Can you describe Seeing Stars?

[RamonaQ]

Can anyone describe this program? What is a typical lesson?

 

Mostly curious, more than anything else.

[peacefully]

I wrote about it in an old thread.

OE, I'm looking at some similar issues with my ds. We're finishing up VT and switching up our OT program at the end of January. The next phase of treatment, in my mind, is to work on visual memory, working memory, symbol imagery and visualization. I purchased the Seeing Stars manual to get a sense of the program, and I may end up taking the workshop in April if I cannot make progress on my own.

 

I was a little surprised by how basic and repetitive the basic process is. Starting with letters, the teacher shows a card for 2 seconds, then the student says and writes the letter in the air (without looking at the card). Then the teacher says the sound of the letter, and the student air writes again.

 

Then they do the same thing with syllable cards. The teacher also asks the student to recall a specific letter — "What's the third letter that you see?"

 

Then they start to change specific letters during the recall process and do other exercises that manipulate the "imaged" word. I think it's important to note that so far, all the words are nonsense words, which the student is decoding. I also think it would be very difficult to do these tasks through auditory skills rather than visualization.

 

Then they do the process with sight words. When they start to teach spelling, the student is supposed to analyze the word (including marking the words a la Spalding, I think), visualize it, and write it.

 

I'm oversimplifying, obviously, but that's the very basic barebones structure. The repetition of it is going to kill me. I've debated getting the $400+ kit, but the bulk of the cost is for flashcards. Over two hundred dollars worth of flashcards. I'm sure this is against my religion somehow.

[merry gardens]

Can anyone describe this program? What is a typical lesson?

 

Mostly curious, more than anything else.

Disclaimer: I'm not doing the full program, just a portion of it. As Kelly wrote, the program develops visual imagery for letters and words. It works with both phonics and sight words, real words and nonsense words. The child learns to "see" letters and words in his head. It uses a few other multi-sensory techniques, like sky writing and finger writing to help the child learn the words.

 

To promote fluency, the children learn to read common words quickly, even those that can be de-coded with phonics. It used flashcards and other things for that. But, it's nothing like the old Dolch sight word list/whole language approach because children do learn the rules of phonics. We're using the portion of the program that teaches to read and spell the most common words in the English language. It calls those "star words". We take a few star words at a time and work on them so he can read them quickly. I also used some of their workbooks, which gives short definitions for some common words and uses them in several sentences. Those workbooks were very helpful for my son because he misunderstood the meaning of some common words.

 

Anyway, that's describes how I'm doing it, although I only read through the manual and didn't take the training. I'm using it to supplement the work we do with Barton. When my son couldn't pass the Barton screen, he needed to use LiPS, (which is produced by Lindamood-Bell, the same company that created Seeing Stars.) LiPS was so helpful that I decided to explore their other programs and materials.

 

Kelly--did you decide to take the training? Are you doing the full Seeing Stars program? Do you think there is any overlap between Seeing Stars program and some of the skills taught in VT?

[peacefully]

.

[merry gardens]

Blah, blah, blah... I go on entirely too much on this forum. You guys do realize that you all are my only place to talk about this stuff, right? Even dh has started to look like this :001_huh: when we start talking about therapy and homeschool - lol.

I'm not surprised. :D My husband looks like your husband.

 

I appreciate you sharing your experience and "listening" to me going on and on too. Your vision therapy experience intrigues me. I know that my son's earlier reading struggles related to auditory processing/poor phonemic awareness, but he also has a poor sight memory for words. That's why I added pieces of Seeing Stars. We've finished all six of their workbooks to cover the 300 most common words. He can read those words now, he knows what they mean and both his reading fluency and comprehension improved significantly. He misspells a large number of those sight words in his written assignments, but he's making progress. Most importantly, he can read and understand what he read. Yeah! (We've done lots of things, not just Seeing Stars.)

 

Blah, blah, blah....Are your eyes glazed over yet? :lol:

[peacefully]

.

[merry gardens]

Are you kidding?? I find this stuff so fascinating. And I think we can appreciate the gains that each others' kiddos are making more than almost anyone else. When you say that your ds did SIX workbooks of Seeing Stars, on top of all the other work that the two of you have done, and now he owns those 300 common words, I am seriously ECSTATIC for both of you. :thumbup::thumbup:

 

There was a several month period that I just lurked on this board. I was a total worried mess of a mom, especially after seeing some of the LD tragedies on dh's side of the family. I'm telling you, the questions and answers on this board were so enlightening for me, but those little stories of a success here and an accomplishment there were what kept me feeling hopeful, YKWIM? I needed to hear that something was working for someone, and I still love to hear those stories.

 

MG, you just go on and blab ALL you want. I am soaking it up. :grouphug:

:grouphug:Thanks!

 

I love reading other people's success stories too. And I needed that encouragement from you.:) Writing it all out here helps me. My poor husband gets the un-edited version. I'm sure I could make your eyes glaze over if I didn't edit my writing before posting. ;)

 

We're here in the trenches and it's hard to see our children's progress. Rarely do things just change overnight. The closest thing to your VT experience for my ds happened with LiPS, which is why I've explored all the LMB products. I get discouraged at how slow it goes--and things we've covered need to re-visited over and over again.

 

I knew it was a big step when we finished those SS workbooks, but on one of the final pages, he wrote a letter reversal. (Letter reversals are something he hadn't done in a very long time.) After we finished them, we moved right onto another some LMB history books and workbooks. I found he didn't spell some of his "star words" correctly when he wrote in a paragraph in his history workbook. I re-tested him on the first 100 that he passed off months and months ago-- and he spelled 21 of them wrong. So...we're going back through them again.

 

Okay, so he can't spell all those words correctly, but at least he can read them. Two years ago, I wondered if he'd ever read. I was homeschooling this bright child, and I couldn't teach him to read. I couldn't find the right professionals to help me figure out what was going on and what to do about it. I was a mess of a mom back then too. Some days I'm still a mess. I need to stay focus on the positive. Thanks for the encouragement. :)

[peacefully]

I hear you about the spelling. I had ds spelling "thank you" almost everyday for two weeks before he could do it. Same with the word "think." He supposedly has great phonemic awareness, but for the first, he couldn't hear the "n" when he tries to isolate the phonemes. With "think" he hears a long "e" instead of a short "i" almost every time. The rules didn't help him with these words. :glare: He can finally do it if he concentrates. If he's zipping along, but overloaded because he's worried about handwriting or concentrating on composing or overstimmed by his sister, he'll misspell them again.

 

But then our SLP was telling me that these language processing kids (and perhaps the auditory processing kids too) go in these waves... Whenever ds's brain seems to adjust to a new level of processing, she tells me to anticipate a period of "disorganization." He'll seem to lose the skills that he has gained. He may be more emotional or spacey. She tells me to picture the brain rewiring itself—there's a point at which it pulls out the wires before it can reroute them in a more efficient way. She always seems to predict these wonky periods accurately. Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks, but then ds can go back to his previous level and then move forward.

 

All this to say, progress with our kids is not linear.

 

I have to remind myself of this about a dozen times a day.

[merry gardens]

I hear you about the spelling. I had ds spelling "thank you" almost everyday for two weeks before he could do it. Same with the word "think." He supposedly has great phonemic awareness, but for the first, he couldn't hear the "n" when he tries to isolate the phonemes. With "think" he hears a long "e" instead of a short "i" almost every time. The rules didn't help him with these words. :glare: He can finally do it if he concentrates. If he's zipping along, but overloaded because he's worried about handwriting or concentrating on composing or overstimmed by his sister, he'll misspell them again.

 

But then our SLP was telling me that these language processing kids (and perhaps the auditory processing kids too) go in these waves... Whenever ds's brain seems to adjust to a new level of processing, she tells me to anticipate a period of "disorganization." He'll seem to lose the skills that he has gained. He may be more emotional or spacey. She tells me to picture the brain rewiring itself—there's a point at which it pulls out the wires before it can reroute them in a more efficient way. She always seems to predict these wonky periods accurately. Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks, but then ds can go back to his previous level and then move forward.

 

All this to say, progress with our kids is not linear.

 

I have to remind myself of this about a dozen times a day.

:grouphug:

Kelly, I like what your SLP had to say. And yes, it's not exactly linear. Spelling words in isolation is different for these kids from when they have to pull it all together with handwriting and creative writing and grammar. I had a thread on this about a week ago because I was so frustrated that ds couldn't pull it all together. We did his spelling test this week by writing sentences using the words he missed previously. He did much better on the test yesterday. Slowly making progress.

 

Most of us learn some of the rules then "reading" takes over from there, but our struggling readers don't do that. They get confused, especially when we throw a "curve ball". "Think" and "thank" are curve balls; they don't do what you might expect. It looks to me like your son does have good phonemic awareness since he could figure that out. The "n" in both those words take on a nasal quality--really more of the /ng/ sound. K's and g's are produced from the same spot in the mouth, and typically when "n' is produced right before k or g, they sound different from the usual /n/ sound. The 'i" in 'think" isn't pronounce with a true short /i/ sound either. Say "thin" and add a /k/--and that's not how the word "think" is pronounced. I don't remember how either LiPs or Seing Stars handles these words, but Barton teaches the "ing","ink" and "ank" as unit syllables.

[peacefully]

.

[Lymeade Mom]

I learned so much from doing Seeing Stars for 6 weeks. And I only paid a dollar for it. :) I got it through interlibrary loan. Now I use the airwriting and spelling backwards with any word dd has a hard time with as we are going through AAS. I think it's been the cement for her in what she's learning.

 

You could also just buy the basic book and use with another program like AAS. To me, they make the perfect program together.