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!