The current thinking about the cause of reading disabilities is going back to early childhood and phonemic awareness and manipulation.  I think many of us instinctively suspected this anyway.  There are many programs for older students and adults that go back to this and are showing several years of progress in a few months.
   
  These were the 10 componenents of phonemic manipulation skills that children need to be able to do in playing with sounds before reading and phonics instruction.  (Wouldn't it be great to educate parents about this also?)
  rhyming, hearing imitial sounds that are the same, beign able to isolate what the initial sound is, categorizing onset and rime, isolating the end and middle sound, blending sounds to mame words, segmenting words into parts--sounds or syllables (with clapping for number of parts, for instance), adding sounds to words (phoneme addition), phoneme deletion, and phoneme substitution.
   
  The other critical suggestion iss that letter sounds rather than letter names were used during these exercises because there is not written component to this--just development of important auditiory skills. 
   
  Dana Newingham

 
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