically, and we talked about their spelling.

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