My son will be 8 in a couple of weeks. I’ve been home schooling him over the summer because I know he needs it to keep up his skills. He’s a bright, sensitive, articulate, emotional child. He still reverses his letters and numbers frequently. He forgets how to do simple math problems from one day to the next. When learning to read, he wouldn’t recognize words from one sentence to the next. He loses his place on the page over and over (in math and reading). It took him a lot more practice than the other (younger) children in 1st grade to pass his spelling tests. He’s clumsy. In other words, he’s just like his mom. I didn’t get DX with a learning disability until I was on my umpteenth try college (after having dropped out of my freshman year of high school). The DX wasn’t specific but the college gave me accomodations (extended time on tests in a quiet room) that not only allowed me to graduate but within the top 10% of my class.
School was very painful for me and I had something to prove in college. Now I want to help my son have a better childhood than I did and I’m afraid I won’t be able to protect him. I’ve done so much remediation with him myself that I doubt the school testing would find him in need of accomodations at this time. I feel like if I allow it to get to the point where the school would recognize the problem that I would have failed him. Yet, I’m afraid that by working so hard with him at home that he won’t get the accomodations that would help him at school.
The good news is that he will enter 2nd grade at a small, public, rural school with only 8 children in his class. The class is 2nd thru 6th grade. Each child’s work is supposed to be individualized.
Adding to the dynamic… I have a child entering 1st grade (the k-1 class also has 8 children). He is autistic but academically very advanced. So while the older brother struggles with his 2nd grade work, the younger one is ready for 3rd grade (at least) math.
If they follow thru with the individualized education that they promise everyone , life will be great for all. The younger son has an IEP because of his autism to work on speech, language, social and behavioral goals. So I know from experience that it is hard enough to get teachers to do what they are required to do by law and I worry about what will happen to my older son who doesn’t have an IEP to protect him.
Thanks for giving me a sounding board. If nothing else I see here in black and white how neurotic I’m being. My husband and I worked very hard to get the boys into this school. We’ve had a few hard years of battling with school administrators. This will probably be the best school year ever.
Wish us all luck. If any of you out there have any words of wisdom, about what I suspect is a visual processing disorder with a visual-motor integration component, I’d appreciate hearing from you. Thanks again.
Re: visual processing and visual-motor integration???
No magic cure-alls, but I have helped several kids with this sort of pattern by direct instruction in handwriting. Get a good handwriting program, either traditional or calligraphy, get *pens* (throw out the yellow pencils, I mean that literally) and also for the first steps a whiteboard and markers, work on smooth free hand motions avoiding tight littl wrist twists, and teach directionality absolutely and enforce it continuously. Learning directionality consistently in handwriting, with the kinesthetic feedback from the hand, can work back and help with the visual directionality. Note in particular that b and d are made with completely different hand motions and so there is no need to confuse them if they are learned kinesthetically. I have four students at this time who all have this kind of problem, and all improving greatly.
At the same time, in reading, teach all new words by sounding out and tracking left to right, never memorizing by sight. Memorizing by sight means staring at the word and running the eyes randomly around in circles, exactly the problem habit that needs to be dropped. Whenever you meet a new word in either writing or spelling, first the child tries to sound it out, then you help as needed with sounding it out, then you point out the digraphs and vowel combinations and silent or irregular letters, then the child writes it (paying careful attention to directionality), then you cover up the models and the child says the sounds and writes it again from memory. This does take a few minutes — but it saves months of the kind of problem you are having now, so it’s a huge time-saver in the long run.
When reading out loud, don’t let inaccuracies slip by. If your child is replacing “a” for “the” and “of” for “from” and “that” for “what”, this is NOT just a little error on little words; it’s a strong sign of poor tracking and not really looking at the words. Encourage your child to *slow down* and look at each and every word, in order, scanning the word left to right. With a ballpoint pen as a pointer, follow along strictly left to right when he reads, to aid in training tracking. The idea is “make haste slowly” — once he is reading correctly, then speed comes easily and usually naturally; but if he is hurrying up and guessing frantically, well what is the value of a fast mistake?
First the handwriting, then the reading. In most cases you see improvement within weeks, and in six months to a year the problems can be mostly overcome.
Re: visual processing and visual-motor integration???
Why not have him privately tested if you worry the school testing will not support you? It is great you are working with him at home, but there may be much more you can do yourself, not to speak of what might be available at school, if you had better insight into the specific nature of your oldest child’s issues. Obviously you are aware of the testing and IEP process through your experiences with your younger child. Was that a negative experience? I ask because I’m wondering why you are shying away from that approach with your oldest boy. Your family history is quite a strong indicator that your child is at risk. I’m sure you’ve done great things for him, but consider as well the possibility that he is using his intelligence to compensate for an LD and comes out looking like he is “average.” You write that you have an LD but managaged to be in the top 10% in college with accomodations. You might benefit from reading more about being gifted with learning disabilities, as you may well fall into that category. So may your oldest. Obviously, your youngest is already demonstrating his giftedness. The thing about gt/ld is that these kids tends to keep their heads above water early on but get progessively worse at school as time goes on, becoming more and more frustrated and disengaged. I have a feeling you can relate to that. The good news is that perhaps more than any other category of LD, gt/ld children can really benefit from early intervention. I have a student who was diagnosed at age 6. He was placed on an IEP, got lots of help and lots of challenges in his areas of giftedness. He is now 14 and, aside from the need to type most things, you would not guess that he has any LD. He is in all honors classes and making very high As. At 6 he was frustrated, oppositional and not learning. Now he is cooperative, has tons of friends and is a leader in and out of the classroom. This was a child with very severe LD. He still has the same issues but was taught ways to work around and overcome them. It couldn’t have worked as well if we hadn’t known the specific reasons for his difficulties. That is where the evaluation is so crucial.
Thank you.
Thank you for your suggestions. I am looking into private testing right now. We had some done before kindergarten and he was found to be bright but with visual processing issues and the only recommendation was further testing when he was older. I almost had the school test him last year in 1st grade but discovered that the new school psychologist was at least as bad as the previous one we’d had to deal with (with our younger son). I’m afraid I don’t have much faith in the school system’s administrators at this point. We’ve had to fight about placement issues for our youngest for years. I guess I feel like if it’s so hard to fight for a child with an autism DX, how much harder is it going to be to get any help for a child who isn’t so obviously disabled?
Re: visual processing and visual-motor integration???
I have had battles with school administrators as a student. teacher, and parent, so I know what it’s like when you hit the brick wall. Some administrations are just set in concrete and it takes ten years and the Supreme Court to even start to change them.
At that point, remember that your first goal is to help your child, so work on at-home remediation as I was suggesting above — it really does work and I have a number of kids who no longer need special help to prove it — get outside therapy any way you can, it’s cheaper than lawyers anyway; and then work against the fixed attitude of the school administration any way you can, chipping away bit by bit.
I know the tutoring I do and teach works because I keep getting students who are hopeless failures and having nervous breakdowns and going to be put out of school, and losing students who are perfectly normal and don’t need special outside tutoring …
Two questions. (1) Have you taken your son in for a developmental vision evaluation? (2) Have you taken your son in for an occupational therapy evaluation?
From your description it sounds as if your son has a tracking problem (loses his place at reading distance), and he may have other lags in development of visual efficiency skills. A developmental vision evaluation would be the first thing I would get. See http://www.childrensvision.com for more information about these types of vision problems, and http://www.covd.org to find board-certified developmental optometrists in your area. Unfortunately, developmental vision is not assessed in regular eye exams. A child can have 20/20 vision and still have severe visual efficiency problems that interfere with academics.
Since you are in a rural area, you may also want to take a look at http://www.homevisiontherapy.com . This is software that corrects some of the more common visual efficiency problems — tracking, convergence, etc. Cost for pre-testing, the software, and post-testing is usually under $300.
An occupational therapy eval would determine whether there is a visual-motor integration problem. If there is, an OT can prescribe exercises to help. This eval is usually covered by medical insurance with a referral from your physician. It’s a good idea to first find the OT you want and then talk to her clinic about insurance coverage. The way your physician words or codes the referral can make all the difference in whether insurance covers it or not.
Another thing you need to look at is a cognitive skills training program. Children with visual efficiency problems tend to lag in development of cognitive skills — things such as visual short-term memory, pattern recognition, visual attention to detail, sequencing skills, directionality (reversals are symptomatic of poor directionality skills). There are some excellent cognitive skills programs that will develop these skills quickly — provided the underlying sensory deficit has been corrected. Good home programs are Audiblox (http://www.audiblox2000.com ) and BrainSkills (http://www.brainskills.com ). An excellent provider-based program is PACE (http://www.processingskills.com ), but it is quite expensive.
Many parents have successfully remediated visual processing problems with appropriate therapies — and there are many more therapies and programs available today than just 10 or 20 years ago. I would encourage you to be proactive beyond merely providing academic remediation at home. It is much more effective to identify the specific underlying deficits and reduce them with direct remediation.
Nancy