OnTrack Reading

Today, I’ve added a new section to the guide on the sidebar. It’s called The Diet Piece (of the Dyslexia Puzzle) and includes a page titled Fish Oil and Dyslexia which discusses a very interesting study that might have a bearing on the dyslexia puzzle.

It’s been a while since my last post, but that’s because the guide on the sidebar now holds most of what I’ve learned over the past several years about the situation we call dyslexia and how to address it most effectively. This addition on diet, particularly Omega-3’s might be important, but it certainly isn’t the answer in and of itself.

I continue to feel that dyslexia is a condition of delayed development across several fronts and that if a single answer is out there waiting to be found it will be something that addresses development at an earlier stage than we now attempt to do. Ultimately, because I think dyslexia has genetic roots, that single answer might even involve genetic tinkering of some sort or other.

For those of you who’ve read most of what I’ve written in the guide and are still looking for answers, I would recommend that you do some research on the role of the cerebellum, or midbrain, beginning with work done at the Dore Centers. This is the next area I intend to investigate, but it will take some time.

In the meantime, take a look at The Diet Piece (of the Dyslexia Puzzle)

I finally managed to put together a Page discussing the Convergence Insufficiency Study that was published in January of 2005.

There you will find a link to the complete article describing the study, as well as a link to a very useful questionnaire used to determine if your child has the symptoms of convergence insufficiency. I’ve also linked to the three charts of results that were obtained in the study so you don’t have to plow through the whole thing yourself.

The study appears to have been well designed and is, I believe, part of a larger study being done at several locations to determine whether convergence insufficiency is best treated by vision therapy. What is particularly impressive is that the article was published in the Archives of Ophthalmology in spite of the Academy of Ophthalmology’s longstanding policy statement opposing vision therapy as a viable treatment. This is, in some sense, progress. Maybe someday everybody will get on the same page with all this and we can start to catch all the children that are currently being missed.

Again, the study is discussed on the Page Convergence Insufficiency Study

Growing an Architect lays out my thoughts on why a child who grows up with a problem with binocular vision skills might just be predisposed to become an architect. It certainly appears, if you read enough websites, that children who struggle with reading have a tendency, if they succeed in getting through school, to become architects, draftsmen, or to work in some similar capacity.

The key is that they get through school successfully enough that they want to go on to college or vocational school to hone skills that they have already unconsciously developed. I write this in the hope that reading it will encourage you, as a parent of a struggling reader, to look on the bright side and realize that your child is developing some visual skills that other children are not. Knowing this might enable you to look on his future with optimism, even though the past few years might have been a real struggle for you and your child.

It’s still vitally important that you address your child’s potential vision problems, but I believe it is also true that the compensating skills he’s been forced to build might be exceptionally useful in the future. So with that in mind, here are my thoughts on Growing an Architect.

Convergence Insufficiency describes one of the main vision problems that, in my opinion, cause children (and some adults) to struggle with reading.

The ability to converge your eyes at nearpoint is just that, an ability, i.e., a developed skill. For one reason or another some children don’t develop that skill at all, or they don’t develop it on schedule.

Educators who are pushing the teaching of reading down into kindergartens across the country are implicitly assuming, usually without even realizing they are doing so, that all five year olds have fully developed convergence ability. But they don’t. Some will develop the skill during kindergarten, some during first grade and some never will develop it.

Every experienced first grade teacher in the country has probably, at some point, assured worried parents not to be concerned yet because often it will all “just click” and a child will finally start to pick up on reading sometime in first grade. In my opinion, what “clicked” is that those children finally developed the ability to converge both eyes on a close object and sustain the effort for a sufficient time to concentrate on print.

Bear in mind that I am not an optometrist, so some of this might be off a bit, but with that in mind, take a look at today’s addition to the Guide, Convergence Insufficiency.

Explaining the Ending “e” is today’s addition to the Guide on the sidebar.

Sorry about the 404 error if you tried to locate yesterday’s addition. I forgot to switch it from draft to published. It’s the entry above today’s on the sidebar, titled Reasons for Modifying Spalding.

Today’s suggested modification is the big one. If I were to ever use Spalding in a classroom I would drop the five rules for the final “e” that Ms. Spalding devised and borrow from Phono-Graphix to explain the ending “e” on so many English words. No rules, just a few more phonograms, and pretty easy ones to learn at that.

This change would really clean up the notation Spalding uses, which can even confuse adults at times if discussions on websites are any indication, and I think it would make it even better than it now is. But, of course, everyone who makes changes to an existing reading curriculum thinks they’re making “improvements.” It’s just that Phono-Graphix is so straightforward that it’s very easy for a young child to comprehend, and I’ve seen it work well with so many kids besides. In my judgment, what I’m suggesting would be an improvement to a curriculum that is already excellent.

Incidentally, I used to work with a child who really struggled due to low cognitive skills. The best reading he would do would be when he would read sentences written at prior sessions, using words that had already been introduced via The Spalding Method, so I think Ms. Spalding was definitely onto something with her Writing Road to Reading.

Read all the gory details regarding this proposed change here: Explaining the Ending “e”.

If your child’s school has done a vision test and told you that his or her vision is fine, or even if your family optometrist has done so, but your child is struggling to learn to read, do not merely assume that your child’s reading problems lie elsewhere. The Page added to the Guide today is Vision Assessment Checklist and it contains a link to a checklist that will get you started on assessing the possibility that a vision problem is causing your child to struggle.

The checklist, developed after experience with dozens of clients of OnTrack Reading, helps me decide whether to refer parents to a developmental optometrist for a vision evaluation. I’ve already made it clear elsewhere on this website how important I believe vision skills are to reading, and the checklist should help you determine whether your child’s vision should be a concern.

To obtain it go to the Page titled Vision Assessment Checklist

The Auditory Piece is a new section of the Guide that will eventually delve into the auditory issues that might be getting in the way of your child’s learning to read. I say, eventually, because this is an area that I have little experience with assessing, beyond the task of phoneme manipulation.

However, I have put together a word list that is quite comprehensive and can be used to train the skill of phoneme manipulation very effectively if used according to the instructions on the Page. You can download the list as a PDF file from Oral Auditory Processing. This is a very useful list that you will find nowhere else.

I use the word list with every client of OnTrack Reading who fails to get a perfect score on the ten-item auditory processing test discussed under the testing section in the phonics Pages of the Guide. Phoneme manipulation is a useful skill and it is trainable. Clients routinely score perfectly on the testing by the time they finish the curriculum. Here is a link to the test form: Download the Test Scoresheet.

The word list and instructions can be found in The Auditory Piece.

Due to a question posed by a friend on another website, I decided to start writing The Vision Piece of the puzzle today.

In it, I go over how the average parent ends up under the impression that they’ve already had their child’s vision thoroughly evaluated when, actually, if your family has a history of reading problems, vision issues should always be suspected as a primary factor. It’s tempting to try to assign blame in situations where important problems get missed, but usually the truth is that some combination of ignorance and inertia are really behind it. We can’t know everything about everything and we tend to keep doing things the way we’ve always done them.

It would be helpful if someone reading this who has had an experience similar to what I describe in The Vision Piece would take the time to add a comment, so that other readers can see how easy it is to rule out a vision problem prematurely. Or, feel free to ask a question, since sometimes that will help me determine what to focus on for the next addition to the Guide.

I wrote The OnTrack Reading Story so that you would have some background information on me and I added The Dyslexia Puzzle next so that you could see how I view the interplay of vision issues and phonics, as well as to warn you that dyslexia is a puzzle, as far as I’m concerned anyway. Today I’ve started working on a section titled The Phonics Piece.

From here, I intend mainly to show you how to use the phonics program that I use, including major components of it that I’ve developed myself.

In a separate section, I’ll add information on why I structured the curriculum the way that I did. It won’t be necessary to absorb the why part, but some people will always question curriculum decisions and want to know why various choices were made. Besides, I like to discuss those issues.

Another section will cover vision topics, including things to consider when looking for a vision therapy department for your child.

And yet another section will address various research issues that come up from which I feel are relevant to figuring out this puzzle that I call dyslexia.

Which topic crops up next depend on what I’m interested in that day and whether any particular issues have been raised by comments left by visitors. And I do want to encourage comments, especially questions that will let me know where your interests lie and also experiences that you’ve had with your own children which can help others understand that there are real issues to be sorted out before deciding what to do to help their own children improve their reading.

Today’s addition is the introduction to The Phonics Piece of the dyslexia puzzle.

Dyslexia Remains a Puzzle is the title of the last Page of The Dyslexia Puzzle . And it does remain a puzzle, at least to me.

I had a parent tell me recently that she hoped that vision therapy would be the miracle cure for her child’s reading problem. And, in the sense that she means it, vision therapy just might be the miracle she’s been looking for. What I’ve tried to make clear is that dyslexia runs in families, that it probably is accompanied by vision problems that first need to be diagnosed and then need to be addressed, usually with vision therapy, and that then some children still need to be taught phonics. And, as I state in Dyslexia Remains a Puzzle, sometimes neither of these is sufficient, though both might have been necessary.

Dyslexia tends to be the sort of problem that draws parents who want miracles and practitioners who claim to be able to provide those miracles. If it were that simple, we’d have figured out exactly which miracle worker was correct by now, and all the rest would be considered charlatans, just out for the money. It is more reasonable to assume that dyslexia is a puzzle, that figuring out the puzzle is a matter of prioritizing, and that miracles don’t often happen.

One of the problems with the miracle worker approach is that each discipline claims to know the answer. This results in each discipline subtly, or not so subtly, disparaging the competition. Phonics instructors, convinced that every child not reading simply needs a good phonics course, can be heard claiming that vision therapy is not effective. Convinced that all reading problems have visual roots, some developmental optometrists might prescribe vision therapy without bothering to see if a child is hopelessly confused about phonics.

Similarly, advocates of dozens of other approaches can be heard claiming that they have the answer, which a desperate but hopeful parent hears as the miracle cure. Vision therapy and effective phonics instruction are pieces of the puzzle, but if you read Dyslexia Remains a Puzzle, you’ll see that I believe there’s sometimes more to the puzzle.

By the way, I’ve added a link to ReadNOW on the sidebar under Blogroll. This is a site on Yahoo Groups that has longstanding contributors some of whom are quite knowledgeable about other programs that might be useful if your child’s vision is fine, but he is still struggling with reading.