THE POWER OF BASELINES
One week later, we are still struggling to get our sessions in. Moving is no joke and we are all tired in the Feriante household. It’s hard to work on things that are hard for you when you are tired.
As I was lamenting about this to my partner, we realized that this extra-busy season would be a good opportunity to get some specific baseline information about where our daughter is really at in her reading and writing skills. We’ve seen the progress reports come home all year with the “sight word” red being the only one that our daughter has been able to read automatically. It’s her current pride and joy, that word red. It’s been disheartening to see the list of introduced “sight words” that she doesn't yet know grow steadily over the last 9 months. Because I know that rote memorization of high-frequency words, often referred to as “sight words”, is not a good use of her energy at this point, I haven’t prioritized working on the flashcards her teacher has sent home. Instead, we’ve used our energy to work through our structured literacy sessions together, focusing on building phonemic awareness, sound-symbol knowledge, and blending those oral and written sounds together into words. However, it’s still disheartening to see that “not mastered” list grow over the course of a school year.
So we’ve seen the progress reports and we have informal data from our sessions. But we have yet to get any norm-referenced data to show what her current percentiles are across the various literacy skill categories. Why is this important?
Well, measuring things yields better results. It’s hard to improve when you don’t have a solid understanding of your starting point. I want to have a solid baseline to measure my daughter’s progress. It’s not a perfect system, these norm-referenced assessments. But they do give a ton of information that will empower me to understand my daughter and in turn, to empower her with self-awareness and self-acceptance. Self-awareness and self-acceptance are some of the first steps in being able to confidently and effectively self-advocate for yourself, which is a skill I am very passionate about teaching my daughter! Regardless of if she does in fact have a beautiful, dyslexic brain or not, she will no doubt need to be really good at self-advocating in years to come.
Getting an official neuropsych evaluation is probably in our future. However, we are not in a place financially or emotionally to tackle that right now. I will write about that at a later date when we are ready for it. It’s a very important process that is also very labor-intensive and expensive. I highly recommend anyone who thinks their child might have a specific learning difference or disability to seek one out. It’s just not something we have the bandwidth for right now.
So, in the meantime, I decided to schedule a literacy consultation with one of Redwood’s Assessment Specialists, Briana Richards. She’s warm, kind, and an expert in supporting and understanding students with dyslexia. I am asking her to administer the Feifer Assessment of Reading Screener, which screens specifically for dyslexia, and the Gort-5, which is a norm-referenced assessment of oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. While these tests won’t officially diagnose my daughter with dyslexia, they will help me understand exactly where her literacy strengths are and where her gaps are in this stage of her literacy journey. This baseline, or starting point, will help me create an individualized plan of support for her as well as empower me with the language and information to advocate for her in her next school setting. It will help me know what questions to ask and what holes to poke. It will help me know how to coach her in using those skills that come naturally to her and support her in those tasks that require extra energy . That kind of information is powerful. Really powerful.
If you are interested, check out one of Briana’s reports. They are kind of amazing.