Reading Comprehension With Visualizing and Verbalizing

I have spent a lot of time working on teaching kids how to decode words and parse out how to say a word. But sometimes just being able to decode a word isn't enough. Some children need to be taught explicitly how to understand what they read, not just how to read it.

My Ana is one of those, mostly I think just because of her hearing disability and lack of language exposure early on. Many kids on the autism spectrum also require this sort of specific instruction in comprehension.

Anyone who does much research into the world of dyslexia and educational remediation of all sorts probably has come across the Lindamood Bell Centers. They are wonderful, effective, intense...

and extraordinarily expensive!

I called once before getting trained in Orton-Gillingham to see if they could help us with Ana. They quoted something like $20,000 for their 12-ish weeks (240 hours) of intensive tutoring over the summer. I think I about died when I heard that. Needless to say that was not an option for us, nor is it for most anyone else I know honestly!

Fortunately I was able to be trained in OG myself and that, plus Susan Barton's system has more than helped us to tackle the decoding aspect of reading. But I was still left with a child who struggled to comprehend things she read or heard. In fact, even describing a picture or a past event is difficult enough to induce tears!

Luckily, Lindamood Bell also has a system for comprehension called Visualizing and Verbalizing, and Gander Publishing sells a reasonably priced manual for it. Really all you need is the manual and some pictures to go with it, plus a few index cards and cardboard or felt colored squares.

I've been slowly reading through the Visualizing and Verbalizing manual these past few months and have begun the picture-to-picture stage with Ana. In this stage she describes a simple, colored picture to me and we work on going through each of 12 structure words to guide her description. Then I repeat her description back to her in my own words, describing the picture she made in my head through her description of the real picture that I cannot see.

The structure words are a fairly simple concept but I did find it useful to make up some extra notes on them. Especially because Ana not only needs to learn comprehension, she really needs to be taught enough vocabulary words to adequately describe an image.

I turned those notes into a printable for her benefit and I'm planning to laminate these and pin them around the schoolroom as study guides for her as she describes pictures or words. My notes go beyond what the manual describes, drawing connections to the part-of-speech each structure word points to, having a question for the student to ask themselves as they look at a picture or read, and listing whether it is a gross (large/main) or fine (small/less necessary) structure word. At the bottom are graphs or graphic organizers listing out many examples of words the student might use in describing a picture/word/sentence with that particular structure word.

This is an example of my basic notes for the first structure word:

You can find the entire printable in my store on Teachers Pay Teachers. 

Has anyone else used V/V at home? Did you find it fairly easy to DIY? Have you found any other great reading comprehension resources?

Another Review Game and Joining Teachers Pay Teachers

Hi! I've been so thankful lately to have several students starting new levels in Barton Reading and Spelling. It's so rewarding to see the hard work of hours of tutoring one-on-one and troubleshooting for each student's particular struggles pay off.

(sometimes I have to bribe Ana through her reading lessons with baby time with her baby sister!)

My daughter, Ana, is now in Level 5 and doing great. It's a big relief after how intense Level 4 was to have an entire lesson on something as simple as suffix "s" and "es"!

With her on Level 5 and another student about to begin the same level a few lessons behind, I wanted to add some extra practice games for the girls. Ana has profound hearing loss and so she has significant language delays. So while the spelling/reading aspects of suffixes haven't been nearly as difficult as tackling multi-syllable words and schwas and vowel teams, I'm using this as an opportunity to advance her vocabulary and language skills too! This is one of the things I love about Orton-Gillingham instruction, it's so multi-faceted that it doesn't just get dyslexic children reading....it teaches them how the English language works.

I've decided the easiest way to upload and share some resources I've made is through Teachers Pay Teachers. It's an established site, lots of people already frequent it, and it's easy to use. I've found several fantastic resources there and I highly recommend that more homeschoolers or independent tutors make use of it. There are some really talented professionals on there sharing inexpensive resources for others.

To start off my account I went ahead and uploaded the newest game I made for my older students. This one is created for students at or above Barton Level 5: Lesson 2 OR any Orton-Gillingham students who have learned the suffixes LY, LESS, FUL, NESS, and MENT.

Barton Level 3 Game: Drop It!

A few weeks ago I arrived at my tutoring student's after school program and realized I had forgotten to bring a game with me! I ALWAYS end tutoring sessions with a little game because it helps motivate the kids and it's my sneaky way of practicing concepts. 

I had five minutes to brainstorm and just my usual tutoring supplies at hand so I came up with this:

Drop It!

Materials: a whiteboard (or a large poster board), a marker, letter tiles

Prep:

1. Make a 5 x 6 grid 

2. Write words without the first letter in each box. For example: for "bent" you would write "ent".

3. Gather a handful of letter tiles that would make a real word out of some of the words on the board. The ones I used include: B, D, F, G, H, J, L, M, N, P, QU, R, S, T, V, W, Y, SH, TH

Play: 

Each player chooses a color marker to be theirs. We did blue and red. 

Taking turns, each player selects one letter tile and attempts to drop it (from a standing position, no bending knees allowed) onto the board. 

When the player successfully drops a letter tile onto a word they read the word with that letter as the first letter. For example, if player 1 chooses T and it lands on UNT they would say "TUNT". If they read it correctly they get one point, signified by a slash / . If they make a real word they get two points, signified by two slashes, making an X over the square. 

There are a couple options for how to end the game. You can time it to the end of the game period or the end of the lesson. OR you can go until all the squares have been hit. 

The player with the most points at the end wins!

Marking Syllables Trick

This week has been extremely busy but I wanted to share this quick idea that has been working for me. Since I put all our student pages in protective sheets we use dry erase markers to mark syllables, but sometimes it wasn't as easy because the markers are slightly bigger and one of my students has Irlen's syndrome so it is hard for her to make her eyes focus on the separate syllables. I had seen syllable sliders recommended by Susan Barton but just didn't have it in the budget to get something like that for such a minor purpose. 

So, we started "highlighting" syllables with the dry erase markers instead. This way we can mark as many syllables as we like without any trouble and because it erases if my student realizes they divided it incorrectly the first time they can easily fix it. 

Plus, pretty colors!