Dr. Karen Holinga is the author of Spelling You See and a homeschool pioneer. Join us as we learn about Dr. Holinga’s inspirational story and how she has helped thousands of students read proficiently and spell adeptly.
Episode Transcript
Gretchen Roe: 00:00:04.885 [music]
Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. Our mission here is to help families stay in the learning journey wherever it takes them. This bonus episode was previously recorded as a webinar and was not created with the audio listener in mind. We hope you will find value in today’s episode.
Gretchen Roe: 00:00:23.195
Welcome, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Gretchen Roe, and it is my very great pleasure to welcome you all this afternoon to this wonderful conversation with Dr. Karen Holinga. Dr. Holinga has been a blessing and an inspiration to me for the last eight years that we have worked together. And she has been, I have watched her be a game-changer for countless families. Today, we’re going to tell a little bit of her story. And her story is interwoven with what she does. When you really love what you do, it becomes you. And I don’t know anybody who does better than what Dr. Holinga does at interweaving their life with their mission. And so today, I think you’ll have a very clear impression of Dr. Holinga and her mission when we conclude our time together. Karen, welcome. It’s a pleasure to have you here.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:01:23.230
Thank you. Thanks for having me. This is so fun. I’m looking forward.
Gretchen Roe: 00:01:26.288
We have done so much work in preparation for this. This has been like pulling the proverbial string on a sweater because one conversation became two conversations that became two presentations that became this. You guys are just going to– we’re going to rock your world today. It’s going to be amazing. So we have an outline and really what I want to do is I’m just here to be the rails to keep Dr. Holinga moving forward. And so how about tell me the backstory. I got to hear this backstory last summer when I had the privilege of spending a couple of days with Dr. Holinga and watching her in action in her private practice. And I said to her then, “This story needs to be told.” So let’s go.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:02:15.206
Okay. So we live in the state of Ohio and I had taught public school. I had been the director of a preschool/daycare. I had taught in Christian school. And then George and I decided to have a family. Now, this is in the ’80s, so it was a long time ago. But we had three children in four years, two girls and a little boy. And I was a really happy stay-at-home mom. And then it was time for the oldest to go to kindergarten. So we were really conflicted. We were trying to figure out what we were going to do and what would be best for her. And what was happening over the summer before she was supposed to start kindergarten was I had heard two interviews. One was on Focus on the Family, where James Dobson was interviewing a family that had been homeschooling and having a wonderful experience with it. And another one that I heard was John Holt, who was a public school educator – this is kind of a blast from the past – in the New York City school system, had taught there for years.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:03:18.394
And he was advocating for home education, which was kind of crazy because of where he was coming from. And when I heard those interviews, I have to tell you that I was just almost beside myself because the mere thought of a parent educating their children was just so beyond the pale for me. I was just overwhelmed. I had gone to public schools my whole life. I had had a wonderful experience. I was the first girl in our family to graduate from college. And I loved teaching. And I just couldn’t imagine someone homeschooling their own kids and officially how weird that would be. And I was just railing and kind of loaded for bear. And George walked in the house one night after a long day.
Gretchen Roe: 00:04:08.060
George is your husband, so.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:04:10.595
Yes. And I told him, I just told him, “This is the most insane thing. And now even James Dobson has turned coat and he is talking about homeschooling.” And I’ll never forget because my husband isn’t like all that– I mean, he’s the salesperson, the marketing guy, owned a carpet company, all that, but not the education person in our family. And he just stopped in his tracks and he looked at me and he said, “I thought of it six months ago. What took you so long?” And I just went nuts. I mean, it was just strange. It was kind of an out-of-body experience. And then I was really mad. And when I looked back on that experience, I think that it was more conviction than anger, but I just didn’t even know how to take care of my emotions.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:05:02.449
But then as I processed that over a couple more days, I realized that it was like a conviction. It was kind of like when your heart– it’s kind of like when you get saved. It’s like you have this conviction in your heart and your soul knows that it’s the right thing to do and that you’re just supposed to do it and say yes. And just it’s kind of like that light switch going on. And you just know that no matter what, you’re supposed to do it. But we had no idea how that was going to play out.
Gretchen Roe: 00:05:38.541
Well, you guys had a few challenges walking this out. So can you enlighten our audience about what a challenge it was to have that conviction in 1984?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:05:51.583
Yeah. Well, the very first thing, and the biggest thing was we live in the state of Ohio, and it was illegal. Homeschooling was illegal. And we all knew people that were in jail because they were homeschooling. They were actually in physical jail. Neighbors were calling on people that saw their kids playing outside. My in-laws were mad at me. My mother was mad at me. They couldn’t understand that we were going to make our kids officially weird for sure. They figured I could probably handle the academia part of it, but the kids were going to be weird. We couldn’t get any– curriculum was a huge problem. We couldn’t get it. And we couldn’t get teacher manuals for sure. So we were staying up late at night doing the long division problems because we didn’t have the answer keys. And then on top of all of that, even though my first daughter did absolutely fine, and I was all full of myself because I taught my own daughter how to read, even though I had taught lots of other kids to read, it’s different when you teach your own.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:06:52.729
Daughter number two couldn’t read. And she couldn’t read in first grade and she couldn’t read in second grade. And, listen, I can’t even talk about it still without getting really teary. And she couldn’t read in third grade. And even my T-shirt friends were mad at me for homeschooling, so I couldn’t even call them. I had been the go-to person. And here I was with a child that was struggling.
Gretchen Roe: 00:07:16.670
That’s hard. I don’t care where you are, how long you’ve been a parent, how many children you have. Your heart is always toward those kids. And when your child struggles, you are the first line of defense. I saw something on Facebook last week that said, “If advocating for your children burns bridges, I have matches.” [laughter] And I really think that that is the truth. And we are the best advocates for our kids. So regardless of how you come to homeschooling, either like I did, accidentally, or like you did being dragged, kicking, and screaming to what you knew was right. Getting here is the important part of the message. Christine has said she’s been there with late readers, so she understands what we mean. So let’s talk about, you had a late reader. You didn’t know what to do. So let’s talk about accommodation. What did you do?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:08:20.506
Well, the first thing was reading was just impossible. So for sciences, I made some notes. For science and social studies, we just did everything orally. I just read everything to her. Math was a particular problem because she couldn’t line up the numbers and she loved math. She ended up being a math major in college, fast forward. But she loved it, but she couldn’t do it. She was so frustrated. So we got a big chalkboard. We did everything on the chalkboard. I explained everything to her. She couldn’t do a spiral math because it was overwhelming with memory. And then that was too labor-intensive. We used a lot of manipulatives and we had to do–
Gretchen Roe: 00:09:02.122
You said it was before Math-U-See was even a thing.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:09:05.570
It was before Math-U-See, so–
Gretchen Roe: 00:09:06.805
You were kind of inventing the ship as you sailed it.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:09:11.110
Absolutely, 100%. And I knew I had a smart kid, but it was just trying to figure out what worked and how I could navigate this for her. But I will tell you just that for three years, every morning when I would put my makeup on, it was so hard that I would be trying to put makeup on and the hot tears would be splashing down my face because I couldn’t figure out how to teach her. And I would actually rehearse ways to explain things to her when I was trying to put my makeup on in the morning. It was that difficult. So instead of doing an intensive phonics program, we did the letter boxes, which we have used now in Spelling You See because it separated out the individual sounds. And what I figured out was as long as we could do the short vowels, and she knew that vowels could be long or short then, it was a game-on situation. I didn’t have to overload her with a bunch of information that she wasn’t able to process or retain.
Gretchen Roe: 00:10:18.164
So those letter boxes helped her segment those sounds then?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:10:21.178
Yes. And that was our phonics piece. The other thing was we did a lot of copy work, kind of Charlotte Mason-ish because that made the connections and that kept everything in line for her. So I had her doing a lot of copy work. What we did was I would find short passages, and I would read them to her, and then I would have her reread them. And we would work on that for like five minutes a day. And she would reread the same passages until we got them fluent. So that was mylonizing her brain. I didn’t even know that at the time because I didn’t have all this information, but I knew that that worked and that was giving her a lot of vocabulary, especially a lot of those sight words that you can’t sound out. Letter boxes are good for sound-to-letter correspondence, but when you have words like come, it’s a different story. We increased the font size for a lot of things. And I just made sure that her sessions were really short because she overloaded really fast.
Gretchen Roe: 00:11:19.924
So in a school day– how long was a school day for you when you were doing this?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:11:24.438
Well, it’s really hard to homeschool like this, but she could only go 10 or 15 minutes at a shot. So I’d work with her in the morning a little while after breakfast, and then I’d let her play and do the laundry and stuff. And then I’d bring her back for another 15 minutes, maybe a little bit before lunch. I’d grab her again in the afternoon. We made it, but that’s a hard way to homeschool because you’re back and forth a lot.
Gretchen Roe: 00:11:46.693
You also had two very neurotypical kids in this mix at that time as well, right–
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:11:52.934
Yeah, we did.
Gretchen Roe: 00:11:53.783
–close in age?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:11:55.666
And all close in age. So it was a real– it was a real scramble to try to keep everybody busy and engaged. But honestly, when we did like the science and the social studies, and I was doing it orally, we just made those into group activities, and that worked really well.
Gretchen Roe: 00:12:12.556
How did you keep her from feeling different?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:12:16.761
Well, that was a struggle. And because she was daughter number two, same sex, only a year younger, I think that she always felt like she could never really measure up. And that was something that was constantly on her mind about finding things that she loved. She was really good at art. And like I said, she did love math. And she loved stories. So I got a listening device at those days, it was a tape recorder, and I played a lot of stories for her. And we did piano, and we did Suzuki Piano, not to pitch it necessarily, but you don’t have to read music with Suzuki for three or four years. They do everything by ear. And that worked really well. And she just was amazing with music and then wanted to do drums. But it was great because we could find some extra things that she could do that we didn’t have the other guys do those things.
Gretchen Roe: 00:13:11.879
And I think there is a tip for the parents who are joining us and watching this, is you have to figure out where that child who’s struggling has enough potential to excel and exploit it. Because that child needs to feel that on some front, the playing field is level, and it does make all the difference in the world. So tell me a little bit about how you figured out that vision was a component of this.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:13:41.434
Well, that was a very long time in coming. But the first cue, as I looked back, was that she couldn’t line up those numbers. And that was a real problem in math. And then when we did start to make a little bit of progress with the reading, even when we were doing those fluent passages, there was head movement like this. And when she did that return sweep, she couldn’t always find the next line. And there was some body language. She was kind of going back and forth like this. So it was like she was trying to bring it into focus. I took her to the eye doctor all the time. I took my kids to the dentist. We did all that stuff, but everybody said she was perfect. She had 20/20 vision. And so you start second guessing yourself because the professionals are telling you that everything is fine, but five minutes into a lesson, everything wasn’t fine. And even like the copy work, that was challenging. She wanted to keep doing capitals for a long time. It was hard to get her switched over to lowercase letters. She couldn’t find the line when she was doing copy work, the way she copied was– and then she’d get tired really fast. The fatigue was always an issue.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:14:52.177
What we eventually did was, as I finally was able to teach her how to read, and we sent our kids to high school. I’m not sure I make that decision now, but that’s another conversation. But keep in mind, this was 20 years ago. So we sent her to high school and she had excellent teachers there and she had lectures in every subject every day. And she was a really good auditory learner. I mean, and if they would do stuff on the board, she could learn, she was smart. She could learn it. And she always had kind of extra homework because the reading continued to be pretty labor intensive. But that was what she– that was what really saved her once we got her there. But her visual memory really took a hit. And so spelling was always, always continued to be a challenge.
Gretchen Roe: 00:15:44.494
And it really wasn’t until you went back to school and got your certifications all the way through PhD that you really realized what was happening there.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:15:55.628
That’s exactly right.
Gretchen Roe: 00:15:56.445
Pop forward just a minute so that you can give the parents who are attending an understanding of what did you now know with your further education and your study about the neuroplasticity of the brain and how we learn and how vital vision is to the learning process. What did you know was happening with her?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:16:18.530
Okay, so just some tips. I think that lessons learned, I guess, basically, is that you really need to pay attention to how they learn and what they love. That’s really, really important. And focus on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. In the olden days, we used to try to fix the weaknesses, but now we know that a lot of times when stuff is happening neurologically, that’s not a good venue. Context is the carrier. It’s better to focus on their strengths. You have to connect new information to old. So things need to be meaningful. They need to sound right. They need to make sense. The other thing is that kinesthetic things are really good. Anytime you can do anything hands-on is just critical to learning. And all kids learn best that way, but especially kids that have a rough start. The other thing that I want to talk about a little bit, if that’s all right, is that I think it’s really– here in my reading clinic, I see over 400 families a year. I see probably 1,500 kids, and I’ve been doing this for a very long time. What I have noticed is what happens here in the office is that many, many people come in, they’re referred to me, and the very first thing they say to me is, “My child is dyslexic.”
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:17:34.151
And I always say to them, my first question is, “Who told you that and what were their credentials?” Because I always want to know if it was a neighbor or if it was maybe a grandma or, if it was– who was it? And what was the definition of that? Because it’s really important. The medical definition of dyslexia is the inability of a child to match sound-to-letter correspondence. And it is neurologically based and it is very, very developmental. I would say maybe as many as one out of five kids have a real slow start there and don’t really catch up till around the age of nine. The research is showing us that there’s big shifts around the age of 9 and then again around the age of 13. But it’s in the language center of the brain. It’s called auditory processing. And you don’t talk louder to those kids. You have to talk slower. And they also have trouble with rhyming a lot of times. Jack and Jill went up the mountain. They have a hard time with clapping syllables. It’s making that neurological auditory connection to language. Vocabulary is a real tough call for them. And especially, you get into math and you have all kinds of vocabulary. That’s very challenging. But that’s true dyslexia.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:19:00.977
Now there’s also visual dyslexia though, which was what we experienced. And that’s when they’re having trouble. Their little eyes might almost be like popcorn on the page and they can’t stay on a line and the print is blurry every time they see a word, it looks different. Now, what happens there though is that that’s physical. What that means is that their eyes, they might have 20/20 vision, but their eyes either vertically or horizontally are not in perfect match. So everything’s kind of like this and it’s very difficult to keep the print clear. That’s physical and it’s diagnosable and it’s something that a good optometrist can help you with. But this is the thing. When they have visual confusion, visual dyslexia, it creates neurological confusion and neurological overload, what I always tell people, neurological fatigue and neurological confusion. But it’s not rooted in the neurology like auditory dyslexia is.
Gretchen Roe: 00:20:10.153
So if a parent is seeing– if a parent is like me and is a researcher and goes and looks at that laundry list on WebMD of, “Here are the symptoms that define dyslexia,” it would be very easy to conclude a student is dyslexic. But if I’m understanding you correctly, they need to find a developmental optometrist to rule out that visual component.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:20:42.085
Yes. And you have to be very specific in asking them. Now you don’t want an ophthalmologist because that’s a surgeon. I have people all the time go to Children’s Hospital, and they tell them everything’s fine or even give them glasses. But you want to go to an optometrist because they’re refractive specialists. And then you have to ask the refractive specialist if he will make sure he double-checks astigmatism because they don’t routinely do that, and that wreaks havoc with the child’s eyes and print. And they have to ask them for convergence. And convergence means either the eyes are pulling in too much or they’re pulling out too much– that those eye muscles are weak and they’re not working well together. Now, if they’re pulling in, a lot of times they can give you glasses that accommodate for that, and they only have to wear the glasses about a year and they’re good to go. If they’re pulling out, they’re going to need, like in our case, maybe five or six sessions of actual therapy to pull those muscles back into alignment.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:21:43.178
I do want to say, too, is that I see a lot of kids on the spectrum, and they have globally low muscle tone. And I don’t know that I have ever had a child on the spectrum that didn’t have weak eye muscles and needed some kind of either glasses or therapy or something. Those kids tend to be, in my experience, very bright. It’s almost like God gives them extra special resources and intellectual capabilities. But those eye muscles are almost always weak and need to be paid attention to.
Gretchen Roe: 00:22:17.346
I know for us and our family, our four oldest children were very neurotypical learners. Our fifth one had some neurological challenges. And one of the things that we learned in the process of resolving his neurological challenges is if you have weak core strength– in other words, you can’t do three, four, five sit-ups, it’s going to be very hard for your student to learn to have neat handwriting. So we had lots of parents who said, “Oh, my child has atrocious handwriting” when they registered for this event. And I want to encourage you that if you have weak muscle tone, you can’t get to good handwriting. With my son, we had to work on that first. So we actually didn’t even try to teach him to read until he was nine and a half. But I’m left-handed and most of my kids are right-handed, so I sat across the table from him when I was teaching him to read and I would read upside down. And I realized in watching him that he had one eye would move and then the other eye would move. And I’m like, “Stop that. Why are you doing that?”
Gretchen Roe: 00:23:26.338
I got the June Cleaver Award for being the terrific mom. He had a binocular vision issue that needed resolution. And until we resolved that issue, he really couldn’t make progress with reading. And it made all the difference in the world. So let’s back up for just a hot minute. You home educated your kids and then decided to transition them to high school. And then you had entered this world and you decided to go back and get your master’s and ultimately your PhD. So can you tell us a little bit about that and what you learned in that process?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:24:03.047
Well, I actually had my master– well, I had a degree in elementary education. I actually had my master’s before I had my kids. So I really had egg on my face because I had a master’s in reading and I had a child that couldn’t read.
Gretchen Roe: 00:24:17.723
Oh my. Okay.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:24:19.056
That has a way of humbling you. Right? So but I did go back to Ohio State and I was there for five years. I was on campus 30 to 40 hours a week. Actually, worked for the literacy department 20 hours a week for four years that I was on there. And I think my degree is actually in developmental reading. And it was, I guess for one thing that is amazing to me is that in that whole time that I was on campus in reading, I never had one lecture– we never had one lecture on vision. And that’s frustrating to me because all the research has been there for a very long time. And I keep thinking, there’s been virtually no communication between the optometric community and the literacy community. And I think, again, we’re back to those numbers. Probably one in five kids have undiagnosed vision going on, and it’s just really frustrating and discouraging.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:25:13.352
The other thing, the other good news was, though, that I found all this research, the Henderson research that the Spelling You See materials refer to in their manuals, but we learned that the letter boxes are exactly the way to go in lieu of intensive phonics because it really shortcuts all that memory work that so many kids have so much trouble with, and eliminates a lot of fatigue. The copy work is just critical. Multiple reads on familiar material. And like in the Spelling You See materials, we use one passage all week. Jack and Jill, we worked on [crosstalk]–
Gretchen Roe: 00:25:46.947
Tell me a little bit more about that. Before you go on, why would multiple reads – and I know the answer here, but I want you to say it – why would multiple reads on the same material be advantageous? Because as an adult, I’m like, “Well, don’t you want to read this and this and all of this?” Why do you want to read the same thing more than once?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:26:06.669
Because there is a neurological reason. What happens is that we’re not born with a lot of myelin. And the word is M-Y-E-L-I-N, if people want to look that up. And the myelin is produced when the synapse, the neurological synapse, bounce together rapidly. And so it’s when the synapse are bouncing together quickly is when the myelin is produced. And you need thousands and thousands and thousands of layers of myelin, that’s that thin fatty sheath, to coat the neurological highways that go up to frontal lobe. And you don’t get any myelin– the best example I can think of is if you have a five or six-inch snow, that big heavy, wet snow and you’re trying to go down a hill on a sled, and you know how the first run, your sled always gets stuck? And then you have to get off the sled, go back up? Maybe this time instead of 6 feet, you go 8 or 10 feet. But by the third or fourth run, you kind of get that ice on the top, and then you can kind of go. And that’s exactly what happens as our brains are myelinizing. So what happens is that you don’t get any myelin on the first and second reads, and maybe not even a lot on the third.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:27:20.643
But by the fourth or fifth read in a paragraph, like in Spelling You See– again, Spelling You See has been so amazing for teaching kids how to read. And it really is a reading program, but we can’t market it as that because it’s really spelling. But having said that, when they read that passage every day all week, by the end of the week, they’re getting a lot of myelin, and they’re automatizing all those non-phonetic words that are the connector words. And then what happens is that the brain starts to figure out rapidly how the brain is supposed to process all that language. And then those words become automatic. And then we call that flexible. And then we have really good overlay into other things. But you really have to get fluency early in the game. You can’t wait to get fluency at fourth or fifth grade because there’s too many holes in the myelin sheath.
Gretchen Roe: 00:28:13.830
So if I have an older student who’s still struggling as a fourth or fifth grader, what would I do to remediate them from your perspective?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:28:23.400
Okay, so the first thing is you got to figure out if there is a problem, right? So for me, personally, I would double check the vision and give them something– start with some large font, maybe like a frog and toad book or something, and then maybe go to a Magic Treehouse book and just see as you decrease the font size, if they’re able to stay on the line or if they have any trouble with the reading, the return sweep, that kind of thing. Then the other thing I would do is you do want– well, that’s the first thing is you got to kind of figure out what’s going on. And then the second thing is you’ve just got to shorten up those periods of time that you’re working with them and you have to provide accommodation so that they can get it. Because in my experience, this is almost never a neurological problem. Kids want to learn. They want to be successful. They’re embarrassed about not being able to do things. They don’t want to disappoint you. And I promise you they’re working 100 times harder than every other kid in the room, but they can’t sustain. So we got to figure out why. And then if we can’t figure out why, we’ve got to provide accommodation.
Gretchen Roe: 00:29:35.825
So I’ve heard you say this at conferences as I’ve stood next to you because I always love to stand there and absorb the things that you say. And invariably, you’ll get at least one mother at a conference who says, “Well, my son is just lazy.” Will you address that here for our viewers?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:29:55.917
I promise you they’re not lazy. They don’t want to be lazy anymore. They would no sooner rather be sitting at a kitchen table with you for two or three hours than the man in the moon. They want more than you do to be able to do this. But what happens is they start to feel like a big disappointment. They feel like you’re always mad at them. They’re always waiting for the shoe to fall. They start to get tummy aches. They get cortisol releases. We have something called the reticular activating system, which is the fight or flight mechanism. And when that happens, we get all kinds of bad chemicals going on. They’re not doing this on purpose. If they could get the stuff done quickly, they absolutely would.
Gretchen Roe: 00:30:43.135
Thank you. I knew that that would be the answer that you would give, but I always think it’s so important to be able to hear that. Because as parents, I think one of the hardest things, particularly for me in the 21 years that I homeschooled my 6 kids, I’m an only child. So I was born a very short adult. And I didn’t understand that my kids didn’t have the same kind of capacities for endurance that I had as an adult. And sometimes I think that’s where we miss the mark as homeschool parents is, “Why can’t you do it? I can do it.” We forget the journey that we had to take to get to where we could do it. So in your notes that you made that were so terrific for me, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what a parent can do as far as those accommodations. You’ve said that a couple of times. So if I’m a parent and I know I have a student who’s struggling, what would be the first accommodations you would recommend?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:31:48.794
Well, well.
Gretchen Roe: 00:31:52.003
I know you recommend a lot of auditory reading. I know that you’ve recommended that you read to the student first.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:31:59.871
I think that all kids should have a listening device. I mean, I’m not a big screen person and I think that there’s some really bad research about too much time on the internet. I mean, really significantly bad stuff. But they’re saying with games, video games and that kind of thing, that they can actually measure the negative growth of brain cells after as little as six hours of time. They can actually measure the negative cellular growth. So that’s kind of scary. So I’m not about a lot of stuff on a screen, but we do know that if they’re listening to good literature, and now you can even do it with your phones and things, that you can almost keep up neurologically with new vocabulary and reading concepts and that kind of thing. If you get programs, good literature and then do a lot of stuff orally, but listening is huge. You’ve got to use manipulatives. You’ve got to do hands-on stuff. You’ve got to keep those periods short. You’ve got to increase font sizes. Is that the kind of thing?
Gretchen Roe: 00:33:06.955
Yeah, that’s what I was looking for. So can you talk a little bit– because I know that we have parents, because of the comments everyone made, I know that we have parents who have kids who struggle with penmanship. And so it’s really easy as a parent to say, “Eh, that’s not a hill I’m going to die on. Here’s a keyboard.” Can you talk about why using– actually, I should have one of these. Can you talk about why using a pencil is so very valuable neurologically?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:33:35.684
Yes, because using a pencil kinesthetically actually frames the material and puts it on the fast track to your long-term memory. When you are at a keyboard and just your fingers going up and down, your fingers do not know the difference between P and D, T, PRS. And it has minimal effect on, it’s very difficult to have the same memory base if they’re not doing writing. You really, and all the research just screams that they should be doing a minimum of 10 minutes of copy work a day, a minimum, and that there should be very little keyboard use if they’re in learning mode.
Gretchen Roe: 00:34:16.635
Okay. So now I’ve also heard you say this. When you have a child who’s resistant, the reluctant pen men, as we’ve called them, can I start with two minutes?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:34:27.582
Yes. Start small. Start with two minutes and reward it and then go to three. You really do have to build that muscle memory. I mean, it’s just like running on a treadmill. You start out with 10 minutes and you’re out of breath. But after a couple of months, you’re up to 30. I mean, you just really have to do it in incremental steps, but it is worth it.
Gretchen Roe: 00:34:48.738
Great. So tell me some other things that you see, particularly with new homeschool moms– I mean, you have seen in your practice an inordinate influx of new homeschool families with the pandemic. And what are some commonalities that you’re seeing where we’re making misapprehensions as the new homeschool mom about what life should be like as far as homeschooling? Are we biting off more than we can chew? Because I know that you are very specific in how you advise families of here’s the things you have to do. And so can you talk a little bit about that?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:35:32.052
Okay. Well, I guess the very first thing is I always want to know what the reading level is. And I actually did my dissertation on this a long time ago about the progression that homeschool families go through over three years. And there were real patterns to that. And the first year you homeschool, everything is just crazy. You buy a bunch of curriculum and you think it’s going to be wonderful and then everything falls apart. I mean, because the kids are having to make their bed or do their chores or run the dog and dad is wondering what the heck you’re doing all day. And the mom is trying to figure out not only the reading level, but the math level. And each kid has a different learning style. And it is a crazy year, and it’s okay. And I can’t tell you how many moms walk in here. They have this, a big stack of curriculum, and they have tears in their eyes and they stand at the door because in Ohio you have to notify every year and you have to check in with an assessor, do a standardized test.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:36:30.232
And they say, “This is what I was going to do. This is what I did. But I got my family back. And it’s okay. If you’re not going to sign for me, I totally get it, but it was still worth it.” And then they cry, right? Then the tears just come. And I always say, it’s okay. But that’s what the first year looks like is that you’re just trying to figure out where they are, what they know, what works for each kid. Don’t spend a lot of money that year. Year two, you’re kind of figuring out, “Okay, we got to get them caught up in math. I thought they were in fractions, but they don’t know their multiplication tables yet. I thought they were reading at this level, but, oh my gosh, they’re not. Spelling is a debacle.” So the second year, you’re really kind of drilling down on where their weaknesses are because you just want to get them caught up.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:37:17.572
And the third year I want to tell you is wonderful because now you’ve got them all caught up and you can start working on their strengths, which is you can get them art lessons or you could start working on piano or whatever. But there is definitely a three-year cycle to this and you have to be patient with yourself because you just got to get through it. But you need people like me and Gretchen to help you because otherwise you will just get overwhelmed and it will be crazy. So just do little bits at a time. Don’t spend a lot of money. Focus on reading and math and then spelling. And then we’ll kind of start adding the other things in.
Gretchen Roe: 00:37:57.109
So here’s a great question. And it says, “Dr. Karen, what is your recommendation for using rewards as motivation for kids to do their reading and penmanship?”
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:38:08.217
All about rewards. Anything that works. [laughter] Anything that works. Oh my gosh. Figure out what their capital is and then run with it. I mean, really, you know what? Really. I mean it’s not a bribe. A long time ago, this isn’t a bribe, this is a reward. And they’re working hard. They are working hard. And they should be recognized for that, but, yeah.
Gretchen Roe: 00:38:32.934
I often say to parents, I say, “Do you work?” And parents will say, “Well, yes.” “And would you continue to work if you weren’t paid?” [laughter] So I think it does make a difference. And there’s a balance there. I think the hardest year I had was I pretty much had a good handle on the rewards that my three oldest children found incentivizing. And then my fourth one came along and she was not about any of that. And so it was really fun trying to figure that out. But I’m so glad that question was asked because it does make a tremendous amount of difference. Please ask more questions. I want to switch gears just a little bit because I want you to talk a little bit about the things that you are learning using Spelling You See in an ESL course.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:39:34.488
Thank you for asking that question. I’m so pumped about this I can’t even tell you. Last year, our church started an ESL program, English as a Second Language. And we have 100 total students, but we have 70 that just came and signed up for the classes. And they couldn’t find materials that worked well for them. And the director called me early December and said, “Help. We’ve got all these students. We can’t find anything that’s really usable.” And we are using Spelling You See and Happy Cheetah to work with these students, and we are just having incredible results. I’m so pumped that I’m going to write a new version of this, and we’re going to make it adult. Anyway, I’m going to talk to Demme about that at another time. But I’m just saying that we’re using the Jack and Jill, and we’re doing the letter boxes. We’re doing the nursery rhymes in there because they’re learning how to articulate, learning the language. They’re hearing rhymes. They’re being able to do– they do the copy work. They’re doing multiple reads on familiar material. And I’ll tell you, the thing has exploded. Everybody is dancing. We are so excited. It is so perfect for ESL. And if you want to know, you can call me, and I’ll talk to you about it.
Gretchen Roe: 00:40:59.952
One of the things I think we talked about when you first started this enterprise was where you were going to start them. So can you give us a little bit of background as to why you chose Jack and Jill? Because I thought that was really interesting.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:41:16.464
Well, first of all, it had to be something that was super easy. But the nursery rhymes and Jack and Jill give them opportunity to hear our language and to practice it, and you can set those to music as well. And because of the repetition– and they’ve got content. Right? You can act them out. Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. And so they can say it and they can practice because the articulation– we have a lot of Somali students. We have a lot of Spanish-speaking. We have several from Ukraine and some of the Germanic languages as well. And they really can navigate and learn how to say those nursery rhymes and sounds. And then when you couple the copy work and the letter boxes, it’s a shortcut to intensive phonics, which is very overwhelming and confusing for many of them. And keep in mind that we’re only doing this two hours a week. So we’ve got to be able to jam a lot of stuff in a short period of time, and these materials have worked perfectly for that. And what we do is we just do Jack and Jill, and then we can send homework home with them. And they’re doing the copy work during the week, and it’s been amazing, amazing.
Gretchen Roe: 00:42:29.129
Wonderful, wonderful.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:42:30.745
Thank you for asking.
Gretchen Roe: 00:42:31.599
And these are adults. These are grown adults.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:42:33.390
These are all adults, 100% adults. And we were a little– I was concerned because they really do look– they look kind of young. But this is the thing. They don’t even care. And that was our biggest concern. And I talked to the director last night, and she said, “They don’t care. They love it so much. They know it’s easy, but that’s exactly what they need.” And they’re like, “We’re learning something all the time.” I mean, like I said, I’d like to step it up and make kind of an adult version, but I’m not going to change anything. I’m just going to format it so that it doesn’t look quite so young. Maybe we’ll step up the artwork or something, but the material itself is going to stay as it is because it’s working.
Gretchen Roe: 00:43:17.929
Right. That’s tremendous. So if you’re a parent who is in what my German father used to call the [foreign] of the hard years of homeschooling where you’re there trying to figure out what is happening – and I’ve heard you do this, so I’m setting you up for success here – how do you encourage a parent that they’re doing the right thing and to keep doing that thing? Because you are such an encourager. And I’m almost going to get emotional about this, but I think that parental spirit of, “Am I failing my children?” comes through when we have a child who struggles can you talk about how you coach moms through that?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:44:04.968
Well, the thing is that I get emotional too, because it always feels so fresh. Nobody loves them as much as we do. And nobody cares as much as we do. And nobody is willing to sit for 5 or 10 or 15-minute chunks of time and really help them. And we are their best teachers. I’m not even– I just know that a mom is the best teacher and she loves them the most. And it’s worth it. They’re worth it. And if we don’t do it for them, nobody else will. And this, even if you just do it for a season, if you just do it until you can get them caught up or until you have a really good foundation and then you feel like you can give them, hand them off maybe to somebody else. But it’s a game changer. And if we don’t nobody else will. I feel like that’s why God gave us families because we can come alongside them and really help them find their best self.
Gretchen Roe: 00:45:10.468
Laney has a terrific question here. It says, my child has been doing a list spelling curriculum where on the fifth day there is a test. She has a wonderful ability to memorize, but she has trouble spelling the words that follow those same rules. Does Spelling You See work with the ability to apply spelling for words similar to what they learned through the program? Laney, separately, I’ll pay you for this answer because the question is perfect.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:45:42.541
Well, first of all, we know that sound a letter correspondence is the number one predictor of teaching a child how to read. And that’s why even with a child that has some auditory processing delays, we work so hard on those letter boxes and listen and write, we do it for a whole 36 weeks and then we do it again for another 18 weeks in Jack and Jill. But we also know that of the 220 most common words in the English language, those Dolsh words, we know that 47% of those words are not phonetic. They’re words like said that has that AI vowel chunk that it makes a short E sound, S-A-I-D. Words like have that have a short A and a silent E at the end for no apparent reason. My, it’s not M-I, it’s M-Y. We know that a high percentage of those words. And the thing is that the higher the reading level, the less phonetically regular the language is. So what you have to do is you have to make sure we have 26 letters that make 44 sounds. You’ve got to drill down as much as you can on those 26 letters focusing on the short vowels. And then what you have to do is you have to use context.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:46:49.501
So you have to provide a short passage. You have to read it to them first and then let them do read that passage over a two, three or four day period of time so that they can get all those non-phonetic words too. Because what we now know, the research is telling us, another thing that I learned when I was in school was that when the brain sees a word list, it perceives that as item knowledge. And because those words aren’t connected to anything, the brain puts those words into rote memory. They study all week, get the A on Friday. And then by Tuesday, the word is, it’s just dumped. And there’s no way to retrieve it because it was dumped. So you have to do, you have to connect these non-phonetic words to something contextual, or the brain doesn’t know how to store it. And if it doesn’t know how to store it, it can’t retrieve it.
Gretchen Roe: 00:47:39.090
So this is why you said it’s so important, yeah. This is why we have an extraordinary number of parents who come to us and say, “We’re using a spelling curriculum, and I have a stellar speller on test day, but they can’t convert that later.”
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:47:55.283
See it all the time. See it all the time. Yeah.
Gretchen Roe: 00:47:58.327
Okay. Can you also talk about, from a parental perspective, choosing a spelling curriculum needs to be not at their reading level and why?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:48:07.518
Okay. So spelling and reading are very different. They’re two sides of the same coin, but they’re very different processes. So when you’re reading, your brain is not– a lot of reading does not a good speller make. We used to think that if you just read a lot, you were going to be a great speller. But what we now understand, what the research is screaming at us, is that when our brains read, it reads for meaning. So when the brain is reading, if it sees the word green, it doesn’t process, “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s a double E as opposed to an E-A,” or, “You could spell green G-R-E-N-E.” It doesn’t stop and analyze that. It pulls up the color green. If it sees the word bird, it doesn’t say, “Oh, that’s interesting. It’s an I-R, not an E-R or U-R,” that kind of thing. Actually, if you spelled bird phonetically, it would be B-R-D. We just happen to know there’s a vowel in there. It thinks about a bird. So you can be a fabulous reader, and you still have never had the opportunity maybe to develop that visual memory that is so critical for spelling. So what the copy work does– when we have the kids chunk these passages that we provide in Spelling You See, it’s forcing the brain to pay attention to the details in the print. So it’s coloring that I-R purple, or it’s coloring the E-E. We’ve got a kinesthetic component. It’s multimodality.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:49:35.094
And then when they’re doing the copy work, it forces the brain to pay attention to the details in the print, and that’s how the brain is actually processing. But this is the thing. The reading level has to be a minimum of– for the spelling passages, the reading level has to be a minimum of a year below the child’s actual reading level because if they’re trying to decode words, or if they’re trying to get used to new vocabulary or think about concepts that they don’t really understand yet, then they’re not going to be able to think about the spelling piece. So we want these passages to be interesting enough to pique their interest, but not so hard that they have to use a lot of cognition to actually understand what that passage means. We want it to be easy enough. So as a guideline, we say, “Make sure it’s a minimum of a year below the child’s reading level.” And then the other thing that Demme has done so well is that they’ve explained the five developmental stages of spelling. Because who knew? We didn’t know. Again, back to the Henderson research, we didn’t even know until the last several years that spelling had stages. And you can go through those stages quickly, but you can’t skip them. So we have to correlate that. But it’s got to be an easy enough passage that your brain can focus on what those words look like as opposed to the vocabulary.
Gretchen Roe: 00:50:56.816
Okay. So you and I talked a little bit about this last night because we got a couple of these questions where parents want to use Spelling You See, and English is not their first language. And so here’s a question for you. We are a homeschool family from South Africa, and English is our second language, although we are using an English curriculum such as Math-U-See. What would be a method– so there’s two questions here. Here’s the first one. Is the method to learn English as a second language the same as it is while learning a first or a family of origin language?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:51:33.432
Well, I’m going to give you a loose yes. But that’s why the Spelling You See is working, because when we start with those nursery rhymes, they learn how to articulate our words and put them together with a certain amount of inflection and meaning. And we have context driving that. So they’re learning how our language works. And then, again, when you couple that with the copy work, they’re neurologically helping the brain to make those connections. But yes, by and large, yes. The answer is yes. But with an adult, you can– you couldn’t give a 12-month-old copy work to do. So of course, little kids have to get immersed in the language. But with adults, when their brain’s already set with language, they know what the goal is and they’re physically capable of doing that. So you can fast track them, which is why this is so exciting with the ESL, because we’re going to get them through this whole program in a very short period of time.
Gretchen Roe: 00:52:35.867
Okay. So the second question that we have here is: there’s a popularly-held belief that in early language teaching, teaching another language beside your home language can cause language confusion. And do you have any thoughts on that subject? I know I do, so I just wanted to see what your thoughts were.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:52:56.591
So are you talking about preschoolers?
Gretchen Roe: 00:52:57.732
I think so. So we’re talking about young students, teaching more than one language.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:53:03.928
Okay. I think if you’re just doing it orally, I think it’s great because the brain is just learning how to do that. And I think it would be fabulous if you speak Spanish in your home and you’ve got a nanny maybe that’s talking English, I think that’s game on. I mean, I just can’t think of a better way to learn language. That would be great. What we’ve come up with, though, with the adults is that it’s that kinesthetic movement of the– they need to learn how to read and speak. What’s happening is, the first semester, they were just trying to teach them how to talk, and it wasn’t enough. It just wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t enough time to practice. But when we coupled that with passage reading and with copy work, and with those letter boxes that broke down those individual sounds, that’s why everybody’s so on fire, because we’re combining all of those activities that an adult can do, and that’s why it’s working so well.
Gretchen Roe: 00:53:56.265
I think that makes a tremendous amount of difference. And I can’t believe we’re almost coming to the end of this hour together. I could spend all day with you.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:54:06.476
We’ll do it again.
Gretchen Roe: 00:54:07.108
I learn so much when we get a chance to talk and we get a chance to– I get to ask questions of you. In the closing minutes here, if there is something that you would want moms, in particular, to take away from this. And I shouldn’t say moms because we have a lot more dads who are homeschooling since COVID.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:54:30.871
Yes, for sure. I have a lot more.
Gretchen Roe: 00:54:33.632
If there’s something you want a parent to take away– or even a grandparent or a tutor to take away from our time together, what would be the thing that you would want them to remember most about the student who’s in front of them?
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:54:50.206
I think focus on strengths. Keep it fun. Keep it interesting. Think out of the box. You’re the mom. You’re the parents. You’re the ones that know them the best. I’ve changed my mind about things about college in the last couple of years. It used to be in the olden days, we said everybody had to go. I’m not convinced that that’s a good thing anymore. I think you really need– it’s helpful to focus on a child’s strengths and see what they want to do and then run with it. I will tell you that those years that I homeschooled – we homeschooled for 12 years – were the best years of our life. And even though they were hard, I wouldn’t give them up for a minute. And I know that when I was homeschooling and we were having tough days, rough days and not knowing where to go or what the answers were, that I always just wanted to know that when that part of our life, that season of our life was over, that I never wanted to look back and think that I wished I would have. I wanted to give it my all.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:56:01.080
And I knew it wasn’t going to be perfect and for sure we made mistakes, but I wanted at least to be able to look back and say I gave it everything I had because there’s no promises in life. And I just wanted– and that was why, I mean, I quit everything and I just focused on them. I was lucky I could do that and George supported me. We drove a lot of cars that had 200,000 miles on them, and I wore a lot of clothes for a very long time and we didn’t get new towels every year. But it was so worth it. And now, I’m in a different season. But hang in there if you possibly can. It’s so worth it.
Gretchen Roe: 00:56:38.725
Thank you so much for this time. It just seemed to pass way too quickly, and I enjoyed so much getting the opportunity to spend time with you. Those of you who have watched live, thank you for hanging in there with us. We certainly appreciate it. We may have one more question here that just popped up if I can get my mouse to cooperate. And here we go. Let me ask this one, and then I’ll give closing comments here. So my child has a hard time articulating something he’s learned. Does Spelling You See help make those brain connections to be able to retell information in a clear, understandable way? And if not, what could I do to help him? He’s an upper elementary, and it seems as though the skill should be developed.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:57:29.799
Okay. Boy, that’s a great question.
Gretchen Roe: 00:57:32.837
It is.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:57:33.978
So there’s a couple things. When she said clearly, I wasn’t sure if she was talking about articulation, like saying F for TH or if S is or TH?
Gretchen Roe: 00:57:45.386
No, I think it’s recounting– input is good, but output is maybe not equivalent. And if I’m misinterpreting that question, please hop right in here and make sure that I have interpreted correctly.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:57:58.194
Okay. And that’s something we can, I would be happy to discuss later off camera or whatever. But with auditory processing, there are two neurological functions that are happening in the language center of the brain. One is receptive language, and one is expressive language. And you can have strengths or weaknesses in each of those areas. So for receptive language, that’s when you receive, and if you’re really easily understanding things that people are saying to you, and then expressive is what I’m expressing now trying to explain things to you. So they’re very different. Two sides of the same coin, right? Okay, so that’s very common to have some difficulty with expressive language, to be able to understand things really well, and even to be a really good reader but getting that vocabulary out. So that’s something that you can work on, but you have to maybe express– I’ve got a whole chart here that word retrieval is often a problem with those kids that they can’t pull words quickly.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:59:05.283
That vocabulary is in there, but pulling it and especially under pressure is really difficult. Word lists are very helpful when they’re trying to do creative writing. The other thing that’s really difficult with these children, in particular, is multitasking is especially difficult. So breaking down those writing tasks. So using, I think we call them not Venn diagrams, but when you’re writing, if you have a circle and you have my biggest topic is porpoises, and then I’m going to do a circle of what they eat, a circle of where they live, a circle of what they do, and then helping kids break that whole process down and working on each bubble separately in a paragraph. If you can really break some of that down because that multitasking is a real challenge for everybody. And kids just don’t have the neurological capacity till at least the end of fourth grade and usually fifth before they’re able to do that very well.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 01:00:03.811
And then the other thing is if spelling is a problem, then that just exasperates the whole process. But typing for them, I kind of tongue in cheek, I say that if you have a child with a story, let them talk into a listening device or you be the scribe. I tell people, Paul did not write the Bible, but scribes did, but it still was Paul’s stuff. You can transpose the stuff for them and then let them use that as copywork. That was a really good question. And there are multiple ways that we can break that process down and make it much more doable.
Gretchen Roe: 01:00:43.465
I think as a parent too, it’s particularly if you’re looking for them to give you feedback on a story they’ve read or something like that. Instead of just saying, “Tell me what you learned from the story.” Give them the framework to hang the context. “So in the first paragraph, this happened. Tell me what you learned that was going to happen in the story based on that first paragraph.” And so what you’re asking your student to do there is to do a little synthesis to start connecting the dots. And here’s where you as a homeschool parent might have to do a little bit of extra work to have read the story in advance to know what’s going on there. I know this was a huge component with my son, Duncan, who is a diagnosed dyslexic. And he has that dyslexic auditory processing component that he’s just about two beats behind. And he was told in fourth grade, “Find him a good trade school. He wasn’t college material”. He’s a computer programmer today. So it turned out all right. [laughter]
Gretchen Roe: 01:01:51.649
But I really had to learn the process of not hanging him out there to say, “Tell me all about this story that you read,” because he just did not have the retrieval capacity to pull back the words. But if we broke it down by a paragraph and said, “All right, so in this paragraph, the dog ran away from home. Where was the dog going?” And in any context as a parent, that you can connect emotion words to what they read, particularly with boys, you’re really doing something valuable. I want to thank you all so much for joining us. Those of you who joined us live, thank you again. Thank you all for your wonderful questions. They were terrific. It has been a great pleasure to spend this hour with you, Dr. Karen. I cannot even begin to tell you. And I think this has been like throwing a rock in a pond, we’re going to see lots of ripples from it. Thank you so very much. Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. Take care, everyone.
Dr. Karen Holinga: 01:02:54.355
Thanks. See ya. Bye.
Gretchen Roe: 01:02:57.089
This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thanks for joining us. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or go on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it.
[music]
Find out where you can subscribe to The Demme Learning Show on our show page.
Show Notes
Some of you emailed post-event to ask for clarification on the word Dr. Holinga used when talking about how we, as parents, can improve our student’s reading capabilities with rereading the same passage for fluency. The word she used was “myelin.” UCSF.edu has an article that supports that position.
If you would like to read about placement in Spelling You See, you can learn more here.
We Are Here to Help
If you have any questions, you can contact us at the link below.
Get in Touch
I can’t begin to tell you what Dr. Holinga has meant to our family over the years. We first met her in 2000 when we took our 1st grade daughter to see her to discover why such a bright, articulate child couldn’t read. Other specialists told us that because of her visual processing issues and dyslexia, our daughter would probably never read. Karen turned all that around. We worked HARD for a number of years (and shed many tears) but finally, she broke through. Our daughter graduated from college magna cum laude and went on to receive her master’s degree in education with honors. Was it easy for her? No. She had to work harder than most of the other students. But she learned persistence and diligence, and she is now helping children with IEPs that struggle in reading. PLEASE don’t give up on your child because things are hard for you right now! You might not see results for a while, but they will come. Let them know that home is a safe place to learn, and it is also a place where no one is going to make fun of them EVER for their efforts. Keep going, mom and dad!