Author vs. Reader

How can it be the end of June already. School here just got out barely 3 weeks ago and Josh is in week 1.5 of summer school---well, ok, ESY ( or extended school year which is the fancy name that kids in special ed get to describe their "extra fun" version of summer school, which trust me is not all that extra fun, but I digress) and between my post school year debate coaching duties at the national speech and debate tournament (shout out to my AWESOME debaters), surprisingly interesting  professional development work and just trying to get into the swing of summer, I'm amazed that I'm already at the end of the first third of my time away from school. 

In the middle of that all, we keep plugging away at the reading thing and that makes Mr. Josh alternately resigned and annoyed with his mother. All to often I hear the "But wh-hyyyyyyyy???????"  issued from my charming child's lips. While I longed at 3 to hear anything from him that sounded remotely like a word, at almost 13 I'm not a fan of the whiny teenager. Take what you wish for, though, I guess. Ha! 

Letter writing practice rates a C-----

We are now at 7 letters for Josh in our quest to get letter/sound correspondence this summer. He has short /a/ and short /o/  and soft and hard /g/. I was surprised by the soft /g/ sound since I didn't have to teach that, he just knew it. That's 90% accuracy or better on 3 trials over 5 opportunities in both naming the letter and independently producing the sound. He can do the /k/ sound for /c/ at 60% accuracy but his naming of the letter is inconsistent across trials. The same is true for /d/. He continues to name them both "e". With /m/, he independently calls it /w/ and says the sound is the name. We have practiced the tactile piece of feeling your lips vibrate against each  other to produce the mmmmmm sound and I've tried various visualizations with him about the vibration but he has such a hard time letting go of the name he has learned. I just introduced /l/ and he can name it at 90% accuracy off the bat. The sound production though, not so much. Right now the name and sound are the same, but given the short time we have been working at it, I think we can change that pretty easily.

As with everything else, it's the transfer effect that Josh struggles with so very much. Part of OG is dictating words, and while he tries, he struggles. I model the word, we practice it together, he says the word and blends it on his own, but I'm never sure how much sticks. I think we have it and then a night like tonight happens where we  start out strong and then about half way through all the words are written backwards and from left to right. Dyslexia strikes again. I am not sure what he was doing, but he was rating each word with a number to describe how difficult it was. Apparently the higher the number, the worse it was..... as you can see, there was no love in Wordville tonight. 

The bigger the number, the harder it was.....

Yet, through all that, I did get him to read one Bella and Rosie book to me. Of course, he chose to read the level A book so it was super easy, but he could do it on his own. Hey, reading is reading, right? 

Who doesn't love them some Bella and Rosie, right? 

But then, at the end, he brings me this project he's been working on and wanted me to take dictation. This is the part where my mama heart swells with pride and alternately breaks into a thousand pieces all over again. He is writing a story and even though I have a long list of issues with his teachers from last year and their less than inspired approach to his reading needs in school, one thing they did encourage him to do was to write and they happily scribed for him when they could understand what he was saying. So, he has this wonderful story from inside his head that he is telling the world and he owns it. He is so, so proud of this adventure that his hero (the name is a surprise to be revealed soon) will be taking on a planet that seems an awful lot like some kind of post apocalyptic world where people need to build things (cue the hours we have spent playing Fallout on the iPad) but as author and illustrator he is finding his voice, and using his voice and that means he is powerful and he has a story to tell. He may be misusing some connecting words in his sentences, but my little man is showing me that he has a rich vocabulary when he independently uses words like dimension, machinery and ancient artifacts correctly and in context. 

The title of this masterpiece...Ancient Keepers and Dragons

Page 2..Check out that Castle!

Page 3...The Cliffhanger.....

I watch him sit in the chair, drawing another picture to go along with the next part of this wonderful tale and I find myself returning to the question that has rattled around in my mind for years, and will continue to keep me awake for the foreseeable future: how is it that there is no one who can tell me how I can unlock the obvious creativity, thoughtfulness, higher order and abstract thinking skills that I know are begging to blossom in my child. Why is it that in one of the best schools in the state I live in, the best that they can offer my son is a multi-categorical special education classroom where he will be left behind and his potential will be wasted because he doesn't fit neatly inside their little box of what is or is not within their power to appropriately educate? Why do I feel so very helpless to help him, and I am an educated parent who works within the very system that is failing my child? Pretty words and platitudes don't mean a whole lot. I have given up on the system since their only desire is to do the bare minimum for him until he's 21. The only people who really, truly care long term are his father and myself, since we are the ones responsible for him. Right now, I am feeling as though I need that superhero from his book to come and rescue me because I know I need some answers on how to fix this broken system. Maybe someday I'll be lucky enough to have Josh guide me there. 

Back at it Again

May 3, 2017--,

Contrary to popular opinion,no one has died and no tragedy has befallen our household. Life just got busy, I got a new job, Josh transitioned to 6th grade, we got to experience all the joys that middle school with a 16p kiddo entails, coaching debate and speech took up a lot of time, life with a high school freshman and junior balanced out every other moment of our day so blogging about reading was not exactly the first thing on my mind, or agenda. Do I feel guilty? Sort of, but such is the life of every other parent on the face of the planet, in some form or another so what can I say...reality is what reality is.

I will save my long list of frustrations with Josh and his reading program at school for another day when I feel better able to capture my words in a more productive format. Suffice it to say, I don't feel like he has made much real progress from where he was last May. So, this mama decided, again, to try and beat the odds and do something at home so consider this the reboot of "Let's figure out how to help Josh figure out how to read"

My trusty Orton Gillingham Manual

So far, we've been doing Orton Gillingham, Josh style, for about 3 weeks an average of 4-5 days a week. I'm happy to say that he is at 100% mastery of the short /a/ and short /o/ sounds. He's at about 85% mastery of the sound of /d/ and about 75% mastery of the soft /c/ sound. He is still intermittent with naming the letters /c/ and /d/ consistently but hey, I'll take what I can get.


We have also added /g/ and /m/. The interesting thing is that he is at 95% mastery for naming /g/ but his sound for /g/ is the /j/ as in gem. He will also say the voiced /g/ as in gum but I wonder why his go to sound is the secondary sound for /g/ and not the primary.  regardless, it's one less sound to learn later. /M/ he wants to call /w/ all the time. (all hail dyslexia) so that one will be a struggle to unlearn and relearn, but we'll keep trying.

As with anything in teaching, you have to monitor and adjust your methods to where the student is at. Josh is so NOT a flashcard kind of kiddo. In OG, one of the main components of the drill section is to practice connecting the letter and sound through flashcards. We have done away with the flashcards for now and are using the letter tiles I bought many moons ago.They serve a similar purpose and are much more tactile (and colorful) for my tactile learner. I also use them to blend the sounds together instead of using the cards to blend the sounds since Josh can manipulate them and I think as we get to things like red words (words that don't follow phonetic spelling rules) I can use the red letters to practice those words with him, and maybe even use different colors to represent the different word chunks (/-ing/ and such). Time will tell...

Word tiles to the rescue

I have also started him on the dictation and finger tapping part of the spelling component of the OG protocol. This part is so tough for him, and its the part I struggle with the most since I have no good answer for where to go to help him. Part of the 16p diagnosis is that his auditory processing has a very slight, yet significant delay. What this means is that he misses part of the spoken word. Think of it this way...when we learned the letter /d/, we learned that the name for the letter  started with our tongue touching the back of our teeth to get the "duh" sound and then morphing into the "eeeee" sound at the end of the name. That's how we differentiate the name of /d/ from /c/ which starts with a "sssss" sound and morphs into an "eeee" sound. In Josh's mind he was taught the letter sound names at a conversational rate so the letter names for /b/, /c/, /d/, /e/, /g/ and a few more letters all have the name /e/ to him because that all he heard when he learned them. He never heard the beginning sound of the name--he only heard the end. That's a problem when people try to ask you to write the letter /b/ and you write the letter /e/ because you think they are the same thing since that's what you have heard/been taught . It makes life really hard to spell and read. Little man has a long hill to climb to unlearn these wrong letter names, figure out how to match the right letters and sounds and then relearn the right letter names to go with the right letter sounds. Will we get there? I don't know. Will school help us? Probably not since they don't have the support or perspective to understand what it is he needs to learn how to read so it falls to me.

Spelling what he hears is hard! 

Yeah, I'm not sure what this means but it
meant something to my budding author!   

I can't promise to keep this blog up religiously (obviously) but I will try to share as I can since I do think that his journey has merit and maybe there is another little person out there who may be struggling just like Josh. Maybe someday that person's mom or dad will find this blog and glean something useful out of it. I hope so because then maybe it will make this long, hard, frustrating journey seem worthwhile. And little man, my fondest hope and prayer is that someday you will find these posts and be able to read them, on your own and know that your mama tried. It was imperfect and I wasn't as consistent and dedicated as I wanted to be but I tried because you are worth every moment that I worried and fretted and got angry at a system that is not designed for you. I have to believe that some day you will be able to pick up a book and enjoy being able to read so you find the pleasure of getting lost in an adventure that happens not on a screen but inside your head.

Elements of a successful lesson: Sand, the dictation book and mama's coffee!