Learning to Read --LD

I am stuck on teaching reading to Aidan using 100EZ lessons. He has been able to identify letters by their sounds for a couple of years now but is not getting blending. Part of this, I realize, is because he isn't segmenting sounds or being able to put them together again. So when I sound out "d-o-g" it has nothing in common to him with "dog". It might as well be "man on the moon".

So I'm reading different books trying to figure out ways to get him comfortable with decoding and blending. Here are some resources I found this weekend:

Montessori Mom -- Learning to Read.
--Lots of good information about the pink cards and how to use them. One advantage for this approach with Aidan is that (1) he needs lots of repetition (2) he loves doing things he can do by himself.

Some ideas for Teaching Blending and Decoding
There are some visuals for phonics manipulatives here.

Here is some information on teaching LD students Phonological Skills.
Aidan has been able to recognize rhyme and generate it for a long long time -- probably because of the ongoing music immersion in this house. But there's a step from there to being able to produce it on call. With him, there is a big step between producing something spontaneously, and being able to produce it on call. This is showing up in all different areas of his life.

This site does give a progression for teaching to discern broken-up words, which is something Aidan has gotten stuck on both in 100EZ and in Reading Reflex.

(A thought! Get Aidan's SLP involved in this -- it does seem like an aspect of speech and langauge therapy and most therapists seem to settle in more productively when they have something concrete to work on -- probably because unavoidably, they know the therapy better than the individual child).

Finally, I am thinking that teaching the signing alphabet might help him segment. When he was struggling to learn to talk, he made huge strides once I figured out a "combination" approach. He had DK-type realistic picture books which he loved. I found that pointing to the picture and slooowlly, emphatically saying the word, and then talking about it (because his receptive skills were way above his expressive ones) was effective, and so was signing the word and saying it slowly at the same time. After a while he took off on verbalizing and I dropped the picture and sign talk because they became cumbersome. But thinking about that, maybe writing out the letters, signing them, laying down cards and so on might help him in the same way.