Adult Student and Recipes for Reading

For slightly over a year, I've been using Recipes for Reading (an Orton-Gillingham type of comprehensive reading instruction) on an adult student who is severely disabled. To be honest, he has improved from a first grade reading level to a second grade reading level. Right now I think he's at least a 2.7 reading level. He's just finished blends and some two-syllable words. It takes a lot of time just to get him to learn certain sounds. However, he still struggles with short vowel sounds. Does anyone have any suggestions to help a older student of about 62 years of age with short vowel sounds?

I really appreciate any comments!!

Any Advice?

I've been tutoring students by using Orton Gillingham method for almost a year. Unfortunately, I run into snags here and there. For example, one of my students is having a difficult time with decoding two-syllable words. I'm still in the early stages of teaching him but sometimes it seems as if he remembers certain similiar words and tries to say what he remembers and not exactly what's in front of him. And when I work on reading comprehension, a few of my students struggle with sequencing of events, remembering what happened and vocabulary. It is a very difficult process but does anyone have any suggestions?

Awesome Experience with my Student

Today I had the awesome opportunity to see one of my students make substantial progress. Before I begin my Orton-Gillingham lesson, I do a phoneme awareness drill of rhymes and onsets and phoneme identification. Then I have my student sound-out words. Thankfully, I found out that by placing tactile letters one at a time in front of my student while he touched and sounded-out each letter of a word, he learned such words as cog, cad, cod, gag and dog. My student had an extremely difficult time sounding out-words, but now he can do them easily with the help of tactile cues.

There are wonderful resources to help train individuals with learning disabilities. Check out www.espbooks.com.