Nicci, thank you so much. I really appreciate this, the whole thing has been so emotional for me because of my own family history on this and also all of DS's interests are startlingly academic and I see this as a potential barrier to pursuing them.
DS works with a SLP (she seems very good and we have heard great things about her from other parents) twice per week in a group of 3 students. While sound discrimination is a part of that it seems to me alot of the focus has been on output. I just emailed her asking if she had administered the pat-2 or ctopp-2 and if not if she could. I explained what you and indianamom noted - - that we may need to attack this on both fronts. I think she is going to be very open to a PA approach and also she has a very special relationship with DS, they both love words.
When you say you say the sound instead of the letter what do you say for letters that have two sounds like c or the vowels? Is there a chart somewhere I can get the letter sounds from?
In more positive news, or mostly positive, DS has in the past four days had a FIRE LIT UNDER HIM! His classroom teacher who I do not love and DS rightly described as "impersonal" took his Magic Treehouse book out of his bookbin and said it wasn't the right fit. We haven't talked to him about it but DS knows, he always knows, and he is pretty sad he is having reading problems. He told me about, said I couldn't talk to the teacher but a sad thing happened at school, his voice was shaking as he said, "And I love magic treehouse." So, of course, I ran out and bought 14 magic treehouses and now DS is begging me each night for our special reading time in my bed -- he reads to me for about 5 minutes and then I read 20 minutes of magic treehouse. I have him read certain words from MT which to DS is esp delightful since his teacher said he couldn't read it. From what I can tell from our reading time, what is killing him is that: 1) he doesn't know short or long vowel sounds and I think you are right, he is not discriminating them; 2) he reverses b and d; 3) he sometimes tries to read words from right to left. However, after a few days I noticed he has started memorizing words by brute force and his recall on that seems very good, much better than I initially thought. Hopefully some combo of memorization + SLP + Wilson or Slant will work (slant has actually checked out positively in general, our therapist knows one of the program's pioneers and is checking with him/her to assure it is the right fit for DS). It is good we are catching it early I hope.
Oh and DH and I ordered this book -- in addition to our therapist who is at a major center we consulted with literacy how and they suggested a bunch of resources. Did you think well of this one?
http://www.academictherapy.com/detai...%5Bbob%5D&TBL=[tbl]
Will PM soon, thank you again!