Dyslexics dont have a problem with learning, they can learn anything if taught in a suitable way. But the skill they especially need taught in a suitable way is READING. Poor reading often leads to educational failure, LD classrooms, bullying, and emotional problems.
This blog follows an intensive intervention that started on over the 2014/2015 Christmas holidays, and then restarted on June 29, 2015. Our student was regularly and competently tutored outside of school in the months between, but without the intensity required for rapid takeoff.
The tools we use are available on this site, and free. Join our private group on Facebook to ask questions, offer your throughts, and share your experience.
“I am enrolling for phlebotomy class. I went to orientation and I filled out the forms for my class on my own. It was such an exciting experience for me because it was something I never dreamed I would be able to do.” Need a miracle for your struggling…
Today was our last day of summer tutoring. Haroun wrote a short essay, and here it is in his own words. It’s a ‘hamburger essay’, and I helped him organize his thoughts into point-form, otherwise it’s all his. His spelling is phonetically plausible so spell-check helped a bit. THE…
School is about to start, and Haroun and I are finishing our last days together. He is now reading independently, and his comprehension, fluency, and stamina are improving daily. We have worked about 80 hours over this summer, averaging just under two hours per day through July and August. Haroun…
Haroun is still reading Goosebumps, and will be for some time. We started a new book yesterday, and this morning he read 15 pages. At this rate, it will still take him about 8 days to finish. That’s better than the last book – his speed is improving with daily…
In the week since I last posted about Haroun, he has made steady progress. He has solidified his ‘silent reading’ and improved his comprehension. These skills need both practice and ‘soak in’ time, and our consistent daily two hours of practice is giving him both. We started a new Goosebumps…
Until now Haroun and I have been reading together – typically he reads the right-side pages and I read the left-side. This morning as we settled into the backyard, he announced that he wanted to read to himself. Yes!!! I asked him to move his lips as he reads, to…
Haroun’s word-attack skills are improving, particularly with longer compound words. He is more attentive to small function words like ‘a’ and ‘the’. But I have been increasingly worried about single-syllable words which he mispronounces and then doesn’t recognize. We started the BLENDING program back in December in our intensive “Christmas…
We finished our second Hardy Boys today. Yippee. He wants to stay with this series, so I’m heading off to the bookstore to pick up another title. Haroun’s word recognition skills have gotten much better through this book, he seems to have figured out the suffixing tricks and regularly nails…
Last week was shortened by Eid celebrations. Haroun and I are reading our second ‘Hardy Boys’ book, punctuated with repeated-reading exercises during our two-hour-per-day sessions. He is making steady but uneventful progress, his accuracy, fluency, prosody, and confidence gradually improving. Today I asked him to read silently, but moving his…
Today we started a new Hardy Boys book. Here’s the first few lines of the story: “Would you like relish with that?” I pulled the steel tongs out of my apron pocket and plucked a plump pink weiner out of the steaming vat of water. “Just a smear of…
We finished our first Hardy Boys book today, the one we started on Monday. Haroun is still reading aloud, and we still take turns reading although he is reading for longer and longer stretches. We average 90-100 minutes of reading in two sessions, plus a repeated-reading or writing exercise. It…
Continuing to read Hardy Boys and having great fun. We are googling frequently for world-knowledge, which slows us down but gives Haroun small breaks. He’s reading more than he realizes. This Hardy Boys book (‘Burned’) takes place in a school that Haroun can relate to. The kids are a bit…
We finished our ‘Wimpy Kid’ on Friday, and Haroun was tired. So I read the first chapter of a ‘Hardy Boys’ to him, with the warning that this book would be hard for him and the offer that we would only continue if he liked it, otherwise we would find…
We have been pounding away at fingerpoint-reading all week – five days in a row. We average about 90 minutes per day, including ‘Repeated Readings’. The gains from this intensive practice are easily visible in this 90-second video. Haroun is reading faster and with more confidence. He is hitting some…
This article on the perils of grade 9 was a wake-up call to me. The goal isn’t to just get Haroun reading, but to build him up as student who can traverse high school and get into university. The more I thought about it, the bigger the challenge became. A…
It is Canada Day, but H. and I worked anyhow. The key to this intervention is *intensity* and daily practice. Today we practiced finger-point reading for 90 minutes, wrote a hamburger essay, played with affixes for ‘DICT’ (pre+dict+ion, contra+dict+ory, dict+ate+or), and talked about mindset and education on our break. And…
Finger-point reading is the easiest, most joyful component of reading instruction. It is also the most important, and the most time-consuming. For older struggling readers, it is perhaps the most overlooked. (Note: do *NOT* push reading until your child has made substantial headway in the BLENDING program. Without phonological awareness…
I have reconnected with H., whom I worked with over Christmas. Blog posts about our previous work are here. It is a pleasure to see him again. He is much more poised, and looks to have grown inches in the last 6 months. He has been receiving intermittent tutoring, and…
Daijon and I won’t be working together any more. I’m disappointed, humbled, and sadder-but-wiser. I wish Daijon success. There won’t be any more posts here for a while. Ping me if you know another candidate.
Daijon practiced blending /ah/ and /ih/ words for about 20 minutes, rough but slowly getting stronger. But today’s video isn’t about him; instead we demonstrate the Word Matrix tool (part of SPELLING). English spelling builds complex words from bases and a small number of affixes, for example ‘unreportable’ is built…
Daijon was back today, and AWESOME. We settled down easily to work. He was focused and relentless. You can practically watch his brain forming new connections and skills in this 5-minute video. I’ve been surprised by the support Daijon gets – teachers, social workers, and vice-principals who are determined to…
Day 2: Yesterday we marched through /ah/ words ending in ‘t’ (bat, rat) and ‘p’ (cap, map), contrasting them without much difficulty. I was sure that we would have no further trouble with /ah/. But I was very wrong. First thing this morning, Daijon fell apart on /ah/ words ending…
Today, 16 June 2015, was our FIRST DAY of training. Daijon read a small text to demonstrate his current skill, which looks to be about grade 1. Then we focused on the sound /ah/ as in Apple. We drilled words like ‘cat’ and ‘cap’, blended and segmented with the word-spinner…
The ‘Summer of Repairing Dyslexia’ is a ‘Reality TV’ style reading intervention. We are recruiting a grade-8 student with severe reading deficits, and will spend the next four months tutoring him intensively every day for 2-3 hours. We will turn him into the BEST reader in his class, and follow…
Thursday. We worked on Blending drills. Consonant clusters weren’t yet perfect, and we peeked ahead at prefix clusters with ‘r’ (‘brand’, ‘trend’) which were pretty rough too. But we’ll keep drilling, and move forward only as quickly as H. can develop automaticity on each skill. We finished the ‘Vampire Breath’…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
