c/p Dyspraxic 6 yo -- reading

[GypsieFamily]

I don;t know what to do. She had a severe speech delay and articulation disorder (dyspraxic). At 4 she said her first word. By 5 she was age-appropriate for language and articulation.

By 5.5 she could recognise most of the 70 phonograms. She can 'glue' and 'unglue' words into syllables and sounds. SWR style she'll sound out the word and syllables, then write it down. She can read and write the syllablry. None of this is particularly difficult for her.

 

but in 6 months nothing has changed! No progress. None. Not a thing. She'll do one word, and then we'll do the next one. By the time we've done the second word, she's completely forgotten the first. No recollection whatsoever.

 

I feel like banging my head into a brick wall. I'm just not sure where to go. I think it's tied up with her dyspraxia, and I know a lot of it is age appropriate. My other kids have hit plateaus before, but for 6 months??? What would you do?

 

(FWIW - dyspraxia and dyslexia have a really strong cross-over, so please don't suggest whole-word, I'm wanting to avoid anything that may increase her already high-risk of dyslexia.)

[Tokyomarie]

I wish I had some really good answers for you. I don't. But I have to say that my son was a lot like your daughter. He had a severe speech delay, having just a few unintelligible words at 3.5 but not combining any two words. He was diagnosed with a "severe phonological speech delay." I suspect dyspraxia would be a more accurate descriptor but that is not the word that was used. At 4.5, after 1 year of speech therapy he was completely age appropriate and had a vocabulary that was somewhere above the 95th %ile.

 

During his 5 year old year, we worked on letter sounds and did Earobics and other activities for phonemic awareness. He had all the consonant sounds & understood that the vowels had both a short and long sound, though he didn't have the more advanced phonograms down. He understood that letters & their sounds went together to make words. But it took another whole year before he could blend sounds to sound out CVC words. Like your daughter it seemed like there was a memory glitch, in which by the time he got to the last sound, he had forgotten the first sound. It was a long, hard slog, but he finally got it. He was not reading at grade level until mid-4th grade.

 

One thing that we learned last year is that he still has difficulty with reading fluency. He doesn't have the automaticity in retrieval of words he's seen often and apparently will still sound out longer words that he should know by now. Fluency training has really helped his reading speed. Here are a few fluency activities you can do:

 

1) create flashcards using words she has already sounded out a few times and work towards quick recall of the word. This is different than using flashcards as a primary whole-word strategy, because you only make cards for words she has sounded out a number of times.

 

2) type a list of words that she has encountered in her reading curriculum in a list that goes across the page like typical print, but not in a sentence. Have her practice saying the list as quickly as she can. You can time her/she can time herself using a stopwatch, to see how she improves. Start with a list of words with similar phonics rules, such as cat, hat, rat. Then mix up the words a bit. There is a program called RAVE-O that uses this type of activity in a carefully sequenced progression. You could just try making your own lists to see how it goes.

 

3) Have her read her reader, or one page of a reader at a time, many times until she is able to read each sentence without stopping to sound out any words.

 

Working memory and memory for word forms seem to be issues with these symptoms. Once we have cracked the code of reading & sound out each new word a few times, we transfer the task of reading that word to a kind of visual memory. Word form memory is based on the way a word looks & is a more efficient way of word retrieval when reading known words. Though the sounding out process iis important for learning to read new words it is inefficient and puts stress on working memory when a child must use it every time he reads a given word. When kids have glitches in working memory (the ability to hold two or more things in memory while manipulating them for some task) and/or visual word form memory, it can make both the process of sounding out new words and retrieving known words through the visual system rather painful. I highy suspect this was a major part of my son's difficulty with learning to read.

[wapiti]

Aside from dyslexia, my understanding is that people with dyspraxia can also have ocular motor issues (vision). I don't know whether vision problems would lead to the particular problem she's having, but I just thought I'd throw that out there, as something that could be ruled out. http://www.covd.org/Home/AboutVisionLearning/SymptomsChecklist/tabid/114/Default.aspx

[GypsieFamily]

I don't know about vision. If that was an issue though, I'd imagine that she'd stuggle a bit more with the recognition of syllables and phonograms?

 

As Tokyomarie said, it just doesn't stick in her brain. I'm even wondering if maybe I just get her to spell the same ten words every.single.time until she can actually do this easily?

 

Or maybe use Webster's Syllablry so she memorizes the spelling patterns?

 

I've even wondered if there is just too short a time between when she said her first word and when I'm asking her to learn to read ... considering she had a severe delay ... maybe I'm not giving her enough time to consolidate oral/aural skills first?

[merry gardens]

...I'm even wondering if maybe I just get her to spell the same ten words every.single.time until she can actually do this easily?...

I was going to suggest something along those lines, but even ten words might be too many. Try between two and five. Some children need to see words over a hundred times before they will recognize the words by sight. Knowing words by sight helps build fluency. It's different from "whole words" or other methods that simply teach the words by sight without teaching underlying phonics. I'd suggest starting with words that are phonetically regular. Elizabeth has a page on how to teach sight words phonetically. The "Seeing Stars" manual by Lindamood-Bell describes some techniques that may be helpful and the program has some cute workbooks for children that I used with my son to build his fluency. Start with just a few words until she's got them, then add more. Fluency builds, and it's really rewarding to watch a struggling reader acquire a larger sight word vocabulary.

 

Based on my experience, I'll warn you that once a child can easily read the word, it still might be hard for some children to remember the spelling. Then once they have the spelling of the word when writing one word at a time, they may misspell the word when writing a phrase or sentence or paragraph. That doesn't mean that our children aren't making progress. It means that the progress is so slow that we can barely detect it. Nevertheless, slow progress is still progress.

 

Also yes, to what you wrote about it might be rather soon after she learned to talk to expect her to read.

Edited June 15, 2011 by merry gardens

[Tokyomarie]

Based on my experience, I'll warn you that once a child can easily read the word, it still might be hard for some children to remember the spelling. Then once they have the spelling of the word when writing one word at a time, they may misspell the word when writing a phrase or sentence or paragraph. That doesn't mean that our children aren't making progress. It means that the progress is so slow that we can barely detect it. Nevertheless, slow progress is still progress.

 

Also yes, to what you wrote about it might be rather soon after she learned to talk to expect her to read.

 

This was also my experience with spelling for my son. He reached chapter book level in reading around the end of 4th grade. In 9th grade he was reading adult level works. When given time & a half for reading a standard passage, his reading comprehension tested at roughly 90th percentile during the neuropsych testing he had in 9th grade. Despite trying numerous approaches to spelling, during the same neuropsych testing he tested at about end of 2nd grade level in spelling which is <1st percentile.

 

Ds is FINALLY making progress in spelling by doing work with a tutor who uses a combination of methods as well as daily work with an online computer program called Wizardsspell. I wouldn't use Wizardsspell with such a young student but I mention it for the benefit of others who have older students who still struggle with spelling. Wizardsspell can be used to supplement any spelling program because the teacher has the option to choose from a huge library of spelling lists or can create her own lists from those in the child's curriculum. My son is dysgraphic & writing the words multiple times wasn't helping. For many years he struggled just to think about how to form the letters & that effort overrode the possible benefit for spelling memory that he got from the exercise. The main advantage of Wizardsspell for my son is that the keyboarding bypasses the dysgraphia & allows the repetition to build memory. It also gets me out of the spelling practice equation, except for setting up his word lists.

[PeterPan]

I feel for you, because you're a few steps ahead of me. However I can throw in a few things. One, you're not going to *make* the dc dyslexic. Either her brain processes that way or it doesn't. My oldest is dyslexic, and I taught her to read with SWR. Like Marie says, we used Sanseri's instructions (they're in the Wise Guide for one of the early list enrichments, go look) and made flashcards that we read OVER AND OVER for fluency.

 

No, things didn't stick well. She'd totally understand it in the moment and act like she had never seen the word later. And three years of repeating the lists made no difference either. Yes, we had some visual problems going on too, and no you can't rule them out.

 

Sanseri, author of SWR, says to use flashcards for the words to build fluency, so I would do it and not be afraid. These are words they understand, have sounded through, and can spell again. You're just trying to build automaticity. The other thing I did when my dd was that age was make little storybooks out of folded paper. I put a simple sentence on each page using her words and had her read and illustrate it. It was like she needed a little nudge to realize she COULD read. So that might be something else to try.

 

Yes, the whole process with some kids is way more exasperating than it ought to be. Just be patient and keep working on it. Sometimes we went forward, sometimes we went back and repeated stuff (going back to the A lists and starting over 3 times in one year!). The audiobooks she listened to during those years were one of the things we did *right* so I highly recommend that. If they're not going to be champions at sounding out, they might as well have enough of a vocabulary that they can figure out the words pretty quickly by recognizing what they can do, kwim?

 

And this little reality check has me sighing and thinking that I've been in Wishful Thinking Land about my ds and his future with reading, joy. He is diagnosed with moderate apraxia and does talk now, though nothing near age-appropriate. But the talking doesn't mean the rest will work. I don't know what I'll do to head that off at the pass. Maybe more thorough work on the phonograms, gluing and ungluing, etc.? I don't know. I'll have to ponder it, sigh.

Edited June 15, 2011 by OhElizabeth

[GypsieFamily]

Thanks, I really needed someone to tell me that I can't make her dyslexic if I choose the wrong method.

 

OhElizabeth, I wonder one minute if I'm just expecting too much from her as even though her speech is great now and has no delays, we are talking about a child who said her first word 22 months ago. And then I think ... but we haven't had ANY progress in 6 months with reading.

 

Not.one.little.bit. So I wonder if there's something I'm not doing right, or if we are potentially looking at a child who will struggle to learn how to read ... but then I think, she's only just turning 6 in two weeks.

 

Am I expecting too much? Am I missing something? Usually I'm fairly bright and up-beat about the whole dyspraxia diagnosis these days, but I'm not so sure on this. My older two learnt to read fairly easily (even though the eldest is also dyspraxic).

 

Travelling, I don't have a support network ... so I'm sort of floundering with teaching her to read at the moment.

[PeterPan]

Well I hate for you to miss anything, but honestly I think it takes time. It's a process that can't be rushed. I told you that when my dd was 5 we went through the lists in SWR, starting over and over at A, *3* times. I'm saying we worked from July to February and seemed to make no progress. Then, boom, she started reading. But it was pretty incomprehensible to me all those months.

 

Have you had her evaluated for anything more than speech? There's probably something going on there. Didn't matroyshka or someone on the boards here finally say what it turned out to be in their similar situation? I'm drawing a blank. Maybe for them it was working memory? I just can't remember.

 

The farther I go in this journey, the less afraid I am of evaluations. I think you're doing the best you know to do right now. Definitely start putting the words on flashcards and seeing where that gets you. It's ok to give it a few more months. But during those few months, I'd start trying to find a good ed psych or neuropsych to get a full evaluation. You're probably going to need one. You're probably seeing little bits of a bigger problem that is going to keep nagging at you. Might as well get it figured out now as later. So my dd was pretty close to 6 when she did start reading, but like I'm saying, the things that made it so frustrating didn't go away and were still there. We just kept glossing over them. By 5th grade the problems were impossible to ignore and we started getting evaluations for stuff. So you might as well get evaluations now and save yourself the grief, that's my two cents.

[cathmom]

I'll just answer from my experience with my dc and you see if anything helps.

 

My older dd has severe dyslexia and dysgraphia, but never had speech issues (she spoke perfectly at two). It took 2 years of consistent phonics for her to learn to read at age 7. It was like you describe with her - she would sound out a word, and then the next time she saw that word it was like it was brand new. She had a very difficult time remembering sight words when reading. For years she confused "of" and "from." Her dysgraphia makes spelling hard. For a period of several months we were working on the list of 500 most common words, 3 at a time. She could never reliably spell anything no matter how much we practiced.

 

Now, my fourth child had a severe articulation problem, which was noticed when his younger brothers began speech therapy. He corrected them all very quickly, as it sounds like your dd did. (BTW, I've just been reading about apraxia and it seems that apraxia/dyspraxia couldn't be fixed so fast? Don't know, but our SLP has suggested that my twins might have apraxia.) Once his substitutions were fixed, he took off with phonics and read just before his 6th birthday.

 

So, based on my dc, I think it sounds more like dyslexia (which, I agree, you cannot give her - she either has it or not).

 

HTH in some way. :grouphug:

[peacefully]

.

[GypsieFamily]

How early is too early to start considering dyslexia?

 

Evaluations and ongoing relationships are challenging at the moment as we are travelling, and in the middle of nowhere (currently the middle of the South Australian desert). There is no one around to do evaluations here. I'm sorta on my own with this one.

 

She's had every single evaluation under the sun I think. The paediatrician was so thorough and sent her off for test after test after test. She hasn't had any testing or evaluations done recently though, so maybe there are more tests that would have come available.

 

With such a severe language delay, the paediatrician wanted to rule out autism or intellectual disability, but she didn't fit the categories for either of those, and her only delay (then) was speech ... which at two/three/four came back as severely delayed, at five came back as age appropriate.

 

 

Cathmom:

I don't know about the speed that other kids take to improve. I know my son (Peter) wasn't age appropriate until 8. His was much longer process, but the diagnosis was delayed and he was extremely ridiculously annoyingly frustratingly uncooperative.

 

For Lucy, she was particularly compliant and cooperative. We actually paid a final year education student to come in and work exclusively with her four days a week. She incorporated speech therapy into games and play for her. She had 6 lots of 5 minutes of home practice of therapy daily (every day). She also had an hour of speech therapy with a therapist two times a week. (Can you tell I was more than a little stressed and paranoid at the time?) It all paid off and once we got through that barrier of getting the first word, it looked up.

[Tokyomarie]

I think at this point you could get away with just trying strategies on your own that are known to be helpful for teaching dyslexic students. You've already gotten good ideas here. The Online Orton-Gillingham Introductory Course which has been mentioned in this forum before might be a helpful way for you to get more ideas. This course is run by the publishers of various materials for regular & special ed learners, including the Explode the Code phonics series which I used for both of my younger two children & found to be a helpful tool. Various homeschool supply houses in the US carry it. It is a US product, & I'm not whether there are differences that need to be accounted for when using it with Australian students. The intro course teaches the OG principles & is not tied to a particular curriculum.

　

　

How long do you plan to be on the road? If you'll be living back in your home area say within a year, I really wouldn't worry about trying to set up an evaluation on the road. If you're looking at this travel as a longterm lifestyle, I would be more likely to suggest finding an evaluator you could schedule an appointment with- around here they schedule 2-3 months out, sometimes longer- and then plan your travel schedule so you could be in that city for the date of the appointment & the followup appointment which usually happens 1-2 weeks after testing.

Edited June 17, 2011 by Tokyomarie
Added link for O-G course

[GypsieFamily]

Thank you to everyone. As Tokyomarie said, there are so many great suggestions and I'll just keep plugging away with her yet.

 

I'm really hoping it's just her age, and that it'll all fall in to place soon. I just have this niggly feeling that it's not just her age and her dyspraxia is playing a part somewhere ... but I'll just keep on keeping on and see where we go for the moment.

[ElizabethB]

My student with apraxia is behind where a normal student would be and takes a lot of repetition...but he is progressing. He can actually now read long 3+ syllable words better than some linguistically challenging words like branch or straight. So, when he finishes up the last bit of regular phonics, he should be able to sound out anything because he's doing very well with syllables.

 

I use Webster's Speller with him, very successfully, the 1908 version. The marked print is very helpful for him.

 

His mom uses CLE with him, it is a very good program for someone with apraxia. He cannot do it all in one day, though, he does the phonics portion one day and the reading portion the next.

 

Marked print, spelling, and short work with repetition are what has helped him the most. He gets visually fatigued after sounding out words for a few minutes and needs a break.

 

I also use my UPP with him and my syllable division exercises.

 

For a while, I also used the 1879 McGuffey readers. That made 4 different marked prints! (I would not do that many different ones with a normal student, but he is very smart and the marked prints are very helpful for him.)

[GypsieFamily]

ElizabethB -- should I just keep working on getting those phonogram recognition perfect, and the syllables?

 

And work orton-gillingham style with her spelling out words? I have very few resources as we can't carry much travelling, but I have websters and the Wise Guide (SWR) so I could use either of those as spelling lists.

 

It's just so frustrating that she doesn't seem to be getting anywhere. She can sound out words with help, there is just no retention.at.all.

[ElizabethB]

ElizabethB -- should I just keep working on getting those phonogram recognition perfect, and the syllables?

 

And work orton-gillingham style with her spelling out words? I have very few resources as we can't carry much travelling, but I have websters and the Wise Guide (SWR) so I could use either of those as spelling lists.

 

It's just so frustrating that she doesn't seem to be getting anywhere. She can sound out words with help, there is just no retention.at.all.

 

:grouphug:

 

Yes. My student needs a lot of repetition. You can make up a reference chart in the meantime, but keep working on them. Here is a sample, I'll see if Don Potter knows if there are any free ones online.

 

If it is any consolation, my son also needs a lot of repetition, although not quite as much as my remedial students.

 

I would also try some word families like yllek suggested. If the student does not start guessing from word families, it is fine to do a word family approach occasionally, especially for a struggling student, it helps them to see the pattern of the phonics and hear and see the rhyme.

 

The 1879 McGuffey's are online for free, you can see if those markings are helpful, it will take a while to get used to the markings and see if they are going to be helpful:

 

The First Eclectic Reader from Project Gutenberg, you want the 7.6 mB pdf version so you can see the markings, this should be a link to that file:

 

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14640/14640-pdf.pdf

 

The key to the markings is at the end, p. 95 - 96.

[GypsieFamily]

Thanks, I think I must just be expecting her to move faster than her abilities allow.

 

It's just that I want to see some progress. I'm wondering if I allowed her more repetition and time to get the phonograms and syllables, and then just expected that it would flow over to the words without doing enough repetition because that's what worked with my older two.

 

I'm just downloading McGuffeys's for her to put on the kindle. Hopefully the mobi version has the markings, too, as that works natively on the kindle.

[ElizabethB]

I'm just downloading McGuffeys's for her to put on the kindle. Hopefully the mobi version has the markings, too, as that works natively on the kindle.

 

Let me know if that works--I have them as pdfs in iBooks right now, but they might be more useful in my Kindle app.

[GypsieFamily]

Will do. Peter and Susan have kindles and she's been promised one when she can read a book like "Little House in the Big Woods". That promise was made when I thought she was going to progress faster than this. I'm wondering now if I need to revise that and have her kindle sitting there for use during school time. She's so keen, and wants to so badly.

 

It would be different if she wasn't enthusiastic and trying so hard. I can really see her trying (even though lollies are involved sometimes). It's definately not a laziness or a lack of interest issue. That's probably why I mind more.

[SailorMom]

They "dys"s tend to come together.

My son was dyspraxic, and is dysgraphic, dyscalculic, and dyslexic.

I know that I am in the minority here, but my neuropsychologist agrees with me, and moy sone is reading adult level books and has been since 6th grade.... sooooo... it may not only work for me....

 

Phonic does not work well with (many/most/some) dyslexics.

Maybe don't give it up completely, but I highly recommend you try something else for a while :) Perhaps the dreaded "whole word" method! I'm telling you - it worked. It still works. In fact - I learned to read this way as well, on accident and on my own. I've never understood phonics and am an excellent natural speller.

 

DS is a faster reader than me and has wonderful comprehension. Now - he still can't spell - but that was something I wasn't as worried about, and his neuro basically told me that he didn't think my ds was capapble of good spelling anyway.