Beginning Readers: Phonics Software

We wanted to open up a thread for community members to share about resources that worked for helping their child to read. There are different ways that dyslexia present in the early years - and that is what works for one child, won't necessarily work for another. Often we first try to assess whether a student has problems hearing, seeing, saying, or remembering letters, letter blends, words, or word parts. This will often tell us which curriculum or tutoring method is more likely to be effective. We cover this is much more detail in The Mislabeled Child. Another important step for recognizing the most effective early reading strategy is a child's best memory system - If a child is weak at remembering sounds, are they better with color pictures to reinforce the sounds? (color memory, visual imagery) Or will they remember better if they make up a funny story to associate with the sound (novelty learner, story / personal memory), or write over the letters as they say them (verbal mediation, kinesthetic memory). When you find a book or program that uses your child's particular memory strength, he will learn much more quickly.

Here's one popular free online beginning phonics site: http://www.starfall.com/n/level-a/learn-to-read/load.htm?f

Another popular program for phonics is Lindamood Bell's LIPS - We'll attach a paper summarizing the different programs, including LIPS.

LIPS stands for Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing:

An excerpted overview:

1. Setting the Climate:
Help students learn to feel, see, and hear speech sounds in order to make reading and spelling easier.

2. Consonant Labeling:
Simple, high-imagery labels are attached to each category—Lip Poppers /p,b/, Tongue
Lifters /l,r/—to enable teacher and students to communicate clearly about sounds within
words in subsequent steps. For example, "When you say /clasp/, what are the last two
sounds you feel? (Student labels those sounds.) How do they change when you say
/claps/?”

3. Vowel Labeling:
Help students to discover how the vowel sounds are articulated, e.g. Smile, Open, and Round.

4. Tracking:
Develop phoneme sequencing for single through multisyllable words.

5. Decoding and Spelling:
Integrate phonetic processing with an ability to predict how words will be spelled or read. Sight words.

References: http://www.umanitoba.ca/unevoc/conference/papers/lindamood.pdf
http://teachers.plainfield.k12.in.us/tcox/Lettersbytheweek.htm