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…
Nothing Wrong with Your Child
Starting in grade 4, poor readers are in deep trouble in every subject, no matter how smart they are. Likely your child was passed from grade to grade, perhaps even labelled with a learning disability. Perhaps he or she has assistance and accommodations to help survive school. But that isn’t…
