Fin’s Wilson Reading Journey

Blog Series#1

Wilson Success Story

I am often asked if Wilson works with older students, particularly adolescents.  Last year, I worked with a Wilson practicum candidate, Kate, and her son, Fin.  Kate had asked if she could use her son, Fin, who was diagnosed with dyslexia in 3rd grade, for her Level 1 practicum student.  I told her that was fine with me, but it would depend on her son’s attitude and compliance.  As I’ve seen, sometimes children will not allow their parents to give them instructions, much less teach them formally.  However, Kate assured me this was not the case; she had home-schooled Fin and found he was compliant.  Thus, the Wilson Reading System would be part of his language arts curriculum.

The WRS Level 1 practicum is done over a year.  Someone who does this practicum has already attended and completed the 3-day WRS workshop. The next task is to find a student reading at least two or more grade levels below their current grade placement.   During the practicum, the teacher meets with the practicum student for at least 65 one-hour sessions so that the student can progress from the first book of the Wilson program to the beginning of the fourth book (Steps 1.3 to 4.2).  While the practicum is taking place, five live observations are scheduled at strategic places in the curriculum so that the teacher can get feedback and coaching as the instruction is given. 

Before the practicum officially begins, the students must take individual reading tests to clearly understand their reading and spelling strengths and weaknesses. This pre-testing data also functions as a measuring stick so that at the end of the practicum, different versions of the same tests are given to show progress in these literacy areas.

Fin was twelve years old and in the 6th grade when his pre-testing was completed.  Kate was trained as an Orton-Gillingham tutor and had used several popular OG curricula with Fin.  She saw “small gains, but nothing like the progress we saw with Wilson.”  His strengths were building things with his hands and listening comprehension.  On one standardized measure, he could not read the nonsense words and scored below first-grade level on that subtest.  His word identification scores were better, scoring at the 3.1-grade level but still well below his current 6th-grade level.   Passage comprehension was his top score at 4.2.  Fin was bright enough to use the context clues to help him figure out the answers.  This is what we typically see with students diagnosed with dyslexia.  On another test, his spelling was the lowest subtest.  His scores were in the 3rd percentile, and it was evident that he did not understand how spelling rules worked.  Some of the errors he made were stres (for stress), plastick (for plastic), ther (for there), and moer (for more).  Fin’s word identification was better, but his score was 19%. You can see his hand-written spelling pre-test for a better look at his errors and handwriting.

Stay tuned to learn how Kate and Fin navigated the journey to literacy.