I have a ten-year-old son who has needed remedial help in the public school system since he was in first grade. During his fourth and the beginning of his fifth year of school he was sent to a literacy school where he could get more one-on-one help with reading. He only made enough progress there that about a fourth of the way into the fifth grade school year he was able to read at a third grade reading level. Everyone has seemed to be baffled by his inability to read well as his I.Q. scores have been extremely high.
After tons of testing and school reports, they came to the decision that he is learning disabled though I was never told exactly what is causing his “inability” either. For the remainder of fifth grade I pulled him out of the public school and I am homeschooling him. This was a very scary thing for me to do as I didn’t know what I was going to do in order to improve his reading ability either.
Through research for curriculum, I was introduced to Audiblox. I read through almost all of the posts on the message boards and all of that articles on the web site as well. I had an older child who had gone through a program in the U.S. which is similar to Audibloxs where I saw some results. I was excited to find something that I could do at home and which didn’t cost me two thousand dollars (the cost of the other program), plus I am learning how to use the program with my child so it can be a continual process, not one that is dictated by when my money will run out (like the other program).
My ten-year-old has only been using the Audiblox program for three months and these are the things that I have noted in him. Most importantly, I would have to say that his self-esteem has improved immensely. He is acting more mature and more responsible for his own behavior. As far as his reading…he is still reading at a third grade level. This is the good news though: Even at the third grade level he would guess every second or third word. You could tell him to look at it closely, sound it out, etc… and he would just keep on guessing. Sometimes the word wouldn’t even look like the words he was guessing. Now he only guesses about every fifth word and if I tell him he has read the word wrong, he’ll look at it again and most times be able to tell me what the word is (he still has a difficult time sounding out mutlisyllabic words). His fluency has increased tremendously too. For the first time he is reading without long pauses between words or sounding like a robot. He is actually starting to put some inflection into his words.
I am excited to see what the future holds for my son. I am finally seeing quick progress in such a short time, that I can’t wait to see what the next few months will bring him by using Audiblox. I also want to state that I think one of the reasons that my son has had progress this quickly is because we started out doing five sessions a day for two weeks, then two sessions a day for two weeks and now we do one session a day, five days a week. It really takes commitment on the parents’ part but you really see results.
I would like to thank all of the support and answers to my questions that I have been given. The administrators of Audiblox have been very willing to give me advice or to explain to me how to go about doing some of the exercises if something was unclear.
I highly recommend Audiblox for anyone that is having problems reading. This is coming from someone who has tons of “how to read books” that were a big waste of money and I can tell you that Audiblox is not.
Karla,
Canada