Wednesday. H. has struggled for the last three lessons with consonant clusters at the end of words. He has no trouble with CVC words like ‘bun’ but give him ‘bunt’ and he goes back to guessing – with errors on the prefix, the suffix, and even the vowel. I pulled…
Christmas Crash Reading – Day 9
Tuesday. I am leaving on vacation in two days. Liz and Julianne will be helping H. while I am gone, and they drop in to spend the morning with us. Liz is the amazing teacher who connected me with H. She has tutored H previously, but didn’t have sufficient time…
Christmas Crash Reading – Day 8
Monday. We made progress today, but had a sharp reminder of how much still lies ahead. We started with our usual blending drill. H. is working on words with consonant-clusters or digraphs in the suffix. He is struggling, the jump from ‘win’ to ‘wind’ has brought back his guessing reflexes.…
Christmas Crash Reading – Day 7
Saturday. We continue to drill on CVCC words, and H. continues to improve but is making too many errors for my liking. We have covered the drills faster than his brain can create patterns, and unfortunately we reinforce his bad guessing habits in our fingerpoint reading. In her original book…
Christmas Crash Reading – Day 6
Friday. We have worked our way through CVC words using the first five vowels, and have launched into the second part of the Blending program – consonant clusters. Same five vowels in single-syllable words, but now we get frisky with the consonants. Our Blending materials do not differentiate between digraphs…
Christmas Crash Reading – Day 5
Thursday – Christmas Day. There were no breakthroughs today, just hard work and slow progress. I am pushing through the Blending course at top speed, not waiting for H. to master each exercise. So he still makes odd mistakes. Blending systematically and gradually builds one sound over another, and assumes…
Christmas Crash Reading – Day 4
Wednesday. Today we wrote our first hamburger essay. We had previously worked through some spoken essays – explaining the concept and trying some examples aloud. I had marked up essays in the New York Times to show how they followed the hamburger-essay pattern. Today I handed H. a pen and…
Christmas Crash Reading – Day 3
Tuesday. We are pounding our way through the Blending program. H. isn’t completely solid on /ah/ /ih/ /aw/ but we have moved relentlessly and started into /uh/. He pronounced the first /uh/ words with /ih/ (‘hut’ as ‘hit’) and then with /aw/ (‘hut’ as ‘hot’) but I I’m making him…
Christmas Crash Reading – Day 2
Monday. The key challenge is getting H. to stop guessing and using memorized words. We are focused on breaking those two habits and shifting him to ‘sounding out’. This is the second day of drilling CVC words with the with the /ah/ sound. We started with reading-aloud /ah/ words that…
Christmas Crash Reading – Day 1
We met Haroun over Christmas in an 11-day crash program. In the months that followed he received some excellent tutoring outside of school, enough to maintain and solidify his reading skills but not much move them forward. The blog posts from the 11 Christmas days start below. We continue…
The Torgesen Study
“Sixty children with severe reading disabilities… received 67.5 hours of one-to-one instruction in two 50-minute sessions per day for 8 weeks. … Within 1 year following the intervention, 40% of the children were found to be no longer in need of special education services.” Torgesen et al. (2001) selected 60…
