DIYing Lindamood Bell LiPS....Timeline?

[imagine.more]

So I gave my friends' daughter the Barton student screening and she was just barely unable to pass it (tried twice on separate days as well). Pretty typical dyslexic kid, bright, can memorize circles around anyone, but really struggles with basic reading still in 2nd grade. 

 

Friend and her husband do mission work/student ministry so budget is tight and so is time. So I've offered to learn LiPS and implement it with her daughter and then move on to Barton once she's gotten far enough through LiPS.

 

For those of you who've done LiPS yourself how long did it take to learn it? I've got a teaching degree + Orton Gillingham training so I'm sure I'm capable but I also know from DIYing Visualizing and Verbalizing that it's going to take some time to figure it out and start implementing it. But how long?

 

Also, how long does LiPS typically take to implement? I know O-G takes 2-3 years to go through so I'm comfortable with a wide range, I'd just like a range of some sort so i know what to expect. 

[PeterPan]

I integrated LIPS right into Barton 1.  Since you've already been through Barton a bunch, you could do that.  LIPS isn't that hard.  Your main challenge is understanding speech production and the vowel circle.  Once you get that part, the rest is easy peasy.  Give yourself a couple hours to scan the manual and get familiar.  

 

The reason I blended them was because it let me take the limited field of Barton and blend it with the skills steps of LIPS and the skill steps of Barton.  That worked really well for us, but you don't have to.  Either way, you should be fine.  I doubt you'll need it more than 2 months.  I forget how long we used it, but it was in terms of months, not years.  They dc you're tutoring is older (and doesn't have extensive speech problems, etc.) so they may go faster.

 

Adding: I always forget my disclaimer.  I took a bunch of linguistics classes in college, so LIPS and speech therapy stuff is pretty straightforward to me.  If it takes you longer to go through the manual, you're not crazy, just going through the learning curve.  :)

[aaplank]

I taught myself LIPS in a few weeks using the manual and the DVD's. I don't think the DVD's are necessary, but the vowel circle one is especially helpful. I taught myself mainly for the reason you want to - in order to prepare a student for Barton. It only took two months to get through the material (only the first half) before moving into Level 1 of Barton. I agree with OhElizabeth about using LIPS with Barton. I think it is essential for those who need LIPS.

I am trained in O-G and have tutored for years. I only wish that I was introduced to LIPS sooner. It was the missing link for so many of students.

[Matryoshka]

Sorry, a bit of a tangent - for those of you who have DIY'd the Lindamood Bell programs, where did you get the materials, and how much do they cost?  On the LB website I can only find 2-day workshops that include the materials, but they run $700-$900. :(    On the other hand, I'm thinking of doing this mainly to put myself out there as a tutor, so maybe it would be worth to get 'certified'? 

 

 

[imagine.more]

Matryoshka, you can find the materials at Ganderpublishing.com. Check out the LiPS Kit and at the bottom is a link to get the materials separately. I've heard that all you really need is the manual and a few items from around the house.

 

Thanks so much for the personal experience guys! I was thinking 1-2 months to go through Lips so I'm glad to see my estimate was on point. I'm curious, how did you go about integrating LiPS and Barton? Like how would a lesson look and how long did you take to go through each Barton lesson since you were incorporating additional LiPS stuff?

[aaplank]

I also recommend getting the magnetic mouth pictures. They are very helpful and much more visually distinct than what is in the manual.

 

Once you learn LIPS I think it will make more sense to you how to incorporate it into the Barton lesson, but basically when you teach the lesson you always bring it back to what they learned in LIPS. When you introduce new letters and sounds in Barton always bring it back to the physical mechanisms of how to produce that sound which was learned in LIPS.

 

Clear as mud?

[PeterPan]

I listed out our steps so maybe Google search? I'm being brief here.

 

LIPS has horizontal and vertical paths. Horizontal is limited field. Use the Barton order. Do the LIPS steps for those letters then the Barton steps. When those are nailed go to the letters for the next Barton lesson. Use multi sensory.

[Kanin]

I'm so happy you're doing LiPS! I'm talking about LiPS with everyone I see. I just started doing it with a kid at my school, age 11, pretty much a non-reader despite years of interventions. He is starting to read! It's like words finally make sense to him now. He's drinking in LiPS like a sponge and somehow he learned the names of the sounds, noisy vs. quiet, seemingly instantly. It really makes sense to him. I hope the same is true for your new student! I think it's a shame that more people don't teach LiPS along with other reading interventions, because you can do OG or something else till the cows come home, but for many kids it's not going to make a difference unless you have LiPS. I don't know why everyone doesn't do it, actually!

 

Like OhElizabeth, I've been combining LiPS, but with OG (Recipe for Reading) rather than Barton. Since you're teaching privately, you have all the flexibility in the world to combine so that it fits your student. What I've done so far is:

 

1. Teach most of the consonant pairs. This went very quickly. I did 2-3 pairs each day and the consonants were done in about a week.

 

2. Teach the vowels at the same time - but only introducing 2-3 vowels each week. LiPS suggests you start with the most contrasting vowels first, so for example you can do /oo/ and /ee/ and /a/ at one time because they feel so different. We've been working since mid-September and we've got all the consonant pairs, all the single vowels and /ee, ea/ and /oo/

 

2a. We're taking a lot of time now with /i/ and /e/ because it's very hard to feel the difference between them. I think a lot of older kids have this trouble so it's worth spending a lot of time on it!

 

3. We use small mouth pictures (I think they're just like 1 inch x w inch or so) and in the beginning, he would build words with them. So I'd say "oop" and he would put a picture of a round and a lip popper. Then I'd change one sound and he'd change one picture, and so on. The manual has good instructions. You're supposed to go more abstract and use blocks in place of the pictures, and then letters instead of the blocks. You can go as quickly or as slowly through these as you want. My student kind of had some "aha!" moments so we did not spend much time doing blocks and moved quickly to letters.

 

4. He's 11 so he knows all the letters and sounds, and some basic reading rules so we're moving pretty fast. We don't really build words with the pictures anymore, but I DO refer to the names ALL THE TIME when he is reading ("What do you feel in the middle of that word? You feel a smile? Let's check and see if there is a smile in the middle. Oh, it's an open!" etc).

 

As you can tell, I love LiPS. If you have any questions feel free to ask!

 

Also, one thing you might do when you get to reading words is print them or write them in BIG font. My kid does well with 30 point font but not well with 18 point font. He does have some eye issues, too, but it's worth a try doing bigger fonts.

 

Have fun!

 

 

[Kanin]

An aside - another reason LiPS is great is because it's FUN! The mouth pictures are intriguing and kids enjoy figuring out which sounds match the pictures. It also doesn't feel like "reading" so there's less stress about "oh here we go, another reading thing I can't do." It's great! I hope you report back when you get started.

[rcgenesis1]

Matryoshka,

 

I have seen Lindamood Bell materials on Amazon.com and on Ebay at some great prices!  Just an fyi

[imagine.more]

Okay, I've got the LiPS manual, have browsed the whole thing and read the first couple portions in depth and I'm back :)

 

So I'm starting to understand the process, especially getting into the actual *doing* of it. It's been fascinating stuff and I'm enjoying incorporating tiny elements of it with all my tutoring students actually! Their syllable explanation is slowly helping DD13 'get' the accented syllable concept, which has been a struggle for her in Barton 4. 

 

Anyway, but here are my questions.

 

First, Oh Elizabeth, I did a google search but was unable to find your description of how you broke up the steps? Any chance you could help me out and link me to it pretty please? :)  I've got a decent flow going right now but I'd love to see how someone else did it, especially with a young child.

 

Second, my student is age 7 and severely ADHD. Very severely. She's bright and can memorize circles around anyone  (she does Classical Conversations and loves it) but the severe ADHD is really making our tutoring sessions very different from any of my other students, and all of them have dyslexia and ADHD at the least, haha! 

 

I'm pulling out all my bag of tricks from O-G training but does anyone have other tips for LiPS sessions with severe ADHD?

 

Also, generally I like doing 1 hour sessions with 45 minutes of work broken up by 10-15 minutes of a 'brain break' where we color or play games or chat or whatever. This works for my other students but for her I'm wondering if it's too much. On the other hand she needs extensive remediation of course and I want her to make good steady progress. With her not being my child I can't just break it up into lots of super-short sessions, kwim? But maybe I should aim for 45 minute tutoring sessions with a 15 minute break in the middle? So 15 on, 15 off, 15 on? 

 

Oh, and I realized early on that she has a bit of a speech impairment, just with articulation. She uses her tongue between her lips when she says /f/ and /v/ and a few other small errors. I mentioned it to her mom and she mentioned it to her OT who is I think going to refer her for a speech evaluation. I assume if I keep gently correcting and helping her to form her mouth properly for sounds during our LiPS sessions it will help that, right? But I'm afraid that'll slow us down more, I remember doing speech-oriented stuff during Barton 3 with DD13 and oh.my.gosh. it was sooooo slow! Like we both wanted to cry some days! I can laugh now, but I remember how hard it was on both of us, her getting frustrated and me trying to stay cheerful and confident to her when secretly I was losing patience....all over ST blends and SH and J and PT blends and such. I really thought blends would be the death of me ;) Anyway, I'd hate for LiPS to be *that* much of a struggle for this girl, poor thing is only 7 of course! 

 

Edited November 25, 2015 by imagine.more

[PeterPan]

Ok, this is just cover your butt kind of stuff here, but it's my two cents.  Me, I'd want an SLP eval before I proceeded, because I'd want to know if there's more going on that I wouldn't catch.  Articulation, could be praxis, could just need some ST, could be connected to an audiology thing like hearing loss or CAPD.  You know that.  I'm just saying I'd be less caught up in "oh the poor child needs help!" and more about requiring them to do the evals that allow her to get COMPLETE help.  

 

Hmm, severe ADHD.  My dd has pretty exciting ADHD for a girl, and when she was that age she was like 20 minutes on, go run laps, 20 more minutes, go run laps.  Have the parents thought about meds?  Just sayin'.  Like just because that's not what *we* choose doesn't mean it's not a good tool for someone else, kwim?  How long can she work now?  I'd just be straight with them.  Like if she can work 15 minutes with a timer, break 5, rinse and repeat, then you get in 45 minutes of work and 10 minutes total of breaks.  During those breaks I'd do a mixture of sensory/cross-body stuff and some working memory.  That way you're really using the time to their benefit, but it's going to help her get back into focus.  Not balavisX, but some crossbody stuff like the School Moves/Focus Moves.  Clapping to a metronome, cross body to metronome.  Just about anything in that vein, done for a few minutes, would help pull her back in.  Use some timers so she can see the plan.  You could set up a visual schedule.  The transitions might be hard for her even though she needs the break.  So the visuals would help her see the transitions and come back in.  If you use the Time Timer app, you'll have that visual to help you.  

 

You're way more of a saint than I am.  I've put up with my own kids, but you couldn't pay me to do that.  I'd tell 'em to put her on meds and then come back, lol.  Or maybe I wouldn't.  Maybe I'm a lot nicer than I feel at almost midnight.  I'm just saying that's pretty wow for someone to hand you a kid who can't focus and say HERE, YOU SOLVE OUR PROBLEM, kwim?  That's their problem to solve, not yours.  They should be sending her in in workable condition.  Their OT can give them a 10 minute routine of crossbody and other exercises they can do before the session to get her in a good position to learn.  Or meds.  Or Therapeutic Listening.  Or...

 

For the record, I've sent my ds to speech therapy with a level of ADHD that is pretty wow.  But they earned $110 an hour and were allowed to use straps to keep him in place.  I kid you not.  And they had all kinds of extra things like cushions to give sensory input (under his bum, under his feet), etc.  So at $110 an hour, sure I'd put up with anything.  But if you're doing charity work or getting $15 an hour or something, guess who's not gonna be so generous, kwim?

 

About the speech.  The reason I would want the eval is because you don't know why she's having the speech problem or how extensive it is.  Have you inventoried to see if she's actually discriminating those sounds?  Speech production and discrimination are closely linked.  So you wouldn't want to aggravate her by trying to have her say sounds she's not ready for or discriminate sounds she's not ready for.  Our SLP had us skip sounds he didn't yet have.  Maybe that's not necessary for her situation.  Just a good reason to push evals.  There is nothing so desperate that it can't wait 2 weeks till they get an SLP eval done, kwim?  

 

As far as blending LIPS, Barton, and PROMPT, I couldn't find my old posts either, but I didn't look really hard, sorry.  It's really what you anticipate.  There are two paths for LIPS, and the vertical (? I forget) has you work through a limited field of sounds, going through all the skills, then circling back to add MORE sounds that you again take through all the skills.  Horizontal path is the inverse, covering all the sounds and then taking them through all the skills.

 

So what I did was take the limited field from Barton level 1 lesson 1, using it as the limited field to start LIPS with that vertical path.  I took those sounds from B1L1 through both the LIPS skills *and* the Barton 1 skills for lesson 1.  Then, when those were entirely mastered, then I took the Barton 1 lesson 2 sounds and went through all the LIPS skills and then all the Barton 1, lesson 2 skills.  Does that make sense?  And you just keep doing this.  

 

Barton tends to stop at the most simple application of the skill, and I consistently stretched the skills to more complicated variants.  Like if she covers the skill through 3 letters, we covered through 5.  Seriously.  Because it seemed like there was too much assumption that things would generalize, that a skill that was obvious with 3 letters done with manipulatives would just naturally generalize to 5-6 letters with no manipulatives.  I couldn't guarantee that for our situation (with the ASD, with the apraxia), so I didn't assume that.  My goal was every sound, every letter, every position, every level of complexity, so there was NO DOUBT he would have those sounds and letters nailed no matter where he saw them.  I didn't want him thinking oh cvc are easy but wow ccvcc are hard, kwim?  So every sound, every position, every combination.  Overteaching.

 

We used the LIPS faces and letter magnets and we worked with them completely every day.  Complete, for me, means we did letter to sound, sound to letter, and we wrote them in something multi-sensory.  We spent a *significant* chunk of time doing this.  We spent more time doing this the first month or 6 weeks than we did anything else.  If we were doing 4 sessions a day at 15 min each, it took us 1 1/2-2 of those sessions to work through the board and do those steps.  It was very intense stuff.  I just sorta went with my gut on what to do next each short session.

 

Clear as mud?   :)

 

It's exciting that you're getting started.  Keep asking questions.  You're not bugging me.  It was just SO hard, so intense, it's one of those things that just sorta dropped from my memory.  It was very custom to him and how hard I could push him.  You'll have to figure out how it works with *your* student, kwim?  We were doing LOTS of crossbody and OT stuff, working memory stuff, etc. We were not doing *just* LIPS, kwim?  When he started, his functional working memory was 2.  So for him to pull two tiles and blend was impossible because that required *3*!!  Think about that.  When you take breaks and do some bodywork and bring in some working memory, you're actually giving her a skill she needs to progress with LIPS/Barton.  So I wouldn't feel badly about that.  It was just very hard and very nerve wracking for me.   I guess I should explain, the reason it was nerve wracking is because of the ASD.  He bolts, so he's like either there or POOF gone.  It can be really wild to work with.   :w00t:

 

Edited November 25, 2015 by OhElizabeth

[imagine.more]

Oh she's on medication, it just doesn't work :P Her parents have been doing everything they can think of to help really. We've been friends awhile and they're very proactive. So she's had a hearing test and testing through an educational psychologist and does OT regularly and is on a gluten free diet. S

 

She's been on medication for a few months now I think and it wears off after like an hour, no joke! I had never heard of that either, when we used medication for Ana we noticed it wore off around 4pm, but that was a solid 6 hours of benefit and we saw a clear benefit especially in focus during math & barton. With this student there is an improvement on the medication but it's like taking it from a 100 on a scale of 1-100 down to an 80 ;) I've suggested they might want to try a different kind or increase the dose again, they're working with the doctors on that of course and trying to balance side effects with benefits. 

 

And I am being paid as a tutor, no worries there :) I'm pretty used to dealing with kids, this level of adhd is just totally new to me. 

 

So I'm thinking the best course of action is to maybe break for a week (it's Thanksgiving anyway) and then pick up just working slowly on the LiPS steps. We've been making progress with the Brothers pairs and I'd like to shore up that knowledge a good bit anyway. 

[PeterPan]

Is she getting OT? 

 

It's a full moon, btw.

Edited November 25, 2015 by OhElizabeth

[imagine.more]

LOL, maybe the full moon is to blame ;) 

 

Yes, she gets regular weekly OT where they focus on sensory stuff and handwriting. She's had OT for years, since about age 2-3 I think? This morning went well, she really seemed to be grasping things and I was able to help her do some simple tracking of two consonant strings with colored tiles....something that she was unable to do on the Barton Student Screening. I think with the adhd it'll just take a good 2 months to get all the way through the brothers, cousins, borrowers, and vowel circle and then onto tracking with all of those. I'm still undecided on whether the horizontal or vertical path is better so I'm kinda splitting the difference and doing a bit of both, haha! 

 

I was so excited to be able to learn this stuff, and with it I'm seeing even more the genius of Barton because she really incorporates a lot of these activities and basic principles into the lower levels of the Barton program too.