my son bruce didnt talk untill he was 4 he is now almost 7 and his speach is about 75% unintelligable, bruce did 4 months of kindergarden when his school decided that it would be best to bump him to first grade because his math skills were at a frist grade level, now its almost the end of the year and he cant read, writing is even worse and i dont know what to do. his teachers told me because he has an above average intellegance that he would pick up on things to not worry but when your child has ld in speach everything that has to do with it fails reading writing the only reason he dose so well with math is because he dosent need paper or pencil to do it, i just dont know what to do any more :cry:
Re: help me help my son
this is really on the wrong board. go over to Parenting with LD for some very knowledgeable and helpful people. Also try schwablearning.com -the board is on the connecting page. Also knowledgeable and helpful folks but more of them.
No - I have to agree it doesn’t sound like a wonderful idea to promote within the year. He needs some serious help NOW. Sooner rather than later will make a huge difference in his life.
I agree with Victoria that this is such a monumental mess-up by the school that you have a marvelous lever to get the services you need. Run to those boards. Also read as much on the Wrightslaw.com site as you can. Your child has legal rights and they have been disregarded. You need evaluation and serious help (don’t let’em get away with speech therapy 20 minutes a week!). Your son needs you to educate yourself (people on those boards will jump to help) on what he needs and how to make the school get it for him.
Welcome and fight the good fight
In hindsight, bumping him up from kindergarten was probably a bad mistake. How many people at any level will pass any class if they are jumped into it after 40% is over?
First of all he needs individual teaching in reading NOW. The person teaching should have knowledge in effective methods, including (but not only) systematic synthetic phonics.
He should probably be on an IEP already because of everything else — is he?
He was cheated out of 40% of his first grade by this decision — you should really pressure the school to make up for what he lost there. If you are lucky or very convincing, the school *may* sometimes offer effective help.
On the other hand, quite a few schools have no teachers who are really trained in reading, sad but true. So you may need to go for private tutoring. It is expensive but can make a huge difference.
Secondly, if a child is going to repeat at all, Grade 1 is the time to do it. Repeating later will never catch up the teaching of basic skills that was missed at the beginning. So start by getting the most effective help possible now, and then in June take another look and see if he is really ready for Grade 2; if not, getting the right start in Grade 1 next year might be the best option. This is a difficult decision. Having been pressured by the school into a bad decision once, get all the information and responsible advice you can and try not to let it happen again.