Photograph by Tsutomu Fujita
Clinician Jordan Hayes watches while Emily Ottke, 9, of Saratoga, plays a game called Concrete Number Line at the Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes center at Neale's Hollow. The game helps children learn how the base 10 number system works.
Learning center in Saratoga works on learning disabilities
By Rebecca Ray
Ashley Schlumberger writes the letters B, E and D on a dry-erase board. She then asks 6-year-old Patrick Burns to write them in the air. Once he does, he sounds out the word: bed.
Three months ago, Patrick could only recognize the letters in his name. In September, his mother, Ginger Burns, enrolled him at Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes, a learning center in Neale's Hollow at 14320 Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road. Although Patrick had been diagnosed with auditory processing problems--he's too young to be diagnosed dyslexic--he can now recognize all consonants, vowels and vowel blends.
Personnel at Lindamood-Bell would say that Patrick has "weak symbol imagery," or trouble visualizing the identity, number and sequence of sounds and letters in words. According to Lindamood-Bell, people with weak symbol imagery may spell words phonetically accurate, but would have trouble remembering the visual patterns of words. For instance, they may write "pach" for "patch."
Patrick also has trouble detecting sounds within words, a problem Lindamood-Bell terms "weak phonemic awareness." While most people know intuitively that the word "cat" has three phonemic sounds--"kuh," "aa" and "tuh"--people who have weak phonemic awareness need to be taught this.
Reading specialist Nanci Bell and speech and language pathologist Patricia Lindamood, who co-founded the company in 1986, developed programs to help people with auditory, visual and language processing. Lindamood and Bell believe that when a person has a deficit in one of these areas, or their auditory, visual and language processes work fine by themselves, but don't work together properly, he or she will have trouble understanding certain material.
Under Bell's Seeing Stars program, Patrick writes words in the air, so that the letters become stored in his memory, improving his chances of remembering how to spell the words.
Under Lindamood's Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing, or LiPS, program, Patrick says the sounds of letters in words and becomes aware of the mouth and tongue movements that produce speech sounds. This gives him another way to verify sounds in words.
The company treats children and adults who have been diagnosed with a variety of learning problems, including dyslexia, attention deficit disorder and autism. Although Lindamood-Bell doesn't diagnose learning problems, employees conduct free screenings of potential clients to see if they would be good candidates for any of the programs.
Ilona Merli, associate director at the Saratoga clinic, enrolled her 9-year-old daughter, Emily Ottke, at the clinic a couple of weeks ago. Although Emily, a fourth-grader at Saratoga Elementary School, scored in the 99th percentile on standardized tests in various subject areas, Merli says, she only scored in the 50th or 60th percentile in comprehension. Although Emily can read words accurately, she had trouble integrating details to understand a concept.
In Bell's Visualizing and Verbalizing program, clinicians read Emily sentences in a paragraph. She imagines a picture to go with each sentence. Next, she describes what pictures she saw and retells the story in her own words while imagining the pictures. Then, not only will clinicians ask Emily about the main idea of the paragraph, but, for instance, after they read a paragraph about bears, they will ask her if she thinks bears stand on two or four legs, and why.
The company, founded in San Luis Obispo, has expanded to 32 centers across the nation. The company opened the Saratoga clinic in May 2000, because many clients at the Menlo Park clinic came from the South Bay, says Saratoga clinic director, Kindle Smyth.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
