Scaredy Cat Reading Program
http://cathyduffyreviews.com/phonics_reading/scaredy-cat-reading.htm
Miquon Math Program
http://www.fun-books.com/books/miquon_math.htm
I have not tried these. I thought they looked interesting though!
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Dealing with Dyslexia part 2
Let's just say I had quite a few plans. If you scroll down on this particular blog you will see each year has a plan for curriculum for each child. And each year it has changed at least twice and sometimes mid-year. I did a lot of research and asked a lot of veteran home school moms. One name kept coming up, Dianne Craft. She had taught at the Home school convention in Arizona, the year before and some other moms were recommending her. Her website, www.diannecraft.org became my life line! Take the time to study and explore her methods. She deals with children who have extreme dyslexia, dysgraphia, and ADD and ADHD. I first purchased her book, Brain Integration Therapy Manual by Dianne Craft, MA, CNHP . This manual has become the basis for all I do for Graham. It is a bit overwhelming at first and can be discouraging when you are trying to start and want immediate results. But it is worth the effort! Each child that struggles with any type of reading or writing glitch is going to be unique and have their own learning style. I am going to share with you our daily routine that I do with my son. Hopefully this might help you when your muddling through all the information your going to have to read. Most of the basic techniques I use are from Dianne Craft.org, but there a many that I do with Graham that we have come up with over this last year and half, that work well for us and our day of schooling. Mind you, I am teaching a fourth grader, a second grader, a first grader, a pre-schooler and juggling an 18month old. So, my days are a bit hectic and scattered and I do use some outside help on occasion to keep us on track. We have been using the following schedule since Graham started the first grade in 2011.
To summarize our learning dilemma: After a year of teaching traditional methods of reading and writing in Kindergarten and beginning of first grade, Graham was not recognizing the differences between letters or numbers. He could not recognize all the letters of the alphabet or count past 10. He would read from the last letter to the first. He could just begin writing his first name. He occasionally wrote his name completely backwards. GRAHAM would look like MAHARG. He began writing most letters from the bottom to the top. He had difficulty recalling information he learned that very day, even a few minutes before.
I began this method:
1. Exercises: large motor, crossing the mid line and stretching the backs of the legs. Eye eights and ear eights.
2. Reading simple words with the short vowels, the same words every day for a week sometimes longer. I use the Right Brain Phonics Program by Dianne Craft
3. Dictation: he would write the words I read to him on paper. I used the same words we were reading that week.
4. Sight words/letters: I used the Dianne Craft alphabet cards to teach him his letters. There are pictures behind each letter, allowing his amazing long term memory to take over and compensate for his poor short term memory. By giving each letter a picture, it gave it meaning and he was able to store each letter and sound. This happened within a week! We then started sight word cards. 5 per week to introduce those tricky words that don't make sense.
To summarize our learning dilemma: After a year of teaching traditional methods of reading and writing in Kindergarten and beginning of first grade, Graham was not recognizing the differences between letters or numbers. He could not recognize all the letters of the alphabet or count past 10. He would read from the last letter to the first. He could just begin writing his first name. He occasionally wrote his name completely backwards. GRAHAM would look like MAHARG. He began writing most letters from the bottom to the top. He had difficulty recalling information he learned that very day, even a few minutes before.
I began this method:
1. Exercises: large motor, crossing the mid line and stretching the backs of the legs. Eye eights and ear eights.
2. Reading simple words with the short vowels, the same words every day for a week sometimes longer. I use the Right Brain Phonics Program by Dianne Craft
3. Dictation: he would write the words I read to him on paper. I used the same words we were reading that week.
4. Sight words/letters: I used the Dianne Craft alphabet cards to teach him his letters. There are pictures behind each letter, allowing his amazing long term memory to take over and compensate for his poor short term memory. By giving each letter a picture, it gave it meaning and he was able to store each letter and sound. This happened within a week! We then started sight word cards. 5 per week to introduce those tricky words that don't make sense.
This is a picture of our current sight word wall. We are adding to it each week.
5. Reading: We are using Dig In by the Merril Reading Program. I got them on Amazon.
6. Writing eight exercises. This video explains how we do this each day.
7. Spelling: I use www.spellingcity.com I use whatever words he is struggling to read or write that week.
Ok..so dinner is cooking and kids are needing me. So this will have to be continued. There are a few more steps to our daily schedule. Paragraph writing and vocab. I cover math options and extras to build visual processing and concentration. I will go into more detail in the next few days. In the meantime....check out www.diannecraft.org and the Davis Method.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Dealing with Dyslexia part 1
I knew I wanted to home school my children the very moment Noah was born. I knew I didn't want him to leave my sight for one second. Five children later and my fifth year of homeschooling. That sentiment has changed a little bit. Sometimes I need those sweet seconds of alone time. That being said, most days I still feel the same way. Imagining my kids leaving every day for eight hours and missing out on all the wonderful things I get to see them accomplish each day, would be sad for me. When Daniel and I began homeschooling our son Noah, it was pretty easy. I thought this is easy, no problem. Noah was hitting all his milestones, reading early. He caught onto math concepts quickly and really seemed to enjoy learning. I put in a leapfrog video and the next day he was remembering every sound and letter that little cartoon frog taught him. I automatically thought each child would seamlessly do the same. I mean I obviously had mad teaching skills, right? Then my second child was approaching the pre-kinder age, the age to introduce letter and numbers. And all this time he had been exposed to a lot of learning with Noah's curriculum. And my second born was a bright kid. He was hard working, intuitive, strong, social and every bit ready to begin learning. We began with the leap frog videos and flash cards. Candy incentives to remember the sounds of the alphabet. And as hard as he tried and as hard he would work, he seemed unable to retain anything I was teaching him. Here is an excerpt from my blog back in April 2010
April 7, 2010
This is us doing "How To Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons", we have done this lesson at least twice and I had been working with him for about 10 minutes before I started recording him. The "t" sound was our new sound and he could not get it. We had gone over the "t" sound using other exercises to help him. He has done this with every letter we have learned. The other sounds have been drilled into him for the last few months. But we are still on lesson 9 after three months and with each new day is a huge review on sounds. He did finally get it the last time we went through it, we will see how tomorrow goes. He is actually extremely good at recognizing shapes, colors and he can memorize verses well. He is very good at figuring things out, like tying knots, riding his bike, doing things with the animals. Telling a story back to me and recognizing letters and numbers seems to be very difficult.
Seven months into the school year and three months working on a phonics book that had taught my eldest son to read, and we were no where near knowing the differences between a letter and a number. In the above excerpt, I had videoed Graham trying to recognize the letter T and tell me its sound. After three months of working on this one letter intently, every day, he could not remember it. I knew then that this was a child who needed to learn differently. I had absolutely no idea how to help him. Every piece of curriculum I found was teaching a child how to read with the exact same method. Look at it, repeat it and Memorize, memorize, memorize.
Two months later I wrote this about Graham's learning:
June 17, 2010
I have stopped working with Graham on schooling, other than a few special projects and a little un-schooling. This has seemed to relieve some of the pressure and is allowing him to shine. Happily he is now copying the letters that are in his name and working on their order. He has memorized his birthday and today, I brought him into a math lesson with Noah. We were doing weight measuring and estimating weights of items found in our house with small blocks. We measured four objects and tracked on paper how many blocks each item would weigh. We first guessed how many blocks we thought it would weigh and then recorded the actual weight. We then used our data to see which object we collected weighed the most and which object weighed the least. To my delight, Graham was the best estimator! He could easily guess just by feeling the objects in his hands and looking at them how many blocks he would need. He also remembered which item weighed the least! He was very proud of himself that he knew something Noah did not. Noah is very factual and only used the numbers to make educated guesses, Graham relied on his very developed common sense to figure it out; making him a much better estimator!
I knew that Graham was extremely bright, the problem wasn't him. The problem was me and the lack of curriculum that could somehow get him to recognize and memorize a letter. By the end of Kindergarten we had painfully gotten through most letters, not all, and numbers 1-10. He could not count in the teens and couldn't find the pattern or rhythm of counting past that. When he began to sound out a word like cat. He would say each sound C-A-T and then say TAC. Whatever letter sound the word ended in, that is what he repeated back to begin the word with. DOG was GOD and HAT was TAH. He hated school. So we quit doing school for a while. He would check out books at the library and studied the pictures and we would read only what he was interested in and then he would draw picture stories to share his thoughts. He'd do some copy work off the board. That was painfully slow and frustrating because he couldn't keep his place and tended to write all over the page. We tried fun things like finding pictures and circling groups of things. That also became difficult because he would circle the objects all over the page in no order and would lose his place. I was beyond frustrated and scared. I knew how talented and smart my child was. But how could I get him to learn these basic concepts?
I had been researching dyslexia for about a year online. Most of the tests were for children who were reading with difficulty. There were not a lot of early intervention tests available. I tried the public school system for some type of test that they give children in school who are having difficulty. They don't test for the problems I was encountering until the 3rd grade! I then went to my pediatrician who sent me to an occupational therapist.
July 23, 2011, he was tested for ADD, ADHD, Autism, Dylsexia, SI and every other abbreviation known to man. Their conclusion: impairments in occular motor tasks. trouble with bilateral coordination (jumping jacks, crossing the midline, crawling) and sensory processing. Basically he was unable to track things visually from left to right. His eyes literally jumped when tracking an object going to left to right. Meaning, his brain re-set when he crossed the midline of his body. This explained why reading was so difficult. We read from left to right and once his brain recognized something on the left, it had to regroup and then figure out what was on the right of the page. Trying to put those two things together was extremely difficult and didn't come naturally for him. Although this was a foreign concept to me and would take another year to really understand what this diagnoses meant. I finally felt we were getting somewhere.
Until I started looking for curriculum. How do I begin teaching this child to read? Even with a hearty diagnosis, I didn't have a clue as to how to begin this daunting task. And again, if he had been in public school this might have been overlooked until the third or fourth grade. So at least I was a little ahead of the game. Graham was starting first grade unable to read, write or count past 10. I needed a plan.
April 7, 2010
This is us doing "How To Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons", we have done this lesson at least twice and I had been working with him for about 10 minutes before I started recording him. The "t" sound was our new sound and he could not get it. We had gone over the "t" sound using other exercises to help him. He has done this with every letter we have learned. The other sounds have been drilled into him for the last few months. But we are still on lesson 9 after three months and with each new day is a huge review on sounds. He did finally get it the last time we went through it, we will see how tomorrow goes. He is actually extremely good at recognizing shapes, colors and he can memorize verses well. He is very good at figuring things out, like tying knots, riding his bike, doing things with the animals. Telling a story back to me and recognizing letters and numbers seems to be very difficult.
Seven months into the school year and three months working on a phonics book that had taught my eldest son to read, and we were no where near knowing the differences between a letter and a number. In the above excerpt, I had videoed Graham trying to recognize the letter T and tell me its sound. After three months of working on this one letter intently, every day, he could not remember it. I knew then that this was a child who needed to learn differently. I had absolutely no idea how to help him. Every piece of curriculum I found was teaching a child how to read with the exact same method. Look at it, repeat it and Memorize, memorize, memorize.
Two months later I wrote this about Graham's learning:
June 17, 2010
I have stopped working with Graham on schooling, other than a few special projects and a little un-schooling. This has seemed to relieve some of the pressure and is allowing him to shine. Happily he is now copying the letters that are in his name and working on their order. He has memorized his birthday and today, I brought him into a math lesson with Noah. We were doing weight measuring and estimating weights of items found in our house with small blocks. We measured four objects and tracked on paper how many blocks each item would weigh. We first guessed how many blocks we thought it would weigh and then recorded the actual weight. We then used our data to see which object we collected weighed the most and which object weighed the least. To my delight, Graham was the best estimator! He could easily guess just by feeling the objects in his hands and looking at them how many blocks he would need. He also remembered which item weighed the least! He was very proud of himself that he knew something Noah did not. Noah is very factual and only used the numbers to make educated guesses, Graham relied on his very developed common sense to figure it out; making him a much better estimator!
I knew that Graham was extremely bright, the problem wasn't him. The problem was me and the lack of curriculum that could somehow get him to recognize and memorize a letter. By the end of Kindergarten we had painfully gotten through most letters, not all, and numbers 1-10. He could not count in the teens and couldn't find the pattern or rhythm of counting past that. When he began to sound out a word like cat. He would say each sound C-A-T and then say TAC. Whatever letter sound the word ended in, that is what he repeated back to begin the word with. DOG was GOD and HAT was TAH. He hated school. So we quit doing school for a while. He would check out books at the library and studied the pictures and we would read only what he was interested in and then he would draw picture stories to share his thoughts. He'd do some copy work off the board. That was painfully slow and frustrating because he couldn't keep his place and tended to write all over the page. We tried fun things like finding pictures and circling groups of things. That also became difficult because he would circle the objects all over the page in no order and would lose his place. I was beyond frustrated and scared. I knew how talented and smart my child was. But how could I get him to learn these basic concepts?
I had been researching dyslexia for about a year online. Most of the tests were for children who were reading with difficulty. There were not a lot of early intervention tests available. I tried the public school system for some type of test that they give children in school who are having difficulty. They don't test for the problems I was encountering until the 3rd grade! I then went to my pediatrician who sent me to an occupational therapist.
July 23, 2011, he was tested for ADD, ADHD, Autism, Dylsexia, SI and every other abbreviation known to man. Their conclusion: impairments in occular motor tasks. trouble with bilateral coordination (jumping jacks, crossing the midline, crawling) and sensory processing. Basically he was unable to track things visually from left to right. His eyes literally jumped when tracking an object going to left to right. Meaning, his brain re-set when he crossed the midline of his body. This explained why reading was so difficult. We read from left to right and once his brain recognized something on the left, it had to regroup and then figure out what was on the right of the page. Trying to put those two things together was extremely difficult and didn't come naturally for him. Although this was a foreign concept to me and would take another year to really understand what this diagnoses meant. I finally felt we were getting somewhere.
Until I started looking for curriculum. How do I begin teaching this child to read? Even with a hearty diagnosis, I didn't have a clue as to how to begin this daunting task. And again, if he had been in public school this might have been overlooked until the third or fourth grade. So at least I was a little ahead of the game. Graham was starting first grade unable to read, write or count past 10. I needed a plan.
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