Michael's Story—Unleashing Potential
"Michael experienced significant trauma that affected him emotionally," says his mom. He had diagnoses of severe depression, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Oppositional Defiant Disorder for which he was medicated. Nine-year-old Michael attended Pace School because his emotional needs greatly affected his ability to learn academics.
While Michael's mother, Vivian, was very involved in his education, the stress of single parenting often made it difficult to monitor schoolwork.
Michael had many behaviors that affected his ability to learn — poor ability to get along with others, easy frustration and little motivation. He missed a lot of school, which also affected instruction.
Vivian remembers, "We needed mental health services both in school and at home to help Michael and me cope with all the stress."
Through testing, Michael displayed superior intelligence and abstract reasoning skills. Achievement testing at the time of enrollment into Pace indicated his reading score was below average while his language score was above average. Michael was enrolled in specialized reading services at Pace School as a result of this discrepancy.
Although he fit the profile, Michael had never been diagnosed with severe reading problems.
A reading evaluation indicated that Michael's main areas of weakness were sight word identification and the ability to figure out unfamiliar words. A delay in these skills can affect reading comprehension and oral reading fluency. It helped that he was able to use his background knowledge and reasoning skills to help him understand what he was reading.
Other testing revealed that Michael was missing a key foundation of reading: he was not able to break down the sounds in words or blend sounds to form words.
He also had poor knowledge of sound-symbol relationships, making it impossible to attack unknown words. Michael's total reading skills were approximately three years below grade level.
Michael needed to learn that words are made up of individual sounds blended together. Through instruction, he learned sounds in a very organized and systematic approach.
Once Michael had a sound foundation of "phonological awareness" and phonics skills, he was better able to decode unfamiliar words and to improve word identification and fluency skills. Ultimately, he improved his reading ability enough to be discharged from specialized reading instruction and return to regular instruction in his Pace School classroom.
And, Michael, along with his mom, learned that he could overcome a problem that had seriously affected his performance in school and his ability to learn.
His many strengths were the source of unleashing his learning potential!
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