The good news is that your student does NOT have significant auditory discrimination difficulty.

Your student is just missing some basic knowledge about big chunks of sound – words and syllables.

It could be due to some slight difficulty with auditory processing, or due to lack of instruction.

You can go ahead and start using the Barton System, but for the first 3 to 4 weeks, stop the session about 15 minutes early.

Spend those last 15 minutes teaching the student’s missing skill. There are many ways to teach those skills. So if you work at a school, ask your kindergarten teacher to show you activities they use to teach those skills. Then adapt them to be age appropriate.

If you do not have a teacher to ask, and your student did not do well in Part A of our student screening, contact us to request free activities that you can use to teach your student how to count words in sentences.

If your student did not do well in Part B of our student screening, click here to see many free activities that you can use to teach students how to become aware of, and clap, syllables.

If you do those activities for 15 minutes at the end of the first 8 to 14 tutoring sessions, your student will master those two basic skills.

This means that your student is NOT ready for the Barton System – or any other Orton-Gillingham-based system.

Your student is having significant difficulty with either Auditory Discrimination or Auditory Memory. Those are both critical skills that must be improved FIRST.

When the skills have been improved, give your student the Barton Student Screening again. Once the student can pass it, then you can start using the Barton System.

How to Improve These Skills?

There are 2 programs that will improve those skills.

One program, called Foundation in Sounds, was released in 2016. Like the Barton System, all of the training you need comes on video, along with scripted lesson plans, and free unlimited support. So parents, teachers, and tutors can easily learn and use this program. To learn more about it, go to www.FoundationInSounds.com or call the developers, Rick or Lisa Weaver, at 719-476-0189.

The other program, which is research-based, is the Lindamood-Bell program called LiPS. But LiPS is not a “parent-friendly” program. You would need to hire an experienced LiPS professional — someone who has completed the 3-day LiPS training course offered by Lindamood-Bell, and who has years of experience using that program.

A student needs to be tutored one-on-one, at least twice a week, by someone who has professional training in, and lots of experience using, the LiPS program.

The student does NOT have to go all the way through the LiPS program. But they need to stay in the LiPS program until the student has been taught all of the brothers and cousins, the vowel circle, and can “track 3 sounds in a simple CVC syllable” and find the sound that’s different in a chain of 10 CVC nonsense words. Any well-trained LiPS tutor will know what that means.

How to find a LiPS tutor?

Call our office at 408-559-3652. If we know any Certified Barton Tutors in your area who have professional LiPS training and years of experience using it, we will give you their names and phone numbers.

Also, many speech-language therapists have been trained in LiPS. So ask the speech-language therapist at your local public school if she has been trained in LiPS. If so, ask if she could be hired to tutor your child after school.

If she doesn’t know LiPS, ask if she can refer you to someone who does – or a call some other local schools.

Or do a Google search for Speech-Language Therapist followed by your city and state.

Or call your state branch of the International Dyslexia Association and ask if any of their members tutor using the LiPS program. To find your state branch, go to www.eida.org or call them at 800-ABCD-123.

Once a student can “track 3 sounds in a simple CVC syllable” and find the sound that’s different in a chain of 10 CVC nonsense words, give that student Part C of our Student Screening again. If the LiPS tutor has done a good job, the student should now be able to pass our Part C with flying colors – and can then start the Barton Reading & Spelling System.