Some teachers at my school use Keyboarding Without Tears. It looks pretty good, not over-stimulating, not babyish.

Good luck to you! It sounds like you have a great plan in place. I imagine the plan will only get better as you learn more. Many people here had to do Lindamood-Bell LiPS before Barton (or any other reading program). LiPS gives a name and a picture to each sound, and you practice "feeling" the sounds in words. It's awesome. You can buy the manual and the LiPS pictures for not too much money, and they'll be worth every penny. Learning the names for the sounds (like t is a "tapper") might help be helpful for your son. It totally changed the life of one of my students who couldn't read 3-letter words even in 5th grade. He can read words like "clean" and "which" and "smooth" now. It's awesome! I attribute all of his success to LiPS. Language just didn't make a lick of sense to him before. This boy also has a ton of trouble with articulation, and I think LiPS may be helping a little with that too. If you have any questions about LiPS, let me know! :001_smile:

Could you just write a list with the steps? Sometimes it can help a lot until he has the steps memorized. :laugh:

At the beginning, our 30-minute lessons went something like this: Introduce a few new consonant "brothers," like P/B and F/V. Practice saying them and noticing if they are quiet or noisy (make your throat vibrate or not). I would set out an array of about five mouth pictures, and ask him to make the sound, /P/, and then find the picture that most closely matched his mouth. That all might take 15 minutes. You can add to it by doing phonemic awareness activities like saying a word and having your child decide where the sound is... in the word "pot" where do you feel the popper? Beginning or end? Etc. It gets more exciting when you start doing vowels, because you can start blending things like /i/ /p/..... ip! You constantly remind your student to "feel your mouth!" When you say "ip," what did you feel first? What did you feel at the end? For this kid, it was like sounds in words suddenly existed. It was very motivating for both of us.

I've been using LiPS with a student since the middle of September. So far it's been LIFE-CHANGING! Until this year his reading was stuck at around a beginning K level, and he's 11. Fast forward to now and he's made about 5 months of progress in about 5 months, according to his DRA. That might not sound like a lot, but for a kid who has made almost ZERO progress in FIVE YEARS of schooling, it's pretty exciting. I have a background in teaching reading so I thought LiPS was pretty easy to implement, but I think it would be pretty easy for a non-reading teacher as well. The manual is HUGE and long, but you don't have to read it all at once. Just read the introduction chapter and the section on teaching consonants, and start doing that. When you get going on the consonants, start reading about the vowels, and so on. It's been five months and we're starting to do "magic e" words (though LiPS approaches them in a different and cool way). The materials I have are: the manual, the small mouth magnets, and lower-case letter tiles. You can buy any tiles you want, though, they don't have to be the official ones. If you have any questions, please ask! I'm a total LiPS evangelist now :laugh:

Hugs, that is difficult. It happens to me all the time - when I think something is going awesomely, I realize it would be awesome for a kindergartner, not a sixth grader. I just try to ignore it as much as possible, even though sometimes the comparison monster definitely intrudes :grouphug:

Teach Your Monster to Read uses British pronunciation, so that might be a problem... but maybe you could start watching some British TV series and do it anyway :lol:

I think you'll do a wonderful job homeschooling! I think working on reading is the most important thing you can be doing. I'm of the opinion that public schools (and schools in general) try to push too much information, too much memorization... how much do we really remember from 4th grade anyway? Just read some fun books that incorporate history and science and enjoy yourself. But she needs to read, so I'd just have that be the main focus. I haven't tried this, but it's a FREE online phonics program by Usborne - it's called Teach Your Monster How to Read. Usborne publishes fantastic childrens' books, and this looks really adorable: http://www.teachyourmonstertoread.com/ I would also recommend getting books from High Noon Books. They make a lot of high interest, easy readers and they're not expensive. I just ordered a set and it took 2 weeks to get here (ugh!) but it was worth it. I picked the Sound Out series - the first ones only use 3-letter words and they're pretty suspenseful and interesting! Have fun!

This looks really cool. I wish I could visit!

Cool! I want these in the classrooms of my school :laugh: I bet I could get grant money somehow!

That's great, thank you!

The other interesting thing is that he can rhyme now! Never could rhyme before LiPS...?!

This all sounds great. Looking forward to reading him!

Thanks OhElizabeth! I'm so glad my experience with LiPS was similar to yours. I remember reading your thoughts about LiPS plus PROMPT, which he probably needs too but oh well. I'll look into good syllabication methods. I have a lot of Wilson materials, maybe some of them would suffice. Thanks again!

Hello everyone! I know there are a few people on here doing LiPS with their kiddos, and I thought I'd write an update about my student's progress with the program. I started working with this kiddo at school in September. He is 11. We work together for half an hour, four days a week. I also see him in some of his other classes so it's been great that I can incorporate our techniques there too! In our half hours, though, it's strictly LiPS, at least so far - I'm thinking we can move on soon. In September, he was pretty much a non-reader. He knew all his single consonant sounds, and *in theory* knew his vowel sounds, but not when faced with an actual word. He nearly always got CVC words wrong. It was extremely frustrating for him and his teachers. We started at the beginning with LiPS and we've also done some air-writing practice from Seeing Stars. Well, now it's December. I haven't done a DRA test or anything, BUT - his reading is MUCH improved! He can read all CVC words and is doing pretty well with 2-letter blends in words. The best thing is... he's actually SOUNDING OUT words! Accurately! Most exciting to me is he's starting to read CVC words fluently. Not sounding them out, but just reading them, like oh hey, I'm reading, no big deal! He doesn't notice that it's a big deal, but I DO! He's EXCELLENT at vowel sounds now. He can accurately get /i/ and /e/. We did /oo/ and /ee/, /ea/ which are his favorite. If he makes a mistake, a gentle prompt to "use your mouth!" does the trick. It's magical! We've started putting endings on some words, -ed and -ing. He's doing great with that. We are also doing "magic e," although LiPS does it differently than most other programs. That's harder but getting better! Air-writing and visualizing was almost impossible for him in the beginning. Now he can visualize 2-letter words, make substitutions with letters and read the new word, and add a third letter and read that word... in the air. Woo hoo! I can hardly believe LiPS worked as well as it did. I'm so grateful and happy!

Ah, too bad nobody else loves Bubbie's at your place. They're pretty hard to sneak into other food! :laugh:

No problem! I hope you report back about how it goes with her. I hope she finds LiPS intriguing enough to stay on task a bit more than usual :)

On the GAPS diet I believe you're supposed to introduce small amounts of probiotics (like a spoonful of sauerkraut juice, so verrrrryyyy slowly) and work your way up. She recommends BioKult and I've taken those. Do your kids like pickles? Bubbies pickles are naturally fermented and SO delicious. Their sourness comes from the fermentation only... no vinegar added! I found them at Wegmans, Whole Foods, and other natural food stores.

Lindamood-Bell tutors use little glass nuggets that they drop into a cup whenever a child gets an answer correct, tries really hard, has a good attitude, etc. The trick to it is to give nuggets extremely frequently so the child sees the cup filling up. I seem to remember that every time the cup is filled up, a star is marked off on a small card. When all the stars are marked off, the child gets to choose a prize at the end of the day. The tutors are directed to fill up the card during EVERY hour at minimum - so a child might get a card filled up and then a second one a quarter filled up in a single hour. It sounds hokey and contrived, but the kids get REALLY excited about it. At the end of a session (so a summer session might be 4 hours), the child gets to choose from different bins filled with small toys. Every child gets to pick a prize after EVERY session. They can save up their cards for a really good prize, or cash in right away. Some parents set their own rewards, like 10 cards for a $10 Target gift card, etc. I personally really liked the reward system. It was fun and fast, and kids got immediate positive reinforcement in addition to verbal praise.

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.

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!

I'm working with a boy who was basically a non-reader until this year. We're doing LiPS and it's working so well. It's like sounds and language are finally making sense to him. I recommend it to everyone I see! Seriously, I sing the praises of LiPS all day long to anyone who will listen. LiPS is also great because you can go through it quickly or slowly depending on what the child needs.

One of the tutors at my school made a "how angry/sad would I get" list with a HFA boy. They listed the numbers 0-10, with zero at the bottom, and then filled in events that would match how angry/sad/frustrated an event would make him. For example, a relative being in the hospital was a 9. Being told to stop playing his video game was a 7. Getting unexpected homework was a 5, etc. They referred to the list when they were talking about events of the day. I think it helped!

Thanks! I googled "Brothers and cousins LIPS" and some interesting pictures came up. I don't recommend, LOL. I did end up getting my hands on a manual after all, woo hoo! Do you think giving some LiPS "homework" would be of any benefit? I was thinking of making a worksheet of sorts with a few 2-letter words, with letters he's studied, and providing an envelope of cut-out mouth pictures. I was thinking he could glue the mouth pictures below the letters and read aloud to his mom. Not sure if that would be good because I wouldn't be there to correct any mistakes...

Hi everyone, I'm about to start volunteer tutoring a student in reading. I'm planning to do a combination of LiPS and Seeing Stars.The trouble is I own the Seeing Stars manual but not the LiPS manual. I'm trying to get a copy of LiPS but it might take a while. Does anyone know of any ways to "hack" the LiPS program and do it without the manual? I'm familiar with the program, but I don't know the sequence of introducing sounds. I do have access to the mouth pictures, tiles, etc, just not the manual. Is there a PDF floating out there on the internet with the vowel circle, the names of the sounds (lip poppers, tongue coolers, etc) things like that? I feel sort of dumb asking this, because I know I NEED the manual, but I have to get by for a while without it. Any ideas?