Barton's Reading and Spelling Question

[dakotamom]

Are any of you familiar with the Barton's Reading and Spelling program? I have been using this with my son over the summer as we have found out that he is, indeed, dyslexic. I love the program, and I understand the reasoning behind beginning at the beginning level no matter what age/level you feel they are at. HOWEVER, this is my question:

My son is 10 and going into 5th grade. He knows all of his letter sounds, letter recognition, etc. Do you HAVE to do each little step in lesson 2 of Barton's even if they already know their sounds well? For instance, when they 'pull down the letters' for the word/nonsense word, does he NEED to break apart the sounds using his fingers, or can he just simply pull down the letters because he already knows them? Those type of steps is what I am asking about.

I don't want to frustrate him with "boredom" (though he enjoys the program overall) when he already knows something by drawing it out longer, but I don't want to skip a detail that somehow 'connects' something in the dyslexic's brain.

I have no intention of skipping any lessons or levels We will do them all, but I just didn't know about every single detailed step. If you have tutored or used this system, any thoughts on that?

Thanks so much!!!
Dakotamom

[jcmc]

I am using Barton with both of my children. Both are dyslexic but have different strengths and weaknesses. My kids do sometimes get bored with the steps. There are a rare few times when we cut some steps, but I have found that as the levels go up, those basic steps need to be really ingrained. It makes the whole process go much smoother. If you establish at the very beginning that these steps are necessary for later levels thing go much smoother since you want the child to have those steps so ingrained they don't think about them anymore. They just do them. I found that once the kids stopped fighting the steps and just did them without thinking about them, the lessons progressed much faster. However, we do not do one lesson in a single sitting. In fact, I break up the lesson over several days and keep the sessions to 15-30 minutes, but I do them every morning, since my kids are morning people. They get less burned out if we do a shorter session and do it every morning. We take a week off every 6 weeks and 1-2 weeks off between Levels. I don't recommend going more than 3 weeks off between levels or you may have to go back and repeat prior lessons...

[jcmc]

Oh, and finger spelling is really pretty critical when you get to higher levels with complicated blends and digraphs. Without the finger spelling, which my kids really hated, the later levels would not have gone nearly as smoothly. However, I frequently do the finger spelling for them, as Susan Barton herself suggests. Susan Barton has a LOT of great suggestions for when kids turn resistant to certain steps. Even though some suggestions seem silly, most have actually worked quite well, even with my 13 year old...