Yes, because Wilson (and Spell links, I assume) don't focus on phonemic awareness. You can do them both at the same time, but they're different. LiPS is meant to last for a period of weeks to months, not forever. If you're considering a career in this area, it would be a worthwhile investment. Of course, if it would throw the family budget under the bus, that's a different consideration.

Agreed. And LiPS can be used for much more than sound discrimination - spelling, reading, it's all in there. The lessons work on all of those at the same time. The beginning part of the program uses pictures of mouths, and you practice spelling/reading/making changes to words with those, and then you move to using letter tiles, but using the same terminology from earlier. When I do LiPS, even once we switch to letter tiles, I still bring out the mouth pictures frequently.

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LiPS teaches phonemic awareness, the awareness of the sounds within words. It helps with similar sounding sounds (b/p, t/d, f,v, etc) and vowels, among other things. The teacher manual for LiPS is excellent. Seeing Stars teaches kids to visualize the letters in their minds, and to make changes - for example, "visualize" the word "cat," then change the t to a p, and what letters do you "see?" C-A-P, cap. You also ask questions like, "What's the third letter you see? The middle letter? Now say them backwards. Now, forwards again." You're teaching kids to hold the visual representation of the letters in their minds, like on an invisible whiteboard. I'm more of a LiPS fan, but I like both.

I originally got ineterested in dyslexia after working for a summer at a Lindamood-Bell summer tutoring program. I had never thought about it, or teaching, before. Totally changed my life! So, yes, I'd suggest going into literacy intervention as a career. It's lots of fun, and very needed! Lots of states are starting to pass laws about dyslexia screening and/or the type of interventions to be used, so you would be in demand. Depending on where you are, you could be in high demand.

Popping in to say that I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE LiPS. I would say that it's easy to implement. It's amazing for getting kids to distinguish all of the sounds, and it's superb for phonemic awareness training, which is the foundation of all future reading. Wilson is awesome too! That's what I use at my public school. I love it. You can do LiPS and Wilson simultaneously. They are both rad 😎 Let me know if you have questions about either. And yes, the Lindamood-Bell stuff is expensive, but it's worth it, at least I think it is.

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I love the way you put this. It's not whatever work a person is thinking about, it's a logical set of steps to get the reader to understand how to solve the problem. Love it! Going to tell my 5th grade math students about this on Monday 🙂

Yeah, I do think saying "mild" or whatever is not necessarily helpful, since you still have to do all of the steps to remediate. You won't really know until you get in there and start doing stuff. BUT, I'm just saying it's probably a positive sign that, although some scores were *lower*, they weren't in the well below average range. A lot of my students are in that well below average range, and it's a whole different kettle of fish to remediate for those kids vs. kids that have less severe issues. I'm not downplaying "mild" AT ALL. I think way more kids need this remediating that testing "shows." (Don't get me started! It's a whole different topic. LOL 😀)

Well, there's mildly dyslexic all the way to severely dyslexic. In some ways, mildly dyslexic is the most confusing! But with a lot of really well-done remediation, she has a good chance of reading well and, who knows, even enjoying reading! 🙂 She may always read a little more slowly than most people, or have more spelling errors, but if she's the kind of person who can advocate for herself (eventually), she can say, hey, I'm dyslexic so please bear with spelling errors in my emails! and stuff like that.

I should think she'd get an IEP with a diagnosis of dysgraphia.

Well, that's annoying and a bit strange. It's possible that the school would say she has a "specific learning disability" by merit of her other scores being quite high, and these being a bit low. Would you mind sharing the CTOPP scores? I've been pondering a lot of kids' CTOPP results lately. Our psych diagnosed a student as dyslexic with only one sub-test on the CTOPP being low, and the rest average to above average. I guess it really depends on who you ask! You might be pleasantly surprised by the school's response - let's hope so! I don't see why the psych automatically said the school wouldn't give her an IEP. Do they do a good job with intervention?

How about teaching? You need great people skills, good problem solving skills, and you're also on your feet a lot 🙂 He could also be involved with a sport or intramural after school sport. He could get an advanced degree while working/ during the summers, even online! My M.Ed. is through Penn State online, and it was a really great experience. I think a smart, patient, kind, hardworking guy with a policing background would be the ideal teacher!

Since your daughter likes to know what's happening next, could you make her a daily list? You could put on all the things she has to do, a couple "would be nice if you do them" things, and then any appointments, fun stuff, etc. Could you pick a fun activity for each day that you can use as an incentive? If you're not able to go someplace because the other kids are busy, it could be baking cookies, watching a show together, etc. I always recommend making the initial to-do lists SUPER easy and achievable, so you get a good positive feedback loop going. Then, you can add a teeny bit of challenge - like one math problem you think she will get wrong. Since the other demands are low, she can get through that one math problem and then move on to something else she feels confident about. Easier said than done, I know! 😊

I agree with this. At my PS, if a kid is struggling, they go on a "Tier 1" plan (with the classroom teacher) to see if a bit of extra help makes a difference. If not, after two 6-week cycles of intervention, they go into "Tier 2" and get more intervention (this would be small group, pull-out instruction a couple times a week). If, after two more 6-week cycles they aren't making improvement, THEN they would get referred to special ed. Even then, if the team doesn't think there is enough of an issue to go forward with evals, then they would say, do some more RTI at Tier 2 and see what happens in X weeks. On the flip side, if a kid is obviously WAY below where they should be, having super behavioral or academic struggles, then the timeline would be shortened. I do think that your PS would reasonably say, let's see how she does with school before we jump to evals. The evals at our PS are done by a PhD psychologist, and they're really good. Our evaluator has a private practice, but does the evals for our school because we're small. She is great! So the evals you would get at school could be great, but I'm sure it depends on who they have. You could probably find out who the evaluator would be at the PS. If you want to go private, you could get on a waiting list now. I know (from this board) that some public schools don't accept private evaluations when deciding eligibility for special ed. At my school, I suspect the admin would be so happy not to pay for evaluations that they'd accept the outside evals in a heartbeat!

Whoa!! No idea! How did you find that out? No wonder my DH feels horrible after eating out! OP, sorry about your daughter. I'm sure you'll figure it out, and I agree that Celiac is harder to accommodate - you're already a pro! Food allergies scare me, too, so I understand where you're coming from.

Yay! I need to find a book like that to work with a kid, too. Great work!!!!! Just thinking about how far he's come is astonishing.

That is AMAZING!!!!!!!! Woo hoo, celebration time!!!!!!!!

I don't think you come across that way at all. You sound wonderful, and your boys, too. I wish you would somehow find the right doctor that could help your boys.

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This is great! Could you have him write for math that's super easy (like, you give him a too-easy problem on purpose), so he doesn't have to contend with the language, calculation, math-to-symbol stuff, AND writing at the same time? Maybe if the language/thinking load is lighter, he'd be able to write the math. In any case, it would be interesting to find out if that would actually happen! Now I'm curious. 🙂

Oh man, I hear you. My math students also have language disabilities, and it's so much effort to get the language part of a problem figured out, and then to have the calculation on top of it - it's exhausting. Heaven help us if there are two part word problems! Scribing with integrity is no easy feat. I just had to scribe for state tests. It's not perfect by any means. Just like how text to speech is helpful, but also often really not that good... I feel the same about scribing. And kids kinda look at you like, am I doing this right...? Like Lecka said, there's also an embarrassment factor, like they know they're not doing that well, or they feel judged in some way. Scribing is definitely not equally as good as being able to do it on your own. Personally, I might only scribe "with integrity" for tests where you need to know what he can actually do on his own. For regular work, I'd probably just have him help me get it down correctly, kinda like an errorless learning way of teaching. Learning how the math symbols associate with the actual math, well, that's a whole different situation 🙂

Sorry you're feeling blue. I bet there are ways to raise your serotonin level...? In any case, I hope you start feeling better ASAP! Some favs: Kim's Convenience (Netflix) Corner Gas (Netflix), a Canadian sitcom The IT Crowd (classic British comedy) Father Ted (Irish comedy), Amazon Prime

Something to keep in mind is that if he's not used to persevering, he doesn't have much experience with that great feeling of accomplishing something after a lot of hard work. He may really not know that he CAN struggle, fail, struggle, and ultimately overcome. At my school, they teach the kindergarten and first graders the word "persevere," and the teachers use it in conversation ALL the time. We have a school motto that includes the word perseverance - the motto is called "habits of success" or something like that All the K-8 students refer to perseverance all the time. Being able to put a name to an emotion/action seems to really help the kids here. And, once they succeed after persevering, they realize that they can apply that perseverance in other contexts. Maybe you could pick something you know he'll struggle with a little bit, and then help him to him finish it. Then, you can increase the difficulty gradually, all the while praising his perseverance rather than his innate skills. Those picture books you got sound wonderful, too 🙂