NOW! Programs

“Camron is, and always has been, an intelligent child with a deep thought process. He always asks thoughtful questions that seem beyond his years and his thought process amazes me. He has always been aware, alert, engaged and thoughtful. So when he began Kindergarten two weeks after his 5th birthday we were excited.

The next 3 years for us and for Camron were hard. Camron struggled. As parents of 2 older children who did not struggle in school, it was a learning curve for us all. Cam had trouble recognizing letters, sounding out words (decoding) and if he could sound out the word quick enough to actually piece the sounds together it was a miracle. Reading daily with him was stressful. He couldn’t tell B from D. He read so incredibly slow that it put me to sleep. I am sure he dreaded reading as much as we did.

Camron received “tiered” instruction his entire kindergarten year but it wasn’t enough. He was retained and it hurt us all even though we knew he couldn’t push forward. His second year of kindergarten was a little better but not much. When he did start progressing and performing at grade level, the school pulled his “tiered” instruction. His scores quickly dropped and he fell behind again. He worked with tutors in addition to what the school provided. We met with teachers and curriculum instructors and every one told us he would come around. They reassured us that he was not having behavioral issues in addition to his learning difficulties. He was an engaged student, he asked questions, he volunteered information and he did well in math, as long as it didn’t involve word problems.

As Cam’s year in 2nd grade progressed, it became evident to the school that he wasn’t improving, and they requested a meeting with us. At that meeting they shared that they wanted to have Camron evaluated. We agreed. The next couple of months following his evaluation were some of the most frustrating on this journey. The results of Cam’s evaluation told the school that he had a learning disability. When we inquired as to how we should handle this, the school didn’t have many answers that seemed to be what Camron needed. I have never felt so frustrated. It was hard sitting in a room full of professional educators with years of experience , and feeling like they couldn’t seem to understand that they way we all had been teaching Cam for the last 8 years of his life wasn’t the answer for him. The school wanted to continue with the same programs that he had been taking. Programs that were not working for him. I knew that Camron could not be alone in his struggles and was discouraged that our education system didn’t seem to have the answers for him and children like him. It was disheartening. Camron could learn he just needed a different teaching style.

I spent the next month researching our options beyond what the school had to offer. I asked anyone and everyone I knew and respected if they knew of any programs that could help someone like Cam. When I found The Morris Center I was a bit nervous. I had heard that they had great programs, but I might have to pay the cost of a nice vehicle. Our budget was limited, but our hope for Cam was limitless!

When we met with Dr. Conway I was impressed. It seemed to make logical sense that the movement of your mouth and the feel of your mouth has so much to do with reading! I felt silly for never realizing this before. I had never realized how much I watch other people’s mouths when they speak and how much my 2 year old had been watching me speak for the first years of her life. I went home and continued my research. I tested it out with our “baby”, I was impressed when she struggled with a word, if I asked her to watch my mouth, she quickly could correctly pronounce the word.

We took a well researched risk and signed Camron up for tutoring with the NOW! program. Over the next 5 months, Cam met once a day for an hour with his tutor. The progress was slow, and I was nervous. For our family, this was a big commitment and it was hard to judge whether or not it was working at first. We had decided to place Cam on an IEP at school. We requested that the school test him at the end of the first 9 weeks of 3rd grade against the end of year expectations for 2nd grade. His data was exciting when compared side by side! His accuracy rate, his decoding of real words vs. non-sense words and his fluency had all improved significantly. What stood out the most was the fact that Cam’s decoding of non-sense words equally improved. The results told us that Cam was applying the strategies he was learning.

While this data was important, Cam’s outlook on reading is what really told me that our investment was paying off. Over the summer, I read The Hatchet to Cam, because for the first time he asked me to read to him. He was eager to be read to and was finally enjoying time spent reading. As he progressed in the NOW program, he began to show initiative and wanted to read. When school started back in the fall, I would come home to find him reading on his own because he said he wanted “to be recognized at school for reading more minutes than other students”. While driving to school one morning he pulled his book out and started reading without me having to ask him to read- This too was a first for Cam. He even reached over and turned the radio off that morning. My heart soared and I took a picture to send to his teachers past and present, his tutor at NOW and my husband. For most people these would seem like insignificant moments but for Camron these were monumental moments worth recording! Then, within a couple of weeks of that while we were on vacation at Disney, Cam told me “He used to hate reading” and when I asked why he told me “because it used to be hard.” I almost cried. He had even began trying to read signs aloud as we drove! These small things, more than anything, solidified that something had changed! I attribute these changes in Cam to the NOW program, as it was the only piece of his educational instruction that had changed. The NOW program helped our son become a better and more confident reader.

My fear that Cam will struggle his entire life with reading are not completely gone. Cam is reading better but his fluency is still a concern. He is continuing to build his fluency with daily practice and I expect that his comprehension will improve. I am comfortable that the skills he has learned with the NOW program are something he can utilize for the rest of his life, and they will help him. He may never be a fast reader but he will be able to read.”

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NOW! Programs are online – to get started, call (904) 409-3381 or send us an e-mail.

What do you do when a person struggles to read?

Most of us would say that the answer is obvious: Give them more practice.

Maybe we should give them phonics instruction that is more engaging, and then give them more practice. Maybe we should give them enriched vocabulary instruction, and then give them more practice.

Yet, this isn’t what science tells us. Research into how language skills develop shows us that there is a direct link between the strength of spoken language skills and reading fluency. These spoken language skills that allow us to effectively process language have to be strong for reading skills to develop. These are also the skills that are most often overlooked by reading instruction, because most curriculum developers assume they are already present.

These spoken language skills include multi-sensory integration. When it comes to language, three senses have to work together: What you see, what you hear, and what you feel when you move your mouth. We did a post on this once before, which you can read here. If these three senses are not solidly connected, reading skills will develop less efficiently, making reading harder.

Phonological awareness is something that many teachers and reading experts are talking about these days. Without the whole host of processing skills that exist under the umbrella of phonological awareness, then reading and spelling will be more labored. These skills include the ability to break words up into individual sounds, recognize even subtle changes in those sounds (“Is the word ‘free’ or ‘three?’”), and sequence them properly, among others. This is distinct from phonemic awareness, which many schools and reading curricula seek to improve, but is only a small piece to the broader necessary skill set.

Even small weaknesses in these skills can make reading that much more difficult. Ever know a student who could read, but they just didn’t like to? While there can be a number of reasons for this, mild weaknesses in early language skills can be one root cause.

It’s a good thing people know all of this about language and reading, though. It has allowed for the development of very effective forms of reading instruction that give the brain the types of exercises it needs to build these early language skills, then quickly apply them to reading and spelling. Doing the proper types of activities often enough, for a long enough period of time, in the proper order, and for the proper duration allow for building reading skills relatively quickly and very effectively.

If your child reads slowly or has trouble sounding out words, or just plain hates to read, it could be because of an early language skill weakness. For more information about how NOW! Programs™ build these necessary skills, email us at info@nowprograms.com, or visit our website at nowprograms.wpenginepowered.com.

Given that Developmental Dyslexia and a Specific Learning Disability with Impairment in Reading are now accurately classified as “Neurodevelopmental Disorders”, this helps highlight that they are of a medical origin and not caused by educational issues. Poor phonological awareness and the subsequent difficulty learning to read, despite adequate intelligence and opportunity, is most likely due to a genetic predisposition for learning difficulties. It is believed to most likely be due to inefficiently wired neurons in the left temporal, parietal, frontal and/or sensory motor strip of the brain – all of which are believed to have happened by the 6th month of gestation (before childbirth; see Galaburda, et al. 2006). Could Pediatricians be the first to explain these scientific dyslexia facts or #DyslexiaScience to families?

Since there is such a wide variation of estimates on how many children are affected by Developmental Dyslexia, ranging 1:5 to 1:20, let’s say it’s only 1 in 10 for the sake of a conservative argument. A typical pediatrician’s office that treats 100 patients per day would have the opportunity to inform 10 patients with dyslexia (or predisposition for dyslexia) each day of the medical, neurobiological facts about dyslexia. Even showing families a basic figure, like the one published by an eminent dyslexia researcher (see Ramus, et al., 2004 figure below), could help families begin to understand the true medical and neurodevelopmental nature of dyslexia. Could such clear and basic neurobiological information help parents be less likely to believe the rampant myths of dyslexia and the countless well-intentioned, but gravely misinformed opinions of friends, family, coworkers, neighbors and others who are not medically trained to know the clear differences between well-established, scientific facts and inaccurate myths?

What if pediatricians could provide basic risk factors or warning signs to watch for at each age of life? Would that help families know when and why to seek evidence-based assessment and treatment services? Could knowing even basic neurological soft signs empower parents to disregard woefully inaccurate information about dyslexia, such as the “Wait and see” myth? Or the “He might catch up later” myth? Or the myth that “boys always learn to read later than girls,” or the “Your just being overly concerned, he’ll read when he’s ready” myth, or the myth that “reading just has not clicked yet?” These myths go on and on, and are a sign that the teacher or individual has little to no idea how children really do learn to read, and instead think it only comes from imparting the correct knowledge, or it is some kind of magical event that occurs via some unknown method, event, or proper birthday. Could families benefit from knowing risk factors like these?

Would families even be receptive to knowing how reading skills are typically developed for children who do NOT struggle to learn to read? What if they knew that typical readers learn from a very specific set of multisensory experiences, and not from random or tangential multisensory experiences, such as shaping words with modeling clay, finger movements in the air, tapping arms or shaking legs, tracing sandpaper letters, or even walking and hopping on large chalk letters? What if parents really understood the science of how reading typically develops for children?

Would families then be more likely to seek services earlier? Would they be better equipped to identify which services are untested “guestimations” of how to teach reading, or are inefficient compensatory “strategy” approaches, rather than well-researched, highly effective, scientifically tested methods with known typical outcomes for any child with dyslexia? Could Pediatricians help families understand that prevention of reading difficulties via evidence-based methods truly provide the best outcomes for the child, family and school? Would families want to know the following NICHD research outcomes that showed that the reading difficulties associated with dyslexia or LD are highly preventable via early intervention at age 5-years old? The phonological awareness deficits that interfere with accurately learning to rhyme, perceiving all of the sounds or changes of sounds in a word and learning how to sound out words can be greatly improved in Kindergarten. Would such medical research help families avoid falling prey to the myriad of untested, unproven so-called “interventions” that truly do not work without 3-5 years of memorization and, even then, do not close the gap between a child’s intelligence and their language and academic skills?

Perhaps the challenges families face are much more complex than a Pediatrician has time to explain during a brief medical exam visit? Perhaps this information is just not that important enough to share in every Pediatrician’s office world wide (although there is scientific evidence that nearly all languages have a degree of dyslexia or learning disabilities in reading) in order to guide parents to accurate diagnosis, services and best possible outcomes?

Maybe it is critical and worthwhile to have Pediatricians share some of our best pediatric intervention research that helps more than 97% of 5-year-olds read on grade-level before the end of 2nd grade – no matter if these children enter Kindergarten in the bottom 10% on pre-literacy and language measures that have been shown to be highly and reliably predictive of who will be a struggling reader by age 9. Would such outcomes be worth the 2-5 minutes that it might take to have Pediatricians help inform the parents of the medical, neurobiological, genetic and almost completely preventable aspects of phonological weakness and reading difficulties inherent in developmental dyslexia?

It is an unfortunate fact that the US educational system has made little-to-no progress with implementing highly effective, evidence-based methods in schools. It is equally unfortunate that many families and teachers are still misinformed that any program with an “Orton-Gillingham” approach is highly effective and evidence-based (they are not). Woefully, our current educational system continues to support a “school to prison pipeline” that fails to help our children to fully develop phonological awareness, reading accuracy, reading fluency, and full comprehension/memory while reading. Perhaps it is time for Pediatricians to step up, play a larger role in the sharing of medical information about a disorder that is medical in origin and nature, and help empower parents to know the true scientific facts of dyslexia? Isn’t it time for one of the most common childhood medical disorders to receive first-line attention by the pediatricians, nurse-practitioners, nurses and other healthcare professionals who are some of the first to interact with families about the health and well-being of their children. IF Pediatricians and other healthcare professionals make an earnest effort to share scientific facts and not myths, then the following successful prevention of poor reading skills (see graph above and supporting PDF’s) results will be commonplace. Then,….

WE CAN BREAK THE “SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE.”

All children deserve this degree of assistance, education, and evidence-based intervention or prevention of dyslexia/LD in reading.

Published by Tim Conway, Ph.D
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dispelling-dyslexia-myths-medical-endeavor-should-tim-conway-ph-d-?trk=prof-post

Diana Leon is a volunteer adult learning tutor for the Alachua County Public Library’s Adult Literacy program. All of the Alachua County Library tutors are trained in NOW! Foundations for Speech, Language, Reading, and Spelling®. Anyone interested in becoming an adult literacy tutor in Alachua County, FL should call Theresa Sterling, ACLD Literacy Coordinator, at 352-334-3929.

I began my search for volunteer opportunities at the library over a year ago because I was determined to give back to my community in a more meaningful way. The Literacy Coordinator, Theresa Sterling, at the Alachua County Public Library made a great case for literacy tutoring: you can take the skills you acquire anywhere, there is a high need for literacy volunteers, and you can give people hope. So, the library sponsored my training with Neuro-development of Words – NOW!® in a program called NOW! Foundations for Speech, Language, Reading, and Spelling®. I was intrigued by their research-based dynamic, multi sensory approach to reading. The logic behind the program is nuanced, yet simple: we need to fine tune our phonological awareness at understandable, concrete levels before we venture into the abstract abyss of English reading, spelling, and comprehension. As a literate person, you automatically make these multisensory connections–your mouth moves, and you produce the sounds you need to read or say words. Yet I was discovering new and exciting ways to understand written and spoken language. I was confident that the program could work.
Next I was paired with my learner, Abby*, who was just as eager to learn as I was to teach. She was pulled out of school during first grade and never acquired the skills you might need for basic reading and writing. She had some previous experience with adult learning centers to no avail. She had zero sound associations with letters and relied on rote memorization to read and spell with little success–“Rat. B-E-D.” But because of her willingness to try anything, I was given raw clay with which I could sculpt.

The first epiphany that Abby had with the NOW! Program was her mouth control. We used mouth pictures with names based on the action required to produce the specific sound to segment, read, and spell words. For example, /p/ and /b/ require you to close your lips and then pop them open to make the sounds. She was learning where to position her tongue, lips, and jaw to make the sounds she needed. She was discovering new words and sounds with a very concrete base so she can self-correct (e.g., do my mouth movements match the sounds I want to produce or the pictures I see).
This was a very important first step in the program.
As Abby learned more sounds and had a concrete understanding of her mouth movements, she gained tools to better understand English. She was also reinforcing the rudimentary steps to actually read and spell (e.g., sounding out words or segmenting, reading from left to right, understanding the way sounds and words can change, etc.). When we first started just short of a year ago, it was hard for her to discriminate sounds in words like “paw.” Today, she segments with relative ease using blocks (a more abstract version of the picture cards, but less abstract than letters), and we are working on perfecting her recognition of all the sounds in the English language and reading and spelling one-syllable words. She’s very pleased that she can now recognize and read words when she watches television or goes grocery shopping.

Not only has her progress been rewarding for me, but she confessed that this past year has been the happiest of her life. Her confidence and self-esteem are now abounding. Meeting with her for three hours every week is a great joy in my life. The library and NOW! are changing lives, and I’m grateful to be a part of it.

A recent article in The Huffington Post addressed reading skills in Kindergarten. It was intended to relieve parents of the high amount of pressure the current system puts on children to perform at a certain level academically, and it probably did just that. With the current backlash against high-stakes testing, parents are looking for pressure-release valves.

In many ways, the author’s thoughts were accurate and helpful. Our system is putting too much emphasis on high academic standards at an age when children, developmentally, should be spending more time running, climbing, and playing in the dirt. Every single one of the author’s “4 things worse than not learning to read in Kindergarten” are accurate… for Kindergarten.

The problem comes when people interpret this attempt at moderation as a reason to not be vigilant (which is not communicated in the original article). While it may not be the end of the world if your child is not reading by the end of Kindergarten, there is evidence in research, explained in this well-written article on Reading Rockets, that it is not safe to assume a developmental lag when children show signs of reading struggles.

So how do we strike the balance? How do we not let our lives be, on the one hand, dictated by fear for every delay, and on the other hand, miss true warning flags?

The answer: education! We must know what is developmentally reasonable, and what is cause for concern. Science has revealed so much, yet it is often hard for good information to cut through the noise that so often permeates our media-saturated society.

For a breakdown of red flags by age, see this list from The Morris Center clinics in Central Florida. But for Kindergarten-age children, here are some things to look for:

• Consistent mispronunciation of words
• Trouble rhyming
• Misses or changes sounds in words
• Has trouble retrieving a word
• Difficulty remembering directions

Bear in mind that most children do these things at some point, but if one or more of these indicators persist over time, consider having them assessed by a neuropsychologist or licensed therapist.

The spread of science-based information to parents is a responsibility held by many entities, including reputable media outlets and pediatricians. It is not acceptable for pseudo-science about dyslexia and other reading struggles to pass as major news stories, or for the medical community to purely see reading difficulties as an educational problem. Parents also need to do their part to seek out information based in legitimate research. This will go a long way toward making sure that parental worries are worthwhile.

And yet, schools will bear the brunt of the responsibility, and will be up for the task if they take two major steps forward:

1) Schools should be administering simple assessments involving phoneme elision, or the omission of phonemes in words (saying “cat” without the /k/ sound) that has been found to be highly predictive of future reading difficulties.

2) It is time that schools begin applying the research that has shown that about 97% of reading difficulties can be prevented in young children when given effective, neurodevelopment reading instruction. Giving PreK-1st Grade students age-appropriate, neurodevelopment instruction in the multi-sensory features of language sounds, and systematically training strong phonological processing skills could virtually eliminate this stress from the lives of most parents by adequately preparing the bulk of students for standard classroom reading instruction.

It’s time for us to all do our part. By spreading information based in science, looking for legitimate red flags, assessing children on necessary and developmentally appropriate skills, and providing evidence-based, neurodevelopment reading instruction, we can strike that balance between fear and flippancy, and find good judgment that leads to growth.

When we talk about the educational system today, it is rarely in positive terms. Praises for the efforts and achievements of individual teachers are often overshadowed by criticism, pointing out its many shortcomings. Recently, these criticisms have focused on two related issues: high-stakes testing, and the unacceptably low percentage of students who are able to reach proficiency standards.

While this debate has been going on in the general population, a powerful advocacy group has been materializing. Organizations like the state-oriented “Decoding Dyslexia” have a growing voice in state and national education policy, and for good reason: They represent the population of students who have, by far, the most frequently diagnosed learning disability. Moreover, it is a disability about which scientific research has made great strides, none of which have made their way into general knowledge among educators or administrators. The educational system has been incredibly unfair to this group, and has fewer and fewer reasons for being so.

Through no fault of their own, these students have trouble with words on the level of individual speech sounds. A neuro-biological condition has set them up for failure in activities that are seen as vital to educational success. But the recent attention they are garnering might bring about some salvation of the system as a whole.

Take the problem with high-stakes testing, for instance. The plight of students with dyslexia might just be what was needed to turn us back from such disastrous policy. Over-testing and punitive measures for not passing have a devastating effect on a student’s motivation to learn by creating anxiety and a sense of disconnection between education and life (“When am I ever going to need this except to pass a stupid test?”). So the impact is negative in general. Yet sympathy for students has been hard to come by. Enter the students with dyslexia, who have to put far greater effort into such foundational academic activities as reading and writing than typical students. Without appropriate instruction, these students have to fight the natural wiring of their brains just to perform. They struggle to demonstrate mastery of the content they’ve learned because of their inability to master academic skills, like reading and writing. What they know is not reflected on tests, leading advocates to rightly conclude that the tests are unfair, as are the consequences for not passing them. Their condition, which isn’t a rare one (current estimates say that about 20% of the general population struggles with some degree of dyslexia), has led many people to question the validity of high-stakes testing in general. Some states have started major overhauls, and the Federal ESSA law, which replaces No Child Left Behind, cuts them out of the equation completely, at least at the federal level.

This is not to say that everyone who struggles on standardized tests or reading fluency only does so because of dyslexia. Most educators, however, would say that a move away from high stakes over-testing benefits everyone involved. This action, which creates justice for one population, ends up benefitting everyone. This is also not to say that the growing advocacy movement for students with dyslexia was the deciding factor in this debate, but it definitely played a role in mobilizing parents and swaying policymakers.

But an even greater impact might be in the realm of reading proficiency. Research into how to teach those with dyslexia to read has been going on for decades, at first with only varying degrees of success. Research conducted in the late-1990s and early 2000s, however, found an astonishingly high level of success at not only teaching students with dyslexia to read, but preventing them from struggling in the first place. The approach taken has been called neuro-developmental, as it follows the same path that typical readers take in building reading skills, explicitly teaching skills that most reading instruction takes for granted. One study found that teaching kindergarten children to read with this approach yielded an incredibly high success rate of over 97% on or above grade level by Grade 2!¹

We also know that science-based, neuro-developmental reading instruction also teaches those with naturally strong phonological systems to read. Neuro-developmental methods teach everyone to read. Imagine if we taught all children with methods based in the science of how brains acquire language skills. An action that would bring justice for one population would end up benefitting everyone.

Yet we continue to offer traditional reading instruction that only works for the 80% that have naturally strong phonological skills. But demand is growing for evidence-based practices in schools. Awareness of what is possible is growing. Imagine a school system where only 3%, instead of 30% to 50%, are struggling to read in 2nd Grade. Imagine the impact on classroom behavior. Imagine the improvement in attitudes toward learning in general. While this might not be a silver bullet that fixes everything, imagine the impact it could have.

¹ Torgesen, J.K., Wagner, R. K., Rashotte, C.A., Rose, E., Lindamood, P., Conway, T., & Garvin, C. (1999). Preventing reading failure in young children with phonological processing disabilities: Group and individual responses to instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 579-593.