My son's school uses Zoo Phonics and my son liked it. He did have trouble linking sounds to letters, though. A problem for him, not a problem with Zoo Phonics. He had problems distinguishing between some letter sounds until he did some intense speech therapy. He would see an s, and know "snake" and the slithery motion, but he had a hard time going from that to "sssss." Once he was getting "snake starts with sssss" it did come together for him pretty quickly. He loved, loved, loved the animal motions. He liked the letter cards the teacher used, also. As far as I know they just went through the picture cards with the kids making the animal motion and saying the letter sound.

Wow, that is really frustrating that the school is being that way about the test scores.

My son is still in public school and there are a lot of things I like about his school. But could they get him up to grade level in reading? NO. There is no way. Kids just don't get one-on-one tutoring until they are in 3rd grade, and then they have to stay after school. It is a big deal my son moved from the lowest reading group to the on-grade-level reading group this year, and it makes it seem like it doesn't happen very often, hmmmm.

I got a lot of nastiness (to me nastiness -- she is actually a nice woman and a good teacher) from my son's teacher in K. "He can't do this, he can't do that, he is failing the Dibels screening." She didn't have anything to do about it but hold my son back in K. Then when my husband and I wouldn't do it, she said some nasty thing about how he would probably be held back in 1st grade, b/c there was no social promotion in our school. Then we got his little report card thing, and she wrote "promoted against teacher recommendation" across it in big letters. I got a lot of info from the Dibels screening then, and that is how I started finding out what to do with him at home that would do any good. I have wished he could have had teacher who wouldn't be so negative, though, many times. I am still mad she wrote all her comments on his report card... we will never show it to my son now. But I have to say I'm glad they didn't just promise me they'd teach him to read, I guess. His teacher was like -- I am teaching, he is not learning, he is the problem. (To be fair I spent a lot of time one-on-one with my son and his K teacher could never have done that in the classroom -- but still, I thought she was very rude about it.)

You do have information that she needs to work on phoneme segmentation and nonsense words. I have worked on this with my son. Have you looked at the screening for Barton? http://www.bartonreading.com/students_long.html#screen If she cannot do this -- the recommendation is to do Lips. I didn't actually do Lips with my son, he was fortunate to be able to do speech therapy that was similar. It was like night and day from his previous speech therapy (and, he still goes to school speech) and much more helpful to him. But I think it is like Lips. I read a book about APD last year, and my son had no symptoms except for confusing consonants. He confused consonants very badly, though. There was more information about the different kinds of APD, though, that might be helpful. I read "When the Brain Can't Hear." For me -- I came out of it thinking my son didn't have APD. I also started with just "he can't do x,y,z." He couldn't do segmenting, he couldn't tell the first sound in a word, he couldn't tell if two words rhymed, etc. etc. It has been hard but my son has been able to learn these things with special teaching techniques. I did a lot of word-building stuff from AAS 1 (and I had watched the videos for Barton level 1, so I did the hand motions and stuff like her). At first I would only ask him to copy me. This is the stuff where you say the word and pull down a letter tile for each sound. I have read a book called Phonics A-Z by Wiley Blevins, that is at my library (there are other good books that are not at my library, lol). He talks about holding your hand on your chin and saying a word slowly, dragging out the sounds. When your chin moves, you are changing to a different sound. You can model this and let your daughter try. He said to start with that, and after doing that, have them jump or make a karate chop when they hear the sound change. Then you would say a word slowly, and have them make a karate chop when they hear the sound change. So -- ssssaaaaaaaammmm, and they make chop when you switch to a and m. I didn't do this with my son but it sounds good to me, and would have been a nice change of routing. I did basically that, but with dragging a letter tile down when I said the new sound... I thought that was good re-inforcement, b/c he could see the letter on the letter tile. I think Elkonin boxes are good for segmenting also -- I didn't do them, though, I thought they were similar to what I did with the AAS tiles. But I think there's a lot of info about them on the Internet. My son had meltdowns, also. He still has speech meltdowns sometimes, but much less. For him -- he has meltdowns when he is asked to do something and can't do it well. For him -- doing poorly on testing at speech therapy would probably mean a big meltdown on the way home or later in the evening. He has done things like cry on the way home and then have a meltdown after we got home. He went through an ugly phase of being very bratty on the way to speech therapy and refusing to get out of the minivan when we got there. I ended up doing lots of snacks and just getting through it -- he was just that frustrated with the speech. But he did work hard for the SLP almost all the time. That is also why I just did lots of modeling, and asking him to copy (instead of answer a question), and didn't actually do Barton 1. He was having lots of meltdowns and avoidant behavior, so I wanted to only ask him to do things I knew he could -- so ask him to copy, after watching it modelled, and he can do that. Asking him to pay attention while I modelled and praising him for keeping his eyes on me -- he could do that. He had had a too long time of not being able to give correct answers or just struggling too much I think. I started him with letters and real words (up, am, at) and AAS 1 instead of Barton, b/c a) he didn't memorize words at all and b) I thought he would be motivated by real words. I don't think my son has any sensory issues or problems. He is an active kid but just regular active when I see him around other kids. I think his meltdowns were just from frustration with his speech and then frustration at the pre-reading stuff being hard/not being able to do it. edit: I have read Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitx, and the nonsense words and segmenting are warning signs for dyslexia. I don't really think my son has dyslexia, though, or I am not sure. But, he definitely does best with using the materials designed for kids with dyslexia. I think these materials are usually high qualty and they use multisensory techniques a lot, and my son does well with multisensory. I think its a great teaching method. I look for products to help kids with dyslexia and I don't think it means my son has dyslexia or not. He can read nonsense words and segment now, and that is the important thing I think.

I am going to pursue private speech therapy earlier for my younger son. If at all possible -- the year he is 5 (turning 5 in November) and in his last year of pre-school. (He looks to be like my older son in this area... and I just had a visit with my MIL and it sounds like my FIL and husband were like this also to some degree.) I am going to do phonemic awareness activites with him. (I own AAS level 1 and Barton level 1 and Reading Reflex, and may use some other resources also.) I am going to get the early HWOT stuff and do lots of playdough letters with him. I am going to pay more attention to letter formation, but hold off on pencils and crayons and markers for writing. I will do more with tracing in different materials instead. So far my older son is in 1st grade and hasn't had a full evaluation. He has had a full language evaluation for speech therapy, and he takes the Dibels screening for pre-reading and reading. To date -- I am satisfied with it. I think there is a good chance of doing it in the next few years, though, unless some other issues resolve themselves. (Oh, he has had a handwriting evaluation at school also and is getting OT for that at school, and it seems like it is going well so far, but it is still new... he has gone for about 2 months at this point.) My older son is also waiting for an appointment with a 2nd optometrist... we got a referral for him having convergence insufficiency. This is not the optometrist I found out about on the internet.... I am seeing what I think of this person and the options, and seeing what insurance will pay. If I don't like this one I will definitely go to the one from the covd website out-of-pocket. I am in early days on that -- I think I will know more about it once Rivers has gone to another appointment or started vision therapy. On the Kindergarten thing -- K was a train wreck for my older son in a lot of ways. He did good socially and with all the math manipulative and listening to stories and things like that, but I wish his speech had been better, and I wish I had known about multisensory teaching and phonemic awareness stuff earlier. He started it the summer after K (after trying some other programs during K that didn't work) and he got to grade level in reading after Christmas of 1st grade. He was in speech therapy with a good person at the same time -- and I think the speech therapy really helped also, so I think I would try to do Lips before or during K if my son isn't able to do the same speech therapy as my older son, for some reason (like, if he doesn't qualify for insurance to pay, I might try to do Lips myself). But overall -- I am very happy my younger son has a November birthday. I have no desire whatsoever to push him ahead or wish he could be 5 for most of K instead of 6 for most of K. It is a relief! He will have more time to get solid on pre-school skills that way, also, b/c really my son was not solid on pre-school skills (that had anything to do with letters or reading) before K, and struggled with them even in K. In every other area he did really well in pre-school, but K has such a focus on letters and reading that it count for more to me now.

I own All About Spelling books 1 and 2, and I think they are very clear. I haven't used them very far but I like them. My son is needing to work on reading right now though, and he is doing well with Abecedarian. There is a spelling book later in Abecedarian we might do in about a year, but we are not there yet.

My same-age cousin I grew up with has Aspergers. I have the perspective of a cousin, not of a parent. My aunt and uncle are wonderful people. As an adult my cousin has taken (at different times) medication for anxiety and depression. It has helped him to get to where he can do some concrete things that would help some underlying reasons for the depression. Or, maybe it has just plain helped. I am not sure. Recently we were all worried about him, and it turned out he was depressed. We did not recognize it as depression -- he seemed more lacksadaisical and distracted than depressed, and he could not get anything done, even things he wanted to do. In general he needs opportunities to be independent from his parents -- this is hard b/c he does need a lot of help. He also needs some social activities. He goes to church but he will not always fit in with the group he is supposed to be in -- it is very hard. Throughout his life he has done better with people who just like him... but it is hard to find these people, and sometimes someone will move or have less time for him just b/c life, and then it is hard to fill in the gap. He does not feel much in common with me since I have had kids, which is sad for me, and he is not great with little kids. He is doing really well with my older son since he has gotten a little older, though. (He is almost 7.) We used to be closer. Overall -- I don't know. My cousin had a hard time in high school also, he also has some learning disabilities and he has a hard time organizing himself. I think the good will of his parents meant (and means) a lot to him there. I would also keep in mind the option of medication if he gets worse or continues to have periods like this. The first time I saw him after he took anxiety medication he was doing very well and I was very happy for him. My aunt and uncle always follow a good diet and my aunt is very health conscious, and I know took him to all kinds of doctors.... it was not a first resort by any means. edit: my cousin has learning problems also, and I think he has a hard time from that as much as from the Aspergers. He is probably more severe than some people with Aspergers, also.

My son is doing Abecedarian Level B, and in the instructions, for a word like cactus, cac-tus or cact-us would both be acceptable. For words like that it can go either way. But for dividing a word, where you look at the two short vowels, then yeah, it would be cac-tus. (In Abecedarian it is just letting kids practice dividing words into syllables at all, in the part I am in.) Otoh, cac and cact would both be closed syllables, so I wonder if it matters? I don't think "ct" is really a unit for spelling, and even if it was sometimes, sometimes the two letters could fall next to each other without being a unit. I do think with a blend instead of a digraph, it is not too big of a deal? You would sound out each sound individually anyway. Curious what others have to say. My son needs direct instruction in this stuff also, we are just not quite this far.

My son had this problem along with poor articulation... it was like he heard two sounds as one sound, and only made one sound, and never produced the other sound. (So it would be like he heard 2 different words as one word, and figured out which meaning was meant by context clues.) He had two years of speech therapy that didn't help much, and now in the last year he has been helped a lot by speech therapy. He is going to a university clinic. He sees SLP students. They are very knowledgable and very good. They had him do things like learn about how to produce sounds, watch how the SLP forms her words, sort the two confused sounds (by having the teacher say a word, and he would have to say what mouth shape it started with, or what letter it started with). At the time he started I looked at Lips and thought it was similar enough to what he was doing in speech that I didn't need to do it myself. I got referred to this clinic (informally) by his school SLP after he did not make progress with her in a year.

My son has had speech therapy and he will work harder for the SLP than he will for me. He does not have baggage for having had frustrations in the past with the SLP. It is SO worthwhile. For me I would see if they could try a few sessions and see if he was more motivated by the tutor or would work harder for her. If not -- I think I would want to do it myself instead of pay the money, if it seemed like it was a program I could follow. That would not really have been the case with his speech therapy. The training they had did make them more effective than I could have been. (Once he started private speech in particular. Not so much when he was reading word lists at school.) If so -- I would pay it in a second. My son's school teacher gave him an award at school in November, at an assembly in front of the whole school, for improved reading, and he got a tee shirt to wear to go along with it. NOTHING I could have done would have meant so much to him. He is still wearing this tee shirt once a week or more, as soon as it is washed. Now, *I* am the one doing Abecedarian and reading practice with him every night, iykwim, but for him at least, he just responds to things like this, and he will work harder for people besides me. When I picked him up from school his teacher said "this award is for you as much as for him" and it has meant a lot to me too and been an encouragement to me as well! The award he got is for kids who are still working below grade level but who have made a big gain or are working very hard. I think they are *so* good about noticing his hard work at school. (In general. I was *not pleased* with his K teacher many times last year. His teacher this year is a real advocate for him and I appreciate her very much.) I think this is my son's personality and it is just how he is. He is also very motivated for me to tell his grandparents when he is doing well or has met a goal. He cares a lot about what they think about how he is doing.

Garfield has the easiest-to-read font and caption bubbles, and easiest words, imo. The writing is all in caps. There are not a lot of words on the page. I censor some pages that I think are unkind, but my son doesn't notice. I tell him I am picking out really funny ones. Some Pokemon and some Avatar comics are easier. The super-hero comics available at our library tend to be a little bit too hard for my son still. There is a section in the children's area (not the teen area, which has even more) and I just pick up books and flip through them. Baby Mouse (I think it is called) and one with a hamster are both easier, too, but above my son's interest level -- they have a different kind of humor he is not getting yet.

My son started private speech therapy 2x/week for 1 hour, last June. He is about to exit, and his school speech teacher is talking about him possibly exiting next year. Now he is mostly talking well and he is better about talking too fast. In June he started the therapy I think is like Lips (but not actually Lips) with articulation below the 10th percentile and an age equivalent of 2 years 11 months. He failed the Dibels screening and didn't automatically know the letters and letter sounds. He knew them but had to think about them, and link them to the animal from Zoo Phonics to say the sound (and still might miss some). So I would say a year. But just compared with my son, it seems like your daughter might go faster, if they were the same, except she can already say the words correctly. But they are probably not the same, lol.

My son also banged his head. It was helpful for me to look at it as sensory seeking, and for him I think it was a reaction to being overstimulated and/or frustrated. (I read a book about SPD I think? It did not directly help but it made me feel like maybe that was what was going on a little bit. I didn't think he had SPD -- just that he would have a tendency to do self-stimulating or sensory-seeking things sometimes, and it was easier on me psychologically to have that explanation than to wonder what was going on.) I am not sure now, b/c he switched to non-injuring temper tantrums, but when he was a little older he started having temper tantrums when he was not able to be understood (he is in speech therapy for articulation). I have tended not to think that his head-hitting had anything to do with his speech delay, but it is hard to be sure. I have also wondered if he had fluids in his ears or silent ear infections, in retrospect. My younger son had fluids in his ears and he would shake his head a lot sometimes, I think partly b/c the fluids were effecting his sense of balance. My son hit his head from about 15 months to about age 2. It was very stressful. I am sorry for both of you. I still remember my son crying from a hurt head after he had hit his head himself. (My son would do it twice a week or less, over about a year, then he did grow out of it. It was all before he was talking so I never really knew what it had all been about. He also head-butted and did some other sensory seeking things, that seemed connected.)

I think it is okay for someone who is 5.5 to be sounding out words as they read, and not remembering them from one time to the next, on the same page. I was worried about my son in the area of "automaticity" but it is coming for him. He is almost 7 now. The silent e and consonant blends are harder than cvc words, I think. I also have read that for kids to become "automatic" with a word, they have to read the word, all the way through, sounding it out, many times. That is how they build the model. Now -- some kids do need more help with that, for sure, but it is also a normal stage in reading. I think if you read a book about reading acquisition, it might either set your mind at ease, or let you be more clear about what the problem is. From when I have read about reading acquisition that all sounds fine for that age. I have liked books by Lousia Moats, Sally Shaywitz, Reading Reflex, and Wiley Blevins, that I think talk about stages of reading. For error correction just with reading -- I love the error correction techniques video on the Abecedarian website. It is so, so helpful to me.

My cousin was diagnosed as a young adult with Asperger's. I think it has its pros and cons. I come out for pro overall. He took some social skills classes and started an anti-anxiety medicine soon after he got diagnosed. These two things made a big difference for him. He seemed more at ease, and had an easier time talking to people. My aunt and uncle have taken him to a job counselor, but at their location, it turns out not to be a really good program ---- they have heard it is better at other locations. The con is that it has been hard on my aunt and uncle. My cousin was born premature and for many years doctors told them he was delayed but would improve with age. He does improve with age. But it is hard for them to have this diagnosis instead of hoping he will grow out of it.

My son did the 2nd Hear Builder last year. It didn't work for him... he wasn't able to answer the questions correctly and progress. I think his working memory/auditory memory is fine. It is just telling the sounds apart, and blending, and segmenting, that were very hard for him. For him he did well when he got manipulatives for the letter sounds for segmenting, and lots of modeling for blending, and he did speech therapy -- he learned to tell sounds apart in speech therapy, and how to say the sounds. I thought the games were nice, though, and that the quality was good. He could count the syllables in a word and did good on that section, and then he could tell which part of a multi-syllable word went with a word.... but then he couldn't advance past that. I still have a good impression and I'm not sorry I tried it. I think it might be good for practice, but not for someone who can't do it at all ---- or that it was just too hard for him. I sat by him and my mom sat by him to try to help him, but he would just have no idea. He needed slow, slow, slow and lots of modeling, and I think he needed the multisensory, too.

VinNY -- My son's speech didn't actually get worse, but it stayed the same, and so he dropped even lower on tests compared to kids his age, who were all improving. He is making progress since he started one-on-one speech therapy. Separately -- what is strange about kids who do better in a structured environment, designed for their own age? My son does better in school than he does in mixed-grades Sunday School at our little church, where kids K-6 are all together.

Yeah -- they have not actually followed the charts too much in deciding what to work on with my son in speech. They also decided he was stimulable on some sounds that are further up on the chart. Actually the only time a SLP got one out was to show how far behind he was on his Ks and Gs. But her point was that was making him have a low score on a certain test, even though he was doing well with other things.

I don't think it could hurt to try it, either. My son is in public school and I like his social opportunities there. However -- I heard from many people that his speech problems were exacerbated by being home with me, that he would talk better when he was around other kids all day b/c he would be motivated to have them understand him. This SO did not turn out to be the case. So I am skeptical of thinking there is some school magic that will fix problems that are happening. But at the same time -- I do like public school for my son. Their reading program is not working for him so I am doing reading at home with him -- that is why I participate in this forum.

There is a little section in The Mislabeled Child where they talk about how kids with different underlying issues will usually respond better to one kind of instruction or another.

http://www.listentalk.org/downloads/Speech_Acq_Chart_2008.pdf This is a speech acquisition chart and the th sounds are really far down at the bottom of it (there are funny symbols for the voiced and unvoiced th, or whatever they are called). My son had substitution of f for th until very recently. He did work on it in speech therapy. But, the sounds lower on the chart are normally later to develop and harder from what I understand. I do think he probably needs some help in some way to hear the differences, but just saying, it is not like it is crazy that it would be difficult. If you look in a mirror, though, f is said with your teeth on your bottom lip, I think. For th your tongue is up by your top teeth. If he can think of that when he is doing spelling words it might help, if he is saying the word correctly. You can also have him look at your mouth when you say the word, and say it slowly.

I didn't know it started with those consonants, but it makes sense, b/c I think those are the hardest ones. It really is hard when they are in the same word, and to hear the final sounds. It sounds like you are doing really good! My son could not isolate individual sounds (even in vc) for a long time, too, so if that is not a problem of course you don't need to spend ages on it. I am with you, though! It is hard to see how hard it is for them to do these "easy" things.

I spent a lot of time just doing examples for my son, never asking him to supply the answer. I would require him to watch me, I would require him to move the tiles while I did sounds (copying what he had watched), I would require him to say the sounds while I moved tiles (again copying), and keep doing that for a while, before even requiring him to completely copy me. That is what it took for him to successfully copy me!!!!!!! But when it starts to click it is wonderful!!!! We had, I think, 2-3 weeks of him just copying me this way, and copying me in blending sounds, and copying me in segmenting, and copying me in word chains (where you change one letter in a little word). We spent time on just words like up, in, at, am before even having an initial consonant. Yes, it is that hard, and if you can make it easier (by breaking it down into a smaller step) in any way, that is the thing to do. I would also say, please don't take advantage of your child having a good nature and wanting to cooperate and please you. I did this and my son became too upset with never being able to get a right answer (this happened while I was trying to do traditional things) and he was having avoidant behavior. I still push him but I *don't* feel like "this is stuff kids are supposed to do when they are 4 and you are 6" anymore -- that is a bad attitude ime. I did that kind of letter tiles, moving the tiles around, with AAS (and Reading Reflex and something else, I also had the free blending and segmenting supplement from Abecedarian, and I had purchased Barton level 1) while my son was in speech therapy 2 hours/week. Also -- I didn't use any of the "difficult" consonants at all for quite a while. For my son -- he could do all the vowels, and he could do l,m,p,n,t type consonants. b,d,k,g were all ones he didn't need to do. s was kind-of hard for him also. I only did the exercises with the easy consonants for a long time. And a warning.... consonant blends are extremely difficult, they just take a lot of time and examples, when it gets to that point. I think that was the most frustrating point here. K/G/D/T are major difficulties here, too. My son never said the K and G sounds... he didn't seem to hear them at all until he was taught to hear and say them in speech. Here those are the hardest consonants. edit: My son actually spent months on K/G/D/T in speech therapy. Some of the other sounds he spent less time on, but the least was "ch" and I think he did that in 3 sessions. I didn't do the part of showing him how to move his mouth or tongue, or how to make the noises in his throat, or listen for the differences, and do picture sorts for the different sounds... that was all at speech for him. But I did do the tiles.

http://www.fcrr.org/FCRRReports/PDF/LIPs.pdf This is another little explanation about Lips. "Identifying and Classifying Speech Sounds" is the heart of it as far as I know. (I looked into it seriously but decided my son was getting the equivalent in speech therapy and so I worked on phonemic awareness, learning to segment, and learning to blend with him. He never had trouble with vowels or with what I think of as the easier consonants, so he could work on those things with speech sounds he had a good grasp of.)