MomofFour,
I have one, my eldest dd10.5, I am doing Barton with, and 3 who are not yet ready.
My 7y/o son is one of them. I cannot afford a lips tutor. Period. Can’t! So after much prayer and supplication, The Lord provided (through an ‘expert’ in the field, some recommendations. Zoo Phonics, the home program, is one of the very few phonics programs that deals with phonemic awareness. And all the children love it dd,10.5 included. Dyslexia is about hearing sounds not necessarily seeing them. For example…out of 4 children ages 4 to 10.5 only one of mine can say the sound sh, and that is child #3 who is 5.5. The 10.5dd can hear it, but her braces make it very challenging to say. But the ds7 can not even hear a difference between s and sh. He never says sh. It is as if it doesn’t exist. So fish is fis. And if I try to get him to identify which sound I am saying alone or in words he can’t. He’s had difficulty w j and ch…but did finally hear it and began to replace all the ch w/ j in a game, chin=jin , church=jurj, char=jar, etc. This was a great breakthrough that had him giggling wildly. But we are still working on sh vs s.
Using the mirror is also very important…
All the children were having difficulty with hearing the difference between w and r, even dd10.5. So in Barton she needed to spell twig. She wrote trig. After working the Barton way a while, I stopped and said listen carefully. Do you hear the difference?…and I said it slowly carefully twig and trig. Exasperated, she said, Mommy you are saying the exact same! At that point, I regrouped. The next day we all sat in front of the mirrored closet door after listening to the ZooPhonics video go through the alphabet, with their animals, sounds, and corresponding kinetic movements, and highlighting and repeating the r and w. We practiced the following sentence until all even the 4 yo could say it correctly. Robby Rabbit runs, and Willy Weasel wiggles. It was quite riotous as you can imagine but very successful.
Another thing is to help them see where their tongue and lips are placed. There are many pairs that have the exact same placement in the mouth…the only difference being whether you vibrate you throat or not. This is call voiced and unvoiced.
Examples: p and b Say both sounds with hand resting gently on throat. B vibrates, p doesn’t. B is voiced, p is not. Teeth, mouth, tongue all the same. Make sure when say sounds you are not adding the uh sound at the end. Just say the b sound not the buh sound!
T and D are pairs.
G and K are pairs.
Etc.
So your goal needs to be to get him willing and as eager as possible to learn…that is going to take communication, honesty, and gentle understanding and a lot of patience! And to get him to hear the sounds well. Sound discrimination, phonemic awareness. Lots of games suitable.
ZooPhonics home program might work. Logic of English might work…either their early program for preschoolers…which my friend loves. Or their school age program – covering quite a range- which my other friend loves. Nice thing about both programs…they are mastery paced. Very important. And Logic of English will teach you about Phonemic Awareness, voiced, unvoiced, etc.
God Bless you, and may you and your son and your husband begin to see what a gift this knowledge can be for you all!
Jo