Phonics help

[CTVKath]

Hi there. I need some phonics help and recommendations. We are using Phonics Pathways and my 7yo son is struggling with it. He reads b's and d's interchangeably. We've been working on ing/ang/og/ung and ink/ank/unk in the last couple of weeks and those are hard. He'll read the word link. But the work "linking" he reads as "links". Once he thinks there is an "s" in there, he doesn't see anything else. Some days I think we're fine. Other days he mis-reads so many consonants that I want to tear my hair out. Sometimes he adds an "n" to the middle of the word and even with me gently telling him that I don't see an "n", he can't get the "n" out of the word. His eyes and ears are fine although they will be tested again in the next couple of months. My sister-in-law has been a 1st grade teacher for at least 20 years and she does not think there are any dyslexia issues. She thinks he needs more hands on and manipulatives in order for it to click.

I've been through Phonics Pathways with an older child and love it. My 7yo son loves Dewey and his sayings. We are using Explode the Code as a supplement and my son is doing fine with that although I started at the very beginning of the series a few months ago so he's just about to finish Book B.

So here's my question. I've been looking at All About Reading and it seems to have hands on manipulatives and games. Do I jump ship to the All About Reading? He does love games. It's expensive but I'm willing to pay for it. The only reason I haven't already bought it is because it seems to be teacher intensive. But the reality is my son might need teacher intensive for learning to read.

I love Phonics Pathways and hate to abandon it but I think my son needs more hands on help.

Thank you. 

[HomeAgain]

You can make your own manipulatives or just add ones to what you're doing.  Since you're working on chunks, write those chunks on index cards. You can cut one card into pieces and use smaller pieces for individual letters, medium for two letter chunks, and larger for 3-4, and so on.  Have him study the chunks individually, like you're doing, but with the cards.  And then build the words together and have him read them, and then go back to the book and read the lesson in the book.  It will slow him down enough to really read them, and if he needs more time building words with the cards before returning to the book you can take all the time he needs.

'b' and 'd' are common mistakes.  We take special time with these letters and learning how to write them.  It's part of why I like d'nealian, because it isn't simply drawing a ball and a stick or a stick and a ball, but starting the letters at different points.  Having him mentally go through how to write them helped slow him down to read, and so did the little trick of holding up both hands with fingers in 'd' shapes, and teaching that he can read 'bed' by putting an 'e' between them (so it's always 'b' shape on the left hand).

 

[Syllieann]

You could try using the cursor technique as done in AAR and dancing bears.  You only reveal one phonogram at a time, which forces him to sound it out instead of guess.  Building the words with tiles may also help.  He can slide each individual tile up as he says its sound.  You could also have him spell the troublesome word aloud before attempting to read it again.  That forces him to look at each letter.  I do like the reading sheets with AAR though because they are prepared for me and we can color them, fold them, or chop them to bits as necessary.  I always have my ds color the new phonogram when he begins a sheet.  It seems to drastically reduce guessing.  I do think you’re going to put in the time with either program, so aar may be worth it for you.  All 3 of my kids have liked the activities with it, but in different ways:  my oldest wanted to glue all the pieces together, my middle wanted to color them all in, and my youngest likes to “compete” against me (he gets a point for correct answers, and I get a point for incorrect answers.)

[Ellie]

3 hours ago, CTVKath said:

Hi there. I need some phonics help and recommendations. We are using Phonics Pathways and my 7yo son is struggling with it. He reads b's and d's interchangeably. We've been working on ing/ang/og/ung and ink/ank/unk in the last couple of weeks and those are hard. He'll read the word link. But the work "linking" he reads as "links". Once he thinks there is an "s" in there, he doesn't see anything else. Some days I think we're fine. Other days he mis-reads so many consonants that I want to tear my hair out. Sometimes he adds an "n" to the middle of the word and even with me gently telling him that I don't see an "n", he can't get the "n" out of the word. His eyes and ears are fine although they will be tested again in the next couple of months. My sister-in-law has been a 1st grade teacher for at least 20 years and she does not think there are any dyslexia issues. She thinks he needs more hands on and manipulatives in order for it to click.

I've been through Phonics Pathways with an older child and love it. My 7yo son loves Dewey and his sayings. We are using Explode the Code as a supplement and my son is doing fine with that although I started at the very beginning of the series a few months ago so he's just about to finish Book B.

So here's my question. I've been looking at All About Reading and it seems to have hands on manipulatives and games. Do I jump ship to the All About Reading? He does love games. It's expensive but I'm willing to pay for it. The only reason I haven't already bought it is because it seems to be teacher intensive. But the reality is my son might need teacher intensive for learning to read.

I love Phonics Pathways and hate to abandon it but I think my son needs more hands on help.

Thank you. 

My recommendation would be Spalding. It's comprehensive, infinitely flexible, and less than $50.

[acresoft]

Build-a-Word Phonics  Kit is hands on phonics with letter tiles and flash cards.

Junior Learning also has some great phonics products.

[Kanin]

If you want to add hands-on to any reading/spelling program, just buy a nice set of letter tiles. Spelling words by building them, and reading words by tapping each tile while saying the sound is so great for learning how to read. If he's struggling, I'd back up to what he can do independently, read and spell LOTS of words at that level, and then add one small new thing at a time... moving slowly as he masters each concept.

Don't dismiss "dyslexia issues" without some investigating. Can he rhyme? If you say a word, can he break it into sounds? Try him out on some easy words "hen, sit" and also harder ones, "slip,"swift," etc. Can he separate words into onset and rime, like saying "cat, c-at," etc.? Dyslexia is very common, with 1 in 5 kids having some degree of dyslexia - most never get diagnosed.

I like Recipe for Reading as a basic guide for young kids, coupled with letter tiles. It's about $20 for the book on Amazon.

[Jess4879]

I, personally, love AAR...but if he's done well with Phonics Pathways up until this point, I probably wouldn't jump ship yet.  It could just be that he's had too big of a chunk thrown at him.  I'd spend some time just doing simple games (bingo, etc) to solidify the new sounds.  I'd also dictate the sounds to him to spell.  Spend a week working on ing words, etc.  Just slow it down and see how he does.  

[CTVKath]

Thank you, everyone, for your responses. They are all helpful. I think we will slow down and linger where are a bit and add letter tiles into the mix. If that doesn't help, I'll switch to AAR. I think my son would like Ziggy as well as Dewey and he'd definitely love all the games.

[MerryAtHope]

4 hours ago, CTVKath said:

Thank you, everyone, for your responses. They are all helpful. I think we will slow down and linger where are a bit and add letter tiles into the mix. If that doesn't help, I'll switch to AAR. I think my son would like Ziggy as well as Dewey and he'd definitely love all the games.

 

I hope it helps! Doing things like switching out one phonogram tile at a time to make a new word can really help kids start to pay attention to all of the phonograms in a word. For reversals, you may find some of these activities for reversals helpful too. It can take time to help a student work through them, just do an activity or two each day. 

[ElizabethB]

Some people need a lot of repetition, AAR is a good program if you ultimately decide to get it.

But, there are also some good fun cheap and free things out there.

My nonsense word game is a fun way to get in more repetition:

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On Phonics/concentrationgam.html

Also, there are a lot of games you can play in a fun phonics way with word cards, don potter has hundreds for blend phonics:

http://www.donpotter.net/pdf/blend_phonics_spelling.pdf

My making phonics fun video shows some ideas:

 

[lilajoy]

My daughter (6 but almost 7) has similar issues to your son. She just isn't catching on as well or as quickly as it seems she should be, and I know she needs something more intensive. She, too, keeps confusing b's and d's. She, too, does well with ETC (just finishing Book 2), yet still can't fluently get through an easy-reader. She, too, sometimes inserts letters that aren't there. And she sometimes even forgets "sight" words that she's seen a thousand times, like "what" and "were." She is making progress, and she can decode basic words and slog through really easy books. But the going is very slow -- too slow, I think.

I don't know whether she is dyslexic (I suspect she may be, at least mildly), but I've decided I will work with her as though she is, just in case. I've just ordered Language Lessons Through Literature, Book 1, which gets good reviews for being a program that really breaks down phonograms for kids. Fingers crossed. I am also thinking of getting a set of phonogram flash cards. I feel weird doing all this when my son learned to read by age 6 with just Hooked on Phonics and some BOB books! But she needs more, so I have to figure out how to meet those needs.

At any rate, this post is just to empathize with you! I would love to know what you end up deciding to do and how it goes for you. I have looked into AAR, but since we are not homeschooling, only supplementing at home, I worry it might just be too much for us to actually get done. I am willing to make or find the time, however, if that's what it takes to get her reading fluently. Feel free to send me a message if you'd like to chat about this one-on-one and get into more specifics. My daughter's situation really does seem so similar to your son's.

[CTVKath]

Thank you for the suggestions and encouragement! We backed up a little bit this week for me to see if it helped and it didn't. For example, today my son read "mask in cask" just fine. The next line was "hush and rush" but my son kept reading "hush" as "hash". I pointed out that there was no "a" in it but that didn't change what he read. Next I asked him to tell me what vowel was in "hush" and he couldn't. Then I asked him to name the vowels and he named them "a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y". Yesterday was similar. So was Monday and Tuesday. Also when we reviewed ink/ank/onk/unk and ing/ang/ong - when he reads one blend, he continues the nk or ng in the rest of the words despite what's really there. Also today I got out a wood puzzle that has the picture of a dog with indentions for the letters d, o and g. My intent was to have him read the word, spell the word, place the letters in the puzzle then write the word in a cornmeal tray. When I asked him to read the word, he said "bog" even with the picture of a dog right beside the word. I asked him to tell me the first letter in the word and he corrected himself to say "dog". Then when I asked him to spell the word, he said "b, o, g". So I asked him what sound "b" says and he corrected himself to say "d, o, g". Then he goes on to reverse the letters and tell me it spells "God". Then he continued to play with reversing and saying "dog" then "God". Then spelling "d, o g" and "G o d".

So I've ordered the 1st Level of AAR. It will put us back at the beginning but when I talked to All About Learning, they said we'd just move quickly through the lessons and naturally slow down when we reach where he needs to be. My gut says he needs much more hands-on and games and it needs to be coordinated with the lessons. I don't have the experience or mental bandwidth to do that on my own. My son loves Explode the Code and will continue doing that.

I'm also starting to make plan Bs, Cs and Ds by preliminarily getting recommendations for in depth vision testing and dyslexia testing. But my hope is AAR will get through this bump in the road and we'll go on our merry way from here.

Thank you again for all the advice!!

[ktgrok]

Honestly, what you are describing sounds just like dyslexia to me. I know you said your SIL says not, but being a school teacher doesn't make one an expert in dyslexia - MOST kids are missed in the school system, so she may have no clue as to the current thinking and screenings. So my first step would be to investigate his oral phonetic awareness using this free test https://senia.asia/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/PASS-directions.pdf

If he's having trouble with the phonological awareness aspect you may need a very different approach. For us, AAR didn't work, not really. What did work was a single level of Barton, and then Abecedarian. The nice thing about Abecedarian is that it is fairly affordable, and they have the regular levels but also have "short" versions of the levels for kids that are older and already have some skills. And it is very efficient, we were able to cover a LOT of ground in 6 months. AAR on the other hand, was total frustration for her after a certain point and she never got fluent. 

If you do Abecedarian make sure to do the placement test and also to make use of the free supplemental stuff on the website - the "eye spy" pages are amazing at building fluency for phonograms. And if you have questions as to what level to use the owner is great at helping you figure it out. 

[CTVKath]

On 12/3/2018 at 12:51 PM, Ktgrok said:

So my first step would be to investigate his oral phonetic awareness using this free test https://senia.asia/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/PASS-directions.pdf

 

A huge thank you for including the link to this free test!!!!!!! That gave me great feedback. In a nutshell, with a 10-question quiz in each of the 10 areas of phonological awareness, my son passed with flying colors so much so that after each quiz, he and his 9yo sister made up more questions and quizzed each other as a game after he finished each quiz. So he's got the phonological awareness down. The only 3 he missed (out of 100) gave me a huge clue on where he needs work. He couldn't segment the "n" out of the word "friend" or the "L" in "splash". He separated them with the "nd" as a single sound and the "pl" as a single sound. Then with phoneme deletion, he was not able to say the word "splint" without the "n" which tells me he hears the "nt" as s single sound. Basically, those blends are exactly where we've gotten stuck in Phonics Pathways.

Oh the agony! AAR Level 1 arrived before we did the test and I set it all up. Now to decide whether to continue the switch to AAR Level 1 or to work on the sounds in the blends - separating, blending and deleting - and continue with Phonics Pathways. I might do a little bit of both and see where he responds better.

[ktgrok]

46 minutes ago, CTVKath said:

 

A huge thank you for including the link to this free test!!!!!!! That gave me great feedback. In a nutshell, with a 10-question quiz in each of the 10 areas of phonological awareness, my son passed with flying colors so much so that after each quiz, he and his 9yo sister made up more questions and quizzed each other as a game after he finished each quiz. So he's got the phonological awareness down. The only 3 he missed (out of 100) gave me a huge clue on where he needs work. He couldn't segment the "n" out of the word "friend" or the "L" in "splash". He separated them with the "nd" as a single sound and the "pl" as a single sound. Then with phoneme deletion, he was not able to say the word "splint" without the "n" which tells me he hears the "nt" as s single sound. Basically, those blends are exactly where we've gotten stuck in Phonics Pathways.

Oh the agony! AAR Level 1 arrived before we did the test and I set it all up. Now to decide whether to continue the switch to AAR Level 1 or to work on the sounds in the blends - separating, blending and deleting - and continue with Phonics Pathways. I might do a little bit of both and see where he responds better.

I'm so glad it helped! And yes, now that you know, you can work on it. I'd use those letter tiles and have him work on building words with the blends, then reading them, then changing them to different words, etc. Do that for a few days and see what happens. I wonder, some programs put the blends "together" in one color or what not, so the kid thinks they are one sound and doesn't learn how to build/break apart the actual blend. Maybe that is part of the problem? 

You can also have him write some words with blends and use a different color for each letter to impress that they each have a separate sound. 

[ElizabethB]

You could probably get by with this app and Phonics Pathways:

http://www.readingdoctor.com.au/word-builder/

While doing some of the things like shown in Abecedarian here:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57891644bebafbbe871a567f/t/57aa43049f7456bea43bbba0/1470776073570/ABCD_WABS_03.pdf

If you need more phonemic awareness activities, I recently got the book "Equipped for Reading Success," it has a ton.

https://www.thereadingleague.org/shop/equipped-for-reading-success-2016-book-by-david-kilpatrick/

They are longer versions of the activities in the PAST phonemic awareness test, you can see it here and excerpts from the book, the tests are at the end.

https://www.cec.sped.org/~/media/Files/Professional Development/Webinars/Handouts/Excerpts from Equipped for Reading Success.pdf

 

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

We are just a few pages ahead of you in PP, my child struggles in a similar way.  I can't make any statements about dyslexia except to say that I don't feel my dd (turns 7 next week) has it, and I think what I'm seeing (and what you are describing) are still in the realm of normal.  Here are a few tips:

-  Use a notched index card.  Uncover single-syllable words all at once, and 2-syllable words one piece at a time (rush-ing)

- If you still have b/d difficulties (we do too!), teach your child to palce their lips in the shape they encounter first, moving from left to right.  When you read a b, you "touch" the stick first.  Make your mouth into a tightly closed straight line, before the "B" sound comes out.  With a d, you encounter the circle first, so form your lips into a circle before pronouncing "D".  This has been by-far the best b/d method I've found, because the child doesn't have to stop and imagine a bed, or think "honey bee" or whatever.  

- Also on the b/d, if I see my child hesitate, I will just say, "That's a B in that word."  I feel it's better they do it right than do it wrong/reinforce the error by guessing.

- Elizabeth's nonsense game is GREAT.  We use it as a warm-up every day (2 games of first-person-to-ten-points).  I keep the cards we haven't learned yet clipped together and just use the cards she should know.  (Up until last week, all the long-vowel cards were clipped together and out of use).  We play it against each other, and she can confirm with me B vs D, and since we just added the long vowels, she can confirm the vowel sound.  But to earn a point, after making any confirmations she feels necessary, she must read the word in one go with no errors.  This really forces her to concentrate.  Because you get two points when a word also happens to be a real word, she does get to win about 30% of the time, which is great!  

- If she inserts a letter in a word that just isn't there, I often times will just move on to the next word, then circle back.  Sometimes she gets stuck in a rut where once she has pronounced the word "hush" as "hash", there is just no un-doing it unless we let it go and circle back.  Her brain is just stuck with "hash".  LOL.  Coming back to it basically always works.

- We will regularly do the lesson on the whiteboard instead of from the book.  This just adds a little element of newness to the lesson, and dd enjoys copying some of the easier words form dictation.  Sometimes as a "reward", I will draw some of the sillier sentences after she reads them correctly.  We love the antics of Gus the pig!  

 

I really don't think you need to necessarily buy a new program.  Just use Phonics Pathways as a jumping off point and work from a whiteboard or letter tiles (never used these personally, but some like them).  Reinforce by using the sillier sentences as your copy work practice as well. 

[MistyMountain]

I am using Phonics Pathways but with a 8 year old who reading did not coming easy for and she is having similar issues. Some days she does really well and other days she has a harder time with the new lesson and makes mistakes at first. If she makes a mistake she tends to get stuck with it. In her case I do think she has dyslexia but she is better with phonemic awareness now and passes tests I give her on that but she might have a difficult time with certain hard blends. One thing I have been doing is just circling the pattern or area she gets wrong in pencil or the problem area to highlight it or a put a little mark near words she has a hard time with to go back to later. If she really struggles on a word I write it out bigger on another piece of paper and do that tap and say thing described in the ABeCeDarian link above. Once I finish with Phonics Pathways I will be doing something else (ABeCeDarian) and I also use The I See Sam Readers sets which are below what she is reading in PP and add things in slowly to help with fluency and give lots of practice.  I am using the throw everything at her and see what sticks. Using PP is definitely helping her reading if I compare where she was before she started to now but she just needs more practice. I will be getting one if those notched cards soon because one if her biggest struggles now is tracking and I think it will help.

Edited December 10, 2018 by MistyMountain