Yes, I wish I would have ordered the first two levels together. My son completed the first level in 2 weeks. His fast completion and the size of the level leaves me feeling a little duped. I almost feel like I need to find a reason to call or email so that I get my money's worth out of this level. I'm awaiting the second level. My wallet hopes it takes longer, but the mommy in me loves the idea of my son zooming through it!

"hand over hand" is where our SLP actually moved my son's hands and feet to the beat. For the hands my son wore the button glove and the headphones while sitting in a chair. Our SLP sat in a chair facing him and took one of his hands in each of her hands and performed the clapping. Sometimes she clapped his hands together and other times she tapped his hand on his legs. While performing thes hand exercises she worked on memory, articulation, homophones...basically areas that she knew he had difficulty with. All of his verbal work had to be to the beat. So, for articulation she would show him a picture and he had to say the word to the beat. For the feet exercises, again my son was sitting in a chair, but our SLP sat on the floor in front of him with the mat on her thighs. This time she held an ankle in each hand and stomped his feet to the beat. During feet exercises she had my son work on his motor skills and following directions. We did this for 3 weeks, one hour a day, every day. The SLP uses IM this way for her younger kids and those kids who aren't ready for traditional IM. It was very interesting to watch. She reports making some wonderful progress using it. He didn't do any word retrieval exercises during the IM sessions. I noticed his struggles with word retrieval while doing vision therapy homework at the time. After about the 8 session of IM my son made a huge jump in his ability to get letter names out quicker. It was like a switch. We went days with him struggling and then one day he could get the letter names out much, much quicker. I thought it was just a fluke day, but it stuck. I remember at the time thinking "what did he eat today?", "did he take different vitamins". I was really trying to figure out what changed him. It wasn't until weeks later when the SLP told me that IM helped in this area that I made the connection.

We did "hand over hand" IM with an SLP during the early part of summer. I was not sure what to expect and we saw gains in memory, word/letter retrieval and rapid automatic naming. I honestly wasn't looking for these gains and didn't even realize that they were due to the IM until the SLP mentioned it later. We are now undergoing IM again. This time he is performing the tasks solely himself (the tradional way). I was curious if we would see more improvements in rapid automatic naming and developed a little test (nothing scientific). Yes, we have seen some good gains after 10 sessions. I've seen improvements all around with my son. However, it is hard to determine exactly what therapy/exercise is responsible since we do so many at one time. I can honestly say that IM helped with rapid automatic naming and memory. I don't think he is "average", but certainly much better. I still don't understand it, but I'll take it!

Lindamood Bell Visualizing and Verbalizing was created to help kids understand what they are reading. It teaches kids to see a movie in their head while reading. The pictures are what we recall for comprehension.

My son just finished up using FFW for his APD. If your son's dyslexia is due or partialy due to APD I highly recommend it. My son can now "hear" the individual phonemes in words. We did it for 90 minutes a day for about 11 weeks. I have seen gains in his auditory memory as well. His APD isn't gone. He stills has trouble with everyday conversation. However, he now has the pre-reading skills that he didn't possess before. When choosing a FFW provider (if you are lucky enough to have a choice), a good question to ask is "How do you help the child move forward in FFW if they reach a point where they are not making progress?" You are looking for them to say that they have additional games/activites for the child to play outside of FFW that will work on their areas of difficulty. Our provider gave us lots of activities to help my son continue to make progress in FFW. I believe this was key to keep him motivated and get us through the program as quick as possible. We were with a different provider in the beginning and the experience was not as good.

Wow - this is so my DS. He has a language processing disorder. Yet, our SLP played a homophone game with him and he was quite good. How can this be? He loves to try and make up jokes that have some sort of word play. However, the words he uses in everyday language are often not at all what you would expect. For example, we were camping and he was swatting the flies in our camper. When my husband walked in he said "Dad, I spanked a bunch of flies today". He wasn't trying to be funny...this was just his word choice. Not sure, if it was a word retrieval problem (which he has a lot of difficulty with) and he just substituted something similar or if it was just the word that came to mind. yllek- I would love to understand more about why your NP suggested V&V. I took the V&V training and not sure how it will help my son. I do know that he can visualize. He produces some really good narrations (with enough detail that it can't come from auditory memory). However, he seems to be quite inconsistant. I wonder if sometimes he relies to much on auditory memory and isn't in the habit of using his visualization. Maybe, the structure of V&V will help him to organize his visualizations better and make it more habitual? We, too, have worked on digit spans. I have BrainBuilder and have used it with him. We didn't do this for long enough to get any result. Like you mentioned I heard it can take a while with digit spans to get good results. I've heard of another mom who was dedicated to digit spans and she saw all kinds of progress with her son as his digit span scores increased. We did get good gains in memory, processing speed and word retrieval doing Interactive Metronome. It was one of the best interventions we have done to date. I believe much of the success was in the way it was delivered by our SLP. We are going to start another round where he will be performing it on his own and I can't wait to see if we make more progress with memory and word retrieval.

As the others have said you need to find an excellent audiologist that specializes in APD and start doing your own research! There is a yahoo group moderated by an audiologist who specializes in APD. The yahoo group is called AuditoryProcessing. They may be able to help find a good audiologist in your area. I would not wait until 7 to look into it. The sooner you know where your child has learning differences the earlier you can start addressing them and with more success.

Hopefully the SLP will give you some direction. Auditory memory, auditory discrimination, attention these are all buzz words for an auditory processing disorder. This may be worth mentioning to the SLP. An audiologist usually does the testing for APD.

Hi yllek - Yes, the brain plasticity is what gets me so excited. I know that we are finally learning how to change the brains pathways and this is why vision therapy and others like it are so successful. And I'm very excited to hear that your memory work only took a couple of months to see improvement. We were with a neuro group years ago that believed increasing the memory is key in learning challenged kids. However, as I stated before, the improvements in memory were often only seen aft 6 or more months and this was with practice 5 days a week (twice a day). I wonder if it is because they only used digits as their memory work and not letters and words. I'm assuming you used more than digits?? I would love to hear more about what you did in vision therapy. We were with a highly recommended vision therapist for a year. We had daily homework (on weekends) and when my son retook the annual test. He showed NO improvements. I went home and cried. It was so disheartening...although not surprising since we had yet to see any jumps in any other learning. The thing is I know without a doubt my son's greatest weakness is his visual processing skills. He NEEDS vision therapy. However, it is obvious that the visual processing help he was getting with this Dr didn't work. We spent a lot of time on primitive reflexes (which he just could not get) and directionality (he can finally tell us where his right and left hand is). This is all we truly worked on (well we had just started working on some of his visual spacial issues which was not going well at all). We spent very little time on strengthening the eye muscles, visual tracking and visual memory. Our current SLP who is also a vision therapist says that all these visual gathering skills must be worked first. We just started with her. She is certainly unique and I love how she does a lot of research on brain plasticity. BUT - every child is unique and only time will tell. We spent two years with two different OTs and the only thing my son learned is how to form the number 5. :001_huh: I'm not kidding! I now believe it is because his visual processing skills are sooo poor. But, the OT kept telling me that he is a visual learner and I kept thinking then why can't he remember where Antartica is on the map. Anyway, I would love to hear more about what sort of vision therapy exercises you did with your son and what sort of visual memory exercises did you use. Thanks for sticking around and providing so much input on the success that you had with your son.

Oh my goodness, Yllek. Every time I read your posts you describe my son. The conundrum that is my son. I've always told my husband that my son's brain is wired for visual learning, but his visual processing skills are so poor he can't get the info in properly. He has the most creative mind and can make up these great stories that I know he is visualizing in his head. Alas, he can't follow words on a page or remember a sight word after months of seeing it or even remember the location of a continent on a map. He has a language processing disorder (diagnosed and clearly present). However, he is so witty and blows me away with some of his understanding of higher order thinking. He can also use some amazing vocabulary words in the right context....but, try and teach him one latin word, repeating it daily and he can't remember it (after months of hearing it). Sprinkle in his auditory processing deficits, memory problems, slow processing speed, motor issues and you get a completely unorganized brain that shows sparks of brilliance, but overall a teaching impossibility. He has absolutely no learning anchor. BUT, neigbors and friends can carry on a great conversation with him and thus often say "I don't see any problems." Its no wonder his individual therapists can't get a handle on him. The vision therapist wants to rely on his auditory gate for an anchor, his SLPs have tried to rely on the visual and meanwhile he makes no progress. I'm just now finally able to get a better idea of what is going on. I'm going to check out the Achieve memory program you recommend. I've actually just started a new direction with his therapy. We are now seeing an SLP who is also a vision therapist. After a year of vision therapy and no progress I knew I had to look in another direction. She is confident she can rewire my son's brain (time will tell). Anyway, she has indicated that one of the big areas to address before we make much progress is his visual memory. I'm a little concerned about this because I've read that memory improvement can take months of work before seeing any improvement. I'm hoping that this doesn't hold him back. Fortunately, he has always enjoyed any games that we play that work on memory. We were doing all sorts of digit spans with a computer program that I have. I think I may take that out again. It only works on digits though and just a quick look at Achieve I see that letters and words are important as well....I guess I'm off to do more research......

Yes, all of it...or rather it was all covered at 90%. I did have to get a gap exception to get it covered in-network. This is because none of the vision therapists in our area take insurance.

Wow - this is a fantastic app! Thanks for sharing. Do you have any others? - Leslie

We made the switch to krill oil as well at the direction of our family dr. We buy ours from Prograde Nutrition. The pill is small and has no flavor or smell. Well we haven't made a complete switch. I still give my boys Nordic Naturals (1/2 what I used to) in addition to the krill oil...still have Nordic Naturals in my cabinet. I used to give my boys 4 of the Omega 3 6 9 Jrs a piece. Our Dr was fine with this dosage. Info on krill oil: http://www.doctoroz.com/blog/kristin-kirkpatrick-ms-rd-ld/new-omega-3-krill-oil

This is a harder question to answer. We were presented with sooo much information during the 3 day LiPS training that I felt like I was running a marathon the whole time. We spent A LOT of time practicing the steps with a partner and the instructor. This 'role playing' was to me the heart of the workshop and the most beneficial portion. I left knowing that I need additional practice discovering the movement of the sounds on myself before I attempt to teach this discovery to someone else. If you have the discipline to really spend the time practicing the steps yourself and watching the DVDs then the training may indeed by unnecessary. I would NOT recommend the 1 day LiPs training. The one day training is just an overview and you don't get hardly anytime practicing. Which, again, the constant practice we had with the LiPs steps was the most beneficial component. The instructor even indicated that everyone who has taken the 1 day LiPs with her left wanting more. I plan to use Barton after I complete just a portion of LiPs. If you are doing just a part of LiPs to get you going with Susan Barton then the steps needed to move to Barton were covered during the first 1.5 days of the class. The last 1.5 days covered later steps that I won't be using. However, they were still benefical since I got more practice with areas I will use (since the program builds on itself). We also covered quite a bit of error handling scenarios on the third day (everyone in the class had some trouble with this). I wish I had a clear answer for you. If you have any specific questions regarding the class let me know. - Leslie

We didn't talk too much about Seeing Stars in the V/V program. We did incorporate some of it in the LiPS training (just some additional steps to LiPS). I think a lot of learning centers have started combining the two and our instructor indicated that she wouldn't be surprised if the two programs are combined at some point. I have the Seeing Stars manual and I will use some of the tricks as I teach my son. I plan to move forward with Barton to ultimately teach my son reading. - Leslie

Hi Michelle - As far as the materials go you can get by with just the Instruction manual and either the V/V Story books or the Imagine That Stories. I purchased the V/V Story books because they have all the grade levels, HOT questions as well as some instructor visualization questions. I would highly recommend at least one of the professional DVDs to see exactly what a session looks like. It was very helpful even with taking the class. If you want some extra hand holding you can also purchase the Picture to Picture Book and for even more hand holding the Sentence by Sentence Easel Books. If you don't purchase the Picture to Picture book you will need to find some simple, colorful pictures for the first 1-2 steps. The Sentence by Sentence book is created for a group environment (hence the price), but has more specific teacher lesson questions to help during your sessions. Additionally, you will have to have the structure cards and square felts, but these are easy to make at home. Some key highlights from the class: - Use the V/V language. Every question you ask should point back to the picture in the student's head. e.g. say "What are you picturing for....?" Don't say "What are you thinking for...?" This is very important for every session! - Errors are always handled in a positive, specific manner. Make sure you use the error handling described in the book. We spent a lot of time practicing error handling. The instructor indicated that if a child gets frusterated in V/V it is very hard to get them back into it. Thus, proper error handling keeps the student engaged and participating. - Use choice/contrast questions to get the child verbalizing what they are picturing. Avoid yes/no questions. The instructor kept saying that a perfect V/V session has the child doing most the talking. However, in the beginning the instructor may be asking lots of questions to get the child going. - We are looking for 75-80% accuracy before moving forward in V/V. Really everything the instructor covered seems to be in the book. The only other thing I would recommend is practicing some visualization yourself (especially the later steps). We got to do this in the class and it was very enlightening. - Leslie

Certainly!

The insturctor indicated that this program was for those individuals where language seems to go in one ear and out the other. These individuals may have very good reading/spelling skills, but when you start to ask them about what they read (or was read to them) they struggle. This also helps those children that don't follow oral instructions well. Check out chapter 4 in the V/V book - it gives good examples of who will benefit from this program. I don't recall her going into any documented statistics on their success rate. You can call Lindamood Bell and if they have any I'm sure they will discuss them with you. I've called several times and spoke at length with the folks there. They always seemed very eager to answer my questions. In fact, one time they called me back about a week later to see if I had more questions. Our instructor did indicated that in all her time with the company (I think she has been with them for 10+years) she has never had a child that she could not teach imaging to. How this translates to every day life and the success they have...well she didn't go into that. Very good question on the daily intensity and can you have success with working with the child for just an hour a day or an hour a week. The answer we were given is yes. I was in a class with SLPs, reading tutors, special ed teachers and I was the only mom. So, this was a question that came up because the teachers often only have 30 minutes a day or in the case of SLPs one hour a week. Of course, the program will take a lot longer to complete and she did indicate that two 30 minute sessions on different days was better than one hour long session. A little background on their 4 hour days... Lindamood-Bell didn't always do 4 hour per day. The creators are SLPs so they started out with much shorter times working with students. One day a parent across the country heard about the success kids were having with the program and asked if they could condense the amount of time for the whole program (she was hoping to fly out with her son and stay in temporary lodging). Lindamood/Bell decided to give it a shot and found that the child was able to handle it for 2 hours a day and still have energy. They increased the time and the child was still successful so they increased the time again... This was the start of the 4 hour days. The instructor stated that this works very well at the Learning Centers because kids are typically coming in during summer months or even being pulled out of school temporarily. They don't usually get the kids for a whole school year. I was a bit intimidated by the program given their intense sessions at the learning centers. Knowing the history and 'why' they do it at the learning centers has helped ease my concern.

I just got back from the V/V 2 day training and I just wanted to give a quick report in case anyone is thinking of using this program. The training provided a lot of great info. However, I don't believe that the training is necessary. Here is why: - The slides that the instructor used had information retrieved completely from the book/manual. In fact, she would not provide the slides to the participants because she wanted us to get familiar with our book. The book is very clear and presented in a step by step format. - The most enlightening part of the whole training (for me) was watching the videos of actual sessions (these can be purchased on the website). Of course, I won't be purchasing them since I attended the training. However, we only watched part of the videos in class and I wish I had them to see more actual V/V sessions. If anyone is interested I can go through my notes and type some of the highlights. I'm attending the LiPS training next week. - Leslie

I just got back from a workshop with a psychologist regarding CAPD. The following are the bullets from her slide "How a Child with CAPD May Look on the WPPSI-III, WISC-IV or WAID-IV" - Low scores on verbal subtests with higher scores on non-verbal subtests. - Low scores on subtests requiring extensive verbal responses. - May do better on verbal subtests that tap information in long-term memory such as Vocabulary and Information, than on verbal subtests that test information in short-term memory such as Arithmetic or Digit Spans.

15 minutes. Wow. How are you using the program? We would review all the phonograms on Monday and then do 20 words, then a quick test on them. Tuesday - review that day's words phonograms and spelling rules, 20 more words and then a quick test. Wed and Thurs are supplemental activities and Friday is test. Each day always seems to take about an 45 minutes (or longer). I have to admit that we are a bit spotty in doing SWR throughout the year. However, we did complete most of the necessary spelling lists last year (we school year round). Unfortunately, every year on the Woodcock Johnson test his worst area is spelling. For example he knows the silent e rules very well, but just doesn't seem to apply them outside of SWR. Part of me thinks I spell well enough and never knew all the SWR rules and phonograms. I'm just wondering if the amount of effort and memorization required by SWR is really needed to learn how to spell. I wonder how much spelling as an adult is pure memory vs. 'thinking to spell'. Of course, I want to do what is best for him even if it means 45 minutes a day. I don't want him to rely on spell check as an adult. - Leslie

Hi - I'm looking for a spelling program for my 9 year old son that won't require a lot of work on my part. We've been doing SWR off and on for the last 2 years. However, it is waayyy more time on my part than I would like for spelling. He reads great, but his spelling could be better...It isn't atrocious, but still needs some work. We signed up for Spelling City. However, I don't like that it doesn't cover any spelling rules. I think we are going to start Vocabulary Workshop....so it would be nice to have a spelling program that would go easily with it. Thanks! - Leslie

Hi All - Would you all recommend taking the LiPS 3 day training or 1 day training (both are coming close to my area). My plan is to start with LiPS (since my son failed the Susan Barton screening and it was also recommended by his SLP) and then move on to either Barton or another ortonG program. The only reason I ask is because of cost. The 3 day seminar would cost $500 more and I'm wondering if it is necessary? This is for my 7 year old DS with APD, dyslexia, visual processing issues, memory problems and dyspraxia. Thanks! - Leslie

Hi - A friend of mine and I are both looking at getting the IEW Teacher Writing and Intensive Writing to start with our kids. We were wondering if it is set up such that we can pitch in and get one Teacher Writing:Structure and Style Seminar DVD set to share and then get our own copies of the Student Writing Intensive. I guess if the Teacher Writing Seminar DVDs require a lot of referring back to it wouldn't work so well. Any thoughts? Thanks!

We just pulled our TLP out of a drawer and started it again. I don't know if it helped when we were using it a couple of years ago (we never finished it), but our therapist at the time really felt it would be a big help. I just spoke with a speech therapist who didn't like TLP because she said it is a 'one size fits all' program. I guess you can't really tailor it towards specific problems. Although, we do have an additional TLP sensory and language CD. I don't see where it can hurt so we are giving it a try again. You do need the right headphones for TLP, even if you aren't doing the bone conduction. If unsure, call TLP and they can tell you which ones work.