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Anyone willing to share some 'BTDT' advice on high school w/ dyslexic child?


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I have known for many years that 14 y.o. son is dyslexic. We just started some testing which confirmed that he is dyslexic and gifted. We follow classic methods with some adjustments as needed for him. I am very anxious on how I am going to help him with the increasing demands and more difficult work load as he starts high school next year. (Still homeschooling) I would love advice on anyone who has 'been there, done that'- best advice and what do you wish you would have done differently? DS is interested in math and computers and tested at college level for math.

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A lot will depend on what the detailed evaluation and testing reveals -- area(s) that need work, and suggested additional therapies as well as types of materials that are a better fit.

Just informally, what do you see as the problem areas that you are already making adjustments for? (for example: difficulties with solo reading? listening? writing? handwriting? abstract concepts in math/logic/thinking? attention span? ability to formulate a plan and execute it?) It's hard to know what might help, without more specifics. ?

Also, what have you been doing that seems to help, and what exactly about that do you see as helping?

Hopefully with more info, people will have more "targeted" advice for you. Also, you might cross post this on the learning challenges board. Warmest regards, Lori D.

Edited by Lori D.
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Thanks Lori! Yes, I agree that after he has finished all his testing I will have a better idea about how to help him. I'm sure when those results come, I will be a nuisance on the special ed. forum. : )

He went through WWE and did really well, minus the writing. We are doing WWS now, and he hates it but he 'gets it'. I have to read the directions because reading comp is bad. Handwriting and Spelling are very challenging for him, and he has a strong aversion to anything that looks like a book. He loves audio books and read-alouds though. The tester said he has a solid understanding of basic phonics, but needs work on advanced phonics. We have tried just about everything- AAS, LOE, Apples & Pears... I do still have LOE, so we could go back through that again.

Also, she did not test audio working memory (?) yet, but suspects it is really bad.

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I've btdt with 1 & still in the trenches with the other. These are my general suggestions. These are things I either did, am doing &/or wish we had done more of:

develop good typing skills

 

lots of writing of short, to the point reports  (eta or fiction or journaling if the student is so inclined. Doesn't matter what, really, just insist on pages. Consider not editing for spelling or grammar, just focus on content. Or don't edit the majority of it at all. This is one area where I'm beginning to really  believe in volume, volume, volume.)

 

try out speech to text software for prewriting essays/reports

work on note taking skills,  especially for lectures, trying several approaches (mind mapping, cornell notes, superstar student etc) until the student finds a good way for them

consider tools like the Live Scribe pen which records audio & collates it with the written notes taken
 

continue phonogram based spelling  - like Apples & Pears. Get through level D & consider starting again with C or D. My ds is just finishing up D at age 16. I think I'll run him through it again in the spring.

at the same time work through most common word lists - say it, spell it, hand write it, type it

 

Dd is at college & has official accommodations of extra time on exams plus the use of dictionaries &/or the option to use word processor on exams.

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I'll share what we have found helpful. Barton's Reading and Spelling for one hour per day made my non readers become readers.

Learning Ally subscription if you don't have one. It is an amazing library of audiobooks you can download to a computer or IPod.

Mavis beacon typing for fifteen minutes a day if he is not typing yet.

 

After reading is remediated a bit, www.home2teach.com for writing ( warning it is time intensive and requires daily revisions ). The instructors could be a little more positive, but progress I've observed has been amazing.

 

I would make my own Lit, History, Govenrment, classes using Teaching Company or other videos in conjunction with the audiobooks. I found Mrs. Sperry utube videos for Shakespeare . Discussion and projects can be used to assess learning. As writing progresses, assign papers. Sign langue may be a good fit for foreign language.

Just as important, I would focus on his strengths. Seek out robotics classes or anything in that area he finds engaging.

HTH

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Barton Reading and Spelling took my very dyslexic 5th grader from barely decoding Clifford books in 5th grade to reading Divergent in 5 days just a year and a half later.  And her spelling from kindergarten level with lots and lots of mistakes and no retention to passing criterion referenced spelling tests with no prep and getting 100s.  But her brother, who has the same diagnosis, has not had quite the rapid success that she has, even though he actually grasps material much more quickly.  He has other issues that are tripping up his output.

 

I agree with others, continue lots of audio books since he does well with those.  Do you have a Kindle?  You might look into Immersion Reading if you haven't already.

 

Also, Dragon Naturally Speaking/Ginger/Inspiration software all paired together with a typing program can help tremendously with output.  There is a learning curve with each program so I would start slow and budget in time every day for "training".

 

Definitely the typing is really important.

 

As as mentioned with others, seek out his strengths and support those!  Give him LOTS of opportunities to pursue and master his areas of interest.

 

Lots of other good suggestions upthread, too.

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Loving this advice- thanks so much! He is a decent reader, just avoids it at all cost because he is a perfectionist, and often times refuses to try if he thinks he may not succeed. He tested at about a 6th grade level of reading, which I think is pretty good considering he is reading-phobic.

The hardest part for me is figuring out how much to push, and when to say, "okay, you can't do it, so let's find an adaptation".

I want him to love learning and feel like he can be whatever he wants to be.

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When you say he is a decent reader, is that silent reading?  How well does he decode when he reads out loud?  What is his fluency like for out loud reading?  Does he guess incorrectly at words based on the first few letters?  Does he frequently skip over words?  Stumble frequently, and have to slow down when sounding out?

 

I ask because very bright dyslexics frequently never get diagnosed because they ARE so bright they can glean enough context from a few correctly decoded words to figure out what they are reading.  They switch to silent reading early on and a parent rarely hears them reading out loud so they are unaware of how poor the child's decoding and fluency skills are.  Those bad habits get ingrained and make reading a very inefficient and frustrating practice.

 

The best way to find out if they are truly reading well is to see how a student does with out loud reading and reading nonsense words.   Can he read nonsense words?  For instance, if you created a word that is not real but followed phonological rules of the English language, could he decode it?

 

Believe it or not, there are many evaluators that do not really check out loud reading and decoding of nonsense words.  They just have them read silently then test reading comprehension or only read real words, not any nonsense words (not saying yours did that, but it is an issue with some).  Very bright dyslexics can often make it through those types of tests and do well but frequently the child actually has terrible reading habits.   Those terrible reading habits can compound the poor spelling, too.  And make them avoid reading because in reality it IS hard for them to read, harder than it sometimes has to be.

 

If, on the other hand, he is very fluent in his out loud reading and he can decode nonsense words well, he might still benefit from running through a true OG based reading and spelling program to help with the other areas of difficulty, but hopefully your evaluator can advise you on that.

 

Also, you might also get an exam through a COVD (developmental optometrist) to see if there are any developmental vision issues.  His visual accuity might be perfect and he could still have undiagnosed developmental vision issues.  That does NOT cause dyslexia, by the way, but it can make things more challenging.

 

http://www.covd.org/

 

Good luck and best wishes.

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On 11/23/2014 at 9:21 AM, my2boysteacher said:

The hardest part for me is figuring out how much to push, and when to say, "okay, you can't do it, so let's find an adaptation".
I want him to love learning and feel like he can be whatever he wants to be.


With DS#2 with stealth dyslexia (mostly manifested in writing and spelling), all the way through high school we did together aloud "popcorn" reading ("you read a page, I read a page") for most of the Literature. That helped him in many ways:

- practice of out loud reading, to be comfortable with that when it WILL be required from time to time even as an adult
- decoding and fluency practice
- learning vocab in the moment
- by getting a "break" every other page, better able to keep track of what was happening (rather than spending all the mental energy just on getting through the reading)
- allowed us great, deep discussion in the moment
- I could see instantly where/when/how to push or back off
- it was fun for both of us, and built great memories of things shared and discussed all through high school ?

During our reading together, I would occasionally stumble and misread things myself, and then correct myself or DS would catch/correct me -- that really helped DS to relax about the idea of making mistakes, which in turn lead to better reading performance from him because he WASN'T now focused on performance. ?

The Literature I had him do solo were always either at or slightly below his reading level AND that I knew would be of high interest to him to help keep him engaged and focused, and provide him with success.

Edited by Lori D.
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… Handwriting and Spelling are very challenging for him, and he has a strong aversion to anything that looks like a book. He loves audio books and read-alouds though. The tester said he has a solid understanding of basic phonics, but needs work on advanced phonics. We have tried just about everything- AAS, LOE, Apples & Pears... I do still have LOE, so we could go back through that again.

Also, she did not test audio working memory (?) yet, but suspects it is really bad.

 

Definitely get DS fluent with typing. That actually helped my DS's spelling a LOT! The typed word stood out to him if it didn't look right. And, spell check helps trigger to him that he needs to fix something. :)

 

 

You may want to check out ideas from Dianne Craft's website for info on nutritional supplements to add focus/concentration for AD/H/D and learning issues. Also, she has some therapies, such as the writing eights, to help increase right/left brain hemisphere connections, which is often lacking in children with dyslexia, etc. And she suggests some visual techniques for learning/practicing spelling (similar to those in Jeffrey Freed's book, linked below), and for writing.

 

Jeffrey Freed's book, Right Brained Child in a Left Brained World, which has lots of very specific, *visual* ways of learning/practicing reading, writing, spelling, and math -- specifically for middle school and high school ages.

 

Doing out loud back and forth spelling practice helped our DS's weak auditory-sequential areas of the brain (Andrew Pudewa's "Spelling and the Brain" lecture details that issue)

 

Writing and spelling were the big stumbling blocks for our DS, too, who struggles with "stealth" dyslexia. In post #18 of the past thread "Will DS ever learn to spell?", I went into detail about what we did for spelling in the middle/high school years. Two things:

 

#1, DS didn't even *begin* to click at all with spelling until he was 12yo; then I saw him click a notch forward each year in ability. However, at almost 21yo today, he still struggles with spelling, and probably always will. It's just not as severe as it was. So I would advise patient perseverance as DS's brain and abilities mature on HIS unique timetable.

 

#2, There are SO many more helps, techniques and therapies out there that weren't available just 8-9 years ago for us to take advantage of, so there are likely newer things out there than what we used that may be more complete and a better fit for you. So that means a lot of time and research on your part...

 

 

...He went through WWE and did really well, minus the writing. We are doing WWS now, and he hates it but he 'gets it'. I have to read the directions because reading comp is bad.

 

For writing, WWE and WWS were not out at that time, but it sounds like those are giving your DS a very solid foundation. Like Hornblower said in her post above, lots of practice is what helped our DS get comfortable with writing. A paragraph a day, slowly builds up to by the end of the week, you have a 5-paragraph essay! :) From 8th grade on all the way through high school we did a weekly timed essay from a past SAT essay prompt. In post #54 of this past post, I explain how we slowly worked up to that. In post #3 of the thread "Help with writing lit analysis essays", I went into detail how we scheduled writing longer papers, with a lot of hand-holding, scaffolding and support to encourage success.

 

The other thing that was *extremely* helpful for writing was involvement in regular speech/debate, which really helps your student think about what to say, use supporting facts/examples, and come up with "hooks" and conclusions -- all of which is exactly what is needed for good *writing*. So that might be something to consider. Our DSs were involved in Youth & Gov't, a model legislative program through the YMCA, and got to debate bills every week, and then have the fun mock legislative event at the state capital at the end of the semester.

 

In post #3 of "Can we discuss apathetic writers and college prep?" I listed the major things that helped us with writing in the high school years.

 

BEST of luck! Warmly, Lori D.

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I've graduated a couple of severely dyslexic kids. The two things they struggled with in high school were spelling and languages. Latin was a nightmare (note that my non-dyslexic kids do great in Latin / Greek). I wish someone had told me that dyslexic children struggle with languages. If I could do it over again, I would have had them learn ASL (American Sign Language). ASL is the one language that dyslexics are able to learn easily because it is multi-sensory and that's how dyslexics learn.

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FWIW, ASL is what DD is probably going to do.  And I think she will do well with it because of her areas of strength.  But ASL can be problematic for a dyslexic if they also have other issues, such as DS does with dysgraphia.  I do not think ASL will be easy at all for DS.   Both kids are dyslexic, but they have different underlying strengths and different areas of struggle that go along with the dyslexia.   

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FWIW, ASL is what DD is probably going to do.  And I think she will do well with it because of her areas of strength.  But ASL can be problematic for a dyslexic if they also have other issues, such as DS does with dysgraphia.  I do not think ASL will be easy at all for DS.   Both kids are dyslexic, but they have different underlying strengths and different areas of struggle that go along with the dyslexia.   

 

Totally agree.

 

Our DS with the "stealth" dyslexia went the ASL route. Spelling and writing are his weak areas, and while he didn't have to write a lot (other than the usual note-taking for class), MANY MANY words are spelled out letter by letter with fingerspelling, as not everything has a sign. This can be a nightmare for a student who struggles in that area.

 

For a struggling speller, I'd strongly recommend 2-3 years in advance of taking the ASL, doing a lot of outloud back-and-forth practice of spelling to strengthen the auditory-sequential aspect of spelling, and to work on vowel patterns to have a strong basis for spelling from hearing the words/names pronounced to make it easier to correctly fingerspell.

 

I think that those things we focused on in spelling really DID help DS have more success with ASL than he would have had otherwise. Likewise, I am convinced the sequential nature of fingerspelling really helped strengthen DS's overall ability to spell. He's still a bad speller, but at almost 21, he is vastly improved from where was 10 years ago!

 

(Our ASL back story: DS had 4 semesters of college classes -- 2 semesters as dual enrollment as a 12th grader -- and then was 2 years into the 3 year interpretation for the Deaf Associate's degree program before deciding he did not want that as a career afterall. But he was doing well, and his instructors and advisor were sorry to see him go -- they expressed that they felt he would have been successful with ASL and interpreting.)

 

As OneStepAtATime said above, you really need to know your student and abilities/weaknesses to have a good idea of what is going to work/not work.

 

BEST of luck to all those with dyslexic high schoolers, working on accomplishing those required credits! Warmest regards, Lori D.

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I really appreciate the advice! He is not yet done testing yet, but the tester said that DS is definitely 2E, as he is testing out in everything except language arts at a 12 to 13 grade level. You could have knocked me over with a feather when she told me that. I had no idea! He has always resisted and complained about everything, except math. I thought he was behind on everything. I love the ASL idea- does that meet the foreign language requirement for college admittence?

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I love the ASL idea- does that meet the foreign language requirement for college admittence?

 

A majority of, but not all, universities are accepting ASL for foreign language. Check with the schools of interest to see what their policies are, to be sure that it will be accepted where DS wants to go.

 

Our DS with LDs did ASL at the local community college as dual enrollment, which was definitely the way to go! Took me out of the picture so I could just cheerlead, and he had a very knowledgeable instructor, in-class conversation practice, and it counted as both high school AND college foreign language credit. So if a future college degree program requires several semesters of a foreign language -- the student would have already knocked it out in high school. :)

 

Just my 2 cents worth: dual enrollment in the senior year is also a great way for a student with LDs to "dip a toe in the water" of college, and learn some of the needed study skills, website navigation skills, and familiarity with college class pacing and self-discipline to succeed when going to college full time. A recent thread discusses this: Sign language accepted for college requirement?

 

And, in case you want to test out the idea of ASL earlier in high school via homeschooling to see if will at all be a match with DS's interests/abilities:

- Sign language classes: Landry? Others?

- ASL language credit available in summer?

- American Sign Language: options?

 

Cheers! Lori D.

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I would work this year to improve his reading.  I'm not sure what all the issues are, but you're going to want to be sure that his decoding is solid and that this ability extends to multisyllable words.  A great resource to use for this is REWARDS.  Also, be sure that he is reading as fluently as possible.  I'd require him to read aloud for 20-30 minutes (sustained) each day.  Start with material well under his (reading) grade level and gradually work your way up.  In a perfect world, he should be able to read aloud fluently at a high school level at about 150 words or higher per minute.

 

As for what to do when you get to high school--

 

For English:  I chose works that I though my son would enjoy.  I read about half of the longer works aloud each year and all of the shorter works (short stories, poems, etc).  We discussed as I read.  If I had it to do over again, I'd use something very concrete and systematic for writing.  I don't think that WWS would have worked for my son because of the lack of an obvious big picture.  For spelling, AAS helped for some of the basic rules (and we actually used it in 8th grade--levels 1-4, I believe), but my son claims that using a word processor for all written work and seeing the corrections with the spellchecker is what helped the most.  His handwriting was helped a lot by HWT, but we worked on that in 4th grade.  It got better again around age 15 probably due to maturity. 

 

In addition to literary works, I had him read supplemental, usually nonfiction, books for other subjects as well.  This really helped improve his reading probably more than anything he read for literature.

 

Another thing I'd recommend is if your son needs extended time for standardized testing that you get the documentation needed for the College Board/ACT people in place during 9th grade.  They require very specific testing and they like to see a documented history of disability.  The ACT people also like to see that the student has been granted the requested accommodations by someone more official than Mom, so if he has the opportunity to enroll in a school for a few courses that will give him an accommodations plan (this would be a 504 plan at a public school and might be called various things at a private school), that could be helpful.

 

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