Has anyone heard of this dyslexia software?

[bumblingbovine]

Ds has just finishe 80 lessons of headsprout (which I heard about on here) which is a phonics based software. His reading has definitley improved so I am pleased we did it. However he still guesses randomly on lots of short words that he should be able to read and still strugggles (though nowhere near as much) with phonics generally

I am considering buying this Easy Read as a follow-up but it is WAY more expensive than Headsprout.

The guy who runs is seems very reasonable and I am impressed with what his website says etc. I have also spoken to a parent who has used this who was very very enthusiastic and said it wa the best money hey had spent on their son.

However the parent's name was given to me by the the guy who runs the company so not exactly an objective view.

So before I fork out around £700 (albeit in monthly payments) Has anyone heard of this/used it?

I used EasyRead with DD and it didn't work - but I did get a full refund.

I also used it with DS when it was in Beta and was free. I'm not sure if it worked or not. He learned to read at the time he was using it - but we were also doing other things as well. So I can't really say for sure.....

Thanks Indigobell. I am sorry it didn't work for your dd, that must have been very disappointing.
I think that tells me some of what I want to know though. I guess there are no guarantees but if you got your money back then that tells me they are at least sincere

I know there are no guarantees that it will work though. Ds does computerised reading practice to books so I am leaning towards buying it.

There are three cognitive subtypes of developmental dyslexia: Auditory, Visual, and Attentional.
So auditory processing disorders, visual processing disorders, attention disorders, or any combination of the three can cause the dyslexic symptom. Each of these different underlying cognitive / medical issues requires a different form or type of support.
Dyslexia is a man made problem regarding having problems decoding and recoding the graphic symbols our society has chose to represent the sounds of speech, which we call the written word.

So from what you have describes your DS may have an auditory cause of his dyslexic symptom, and is not able to use phonics to learn new word, and can only use his visual cognitve abilities to recognise the visual shape of a word, and having to guess what phonics means.

Those who have Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) (10% of children according to the UK Medical Research Counicil have problems processing the gaps betwen sounds. this includes the gaps between sounds which can make up words and the gaps between words especially in rapid speech. So if you can not process the gaps between sounds and identify the seperate sound that make a word, it is not cognitively possible to decode the visual symbols which represent those sounds and the so called blending of phonics is impossible.

There are two cognitive process used in task of reading Lexical and Sublexical, the lexical process processes the shape of the word for comprehension, and sublexical processes the phonic to decode the sounds. So you need to find a teaching program based on the visual or Whole word approach to teaching. Not all can use phonics which is a myth promoted by the phonics industry to sell their teaching programs

Thanks dolfrog. Easy Read does sort of work with visuals and the website mentions the main cause of difficulties being auditory on his website and how the programme works for that. www.easyreadsystem.com/info/dyslexia.html

It is not entirely phonics based because it usues a visual cue for every sound. I am not wedded to it by the way just saying that it is a bit different to the normal phonics programmes for reading