How Long did it take your child to go through Wilson Reading?

[sste]

Just wondering how many years and at what intensity for your child or even other kids you know. And what stage did your child start reading fluently and you decided to stop at?

We are starting stage 2 and my son will bump up to intensive daily Wilson for the summer so he will likely complete stages three and all or at least half of stage 4.

I guess my hope is that we will be done with intensive Wilson at the end of next year (summer 2016) which I think would be through stage 6 for us but who knows. After that I would want my son to continue to do Wilson 1X per week to further develop his written expression and learn more elaborate English language rules. So I don't mind continuing at some amount -- it is just the 3 hours per week treadmill that I would like to see an end in sight for!!

[StantonHyde]

hmmm, I am not sure exactly what stage. DS had 4x a week tutoring after first grade--summer. Then no tutoring until March--so 6 months off. Then once a week March-May. Another 4x a week summer and then he started at the school with the Wilson tutor. He had to repeat first grade--he had tutoring 2-4x a week.This was during the school day--the interventionist would pull him out of class. Within 6 months, he had advanced 1.5 years. We did 2x/week summer and then he worked with the tutor in second grade as well. By the end of second grade, things were looking good. I think we switched over to math tutoring 2x a week for the summer. He still got tutored in 3rd grade during school but there was more emphasis on writing and math. By 4th grade he was getting in trouble for rushing through his math worksheets and putting down any guess so he could hand it in and get back to his book!!

So that's 2 whole years of 4x a week. Then down to 2x a week for another year. As your son gets older, he will also need support in grammar and spelling in context. DS gets 100% on spelling tests but he cannot spell even easier words when he is writing a paragraph. This past several months, I have focused on key boarding. He will have to work on it over the summer and then we will figure out what kind of computer device he will use for typing assignments. They have a great software program that is designed to identify and correct "dyslexic" grammar and spelling errors--its basically an accommodation. We will try that.

[sste]

Thanks Stanton. My DS has been doing 2-3 sessions of Wilson per week all year (either 3 50minutes sessions or currently he does 2 1.5 hour ones which include a read aloud/comprehension component to break it up). However, that is just at home! At school he does 25 minutes per day of another, similar OG program which moves more quickly. So his Wilson has tended to drag behind this other program which has been good though because the Wilson has greatly helped with fluency and spelling and reinforced each rule he has learned in school's faster OG program.

For the summer, he is doing Wilson daily. And our plan is to continue 3-4 times per week next school year.

What is hard for him is that he does ALOT after school -- the Wilson, private speech (on top of in school speech), private OT (on top of school OT). Frankly, he needs help with his math facts too - - they just seem very hard for him to access. Theoretically he seems to love math. He asked me what infinity plus 100 is. And I said infinity. And he said no it is infinity plus 100. And I think??? as a matter of math theory, recalling a party conversation long ago with a mathematician, he may be right. However, we really need a little more speed over here with 4+3 or 36+1! So at some point it would be nice if the Wilson could go down a bit so we could add math tutoring. He is starting to learn keyboarding in first grade with the school OT -- a slow process for him, I anticipate a few years at least.

[StantonHyde]

sste:

We decided to focus on one item at a time. We specifically did not work on his handwriting/OT because it is lower on the list of priorities. DS never did anything after school--just psychologist therapy sessions and psychiatrist med checks for his anxiety/ADD. He didn't need speech. We worked with the psychologist to limit his after school tutoring/therapy--we needed to balance DS being a kid with getting him services he needed. We probably did miss out on handwriting--but that's why he will be key boarding. Different kids are different. When your children are young, it feels like you should do everything. Just remember it is ok to prioritize.

[sste]

Stanton, those are wise words. It is just so hard -- from all I have gathered there are def. windows of early intervention for reading, handwriting, DS's vision loss from lazy eye, even the speech organization work he still needs to do (right now his speech sessions focus on articulation). After those windows, it is not clear to me that one can completely "fix" the issues -- certainly for the lazy eye, reading fluency, and writing it becomes very, very hard if not impossible. In theory I completely agree about staggering and weighing the effect on the child's mental health. But then what if the long term upset over slow reading or illegible handwriting is worse than the "short-term pain"??? These questions keep me up at night. What makes it harder is my DS is ridiculously responsive to quality intervention -- his former anxiety is down to normal range after 3 months with a top-notch CBT person, his handwriting has gone from crazy-bad to middle of the pack (he will probably end up with nice handwriting), his reading is now at or very close to grade level and his fluency is even normal range . .. honestly, it would be easier for me if there was something I thought I could ditch because he seemed unlikely to respond or because the cost:benefit didn't make sense.

We are looking into doing a partial homeschool next year so we can move more of his therapies into the school day. I am very torn about the entire thing but I hate to get rid of therapies he responds so well to and replace them with the inevitable inefficiency/down time/busy work of the average school day. Every single day I think to myself our kids need more learning efficiency, not less!

[inmypjs]

I have several friends who are Wilson tutors. They all say how long it takes depends on how severe the dyslexia is and at what age remediation begins. Starting above 5th grade takes longer. Below 5th grade, they say 2 years if the child is moderate and goes to tutoring 2x week. Severe dyslexia would be roughly 3 years, profound longer. If you want another opinion, you can go to the Wilson web site and email Barbara Wilson. I hear she is responsive to questions.