Since he is still 4 years old, you might be able to get Birth to Five in your area to help prove educational impact. Birth To Five programs go under many different names but every state has a Birth To Five program. You would need to ask at your local health department what agency does develmental evaluations for children under age five in your area to find out the name of the program in your state.But even if they can't help him because he is about to turn 5, they might be able to give you the backing you need to prove to the school district that there is or will be educational impact and he requires services. Did you talk to the local school or the special education cooridinator for the school district? Often the individuals at the local school have no idea what all special education services can and will do but give their biased opinion anyway, to the detriment of private school and homeschool students who would otherwise qualify for services. Your best bet is to start with the special education cooridinator for the entire school district, don't even worry about the local school just yet. Submit a request, in writing, for an evaluation for services to the district SPED cooridinator. They usually have to respond to all requests within a certain time frame during the school year but I don't know if they do during the summer or if all requests during the summer roll forward to the beginning of the school year. But if they are required to provide services to all students, I would look up the specific law in your state and speak to the district until it is decided whether or not your child will receive services. Individual schools are notorious for giving false information about special education services to parents who ask about having their child evaluated but the child does not attend public school. Sometimes the individuals are simply misinformed themselves and other times they just think they are doing their school a financial favor by detering parents of children who do not attend public school from pursuing their child's legal right to services. Either way, it's just best to cut out all the middle men and deal with those who actually deal with these kinds of cases and know what they are talking about.

How does he do with other kids? Do the other kids understand him? Does he express frustration or anxiety from not being understood? Is there any way you could record him having a conversation with a neighbor or another parent to show the SLP that you don't think his speech progress is making the jump to spontaneous speech yet and what can be done about that? Does he ever have group therapy sessions with other children so the SLP can evaluate spontaneous speech? Does your son see a pediatrician or a family doctor? If it's a ped or a family doctor that sees lots of kids, that might be someone you can ask to listen to your son and see if they agree with the SLP that his speech is age appropriate. You could also ask for an evaluation by the SPED department of your local school district.

My 5.5yo son has apraxia and has been in therapy since he was almost 2 years old. The SLP is talking about graduating him in about 6 mos, probably around his 6th birthday. His errors are absolutely age appropriate now and he only falls back into old habits when he tries to talk too fast. We include a lot of speech work in teaching him how to read as well. He also corrects himself often when he hears himself struggle to get a sound correct. He will stop, slow down and go sound by sound in the word. Is your son doing any of these things? If my son weren't, I would be concerned about possible graduation as well. Is this a private SLP you are seeing? Is it possible that she thinks his issues are not severe enough to warrant private speech and speech at school and she believes he will be starting school in the fall? Can you ask the SLP or has she shown you her goals for him and how she assesses how he is doing moving toward those goals? We get a speech progress report 4 times a year that shows her current speech goals for our son, for example right now one of his goals is to produce s-blends with 90% accuracy, which is age appropriate for a 5 year old to make a few mistakes still with s-blends. Then each quarter, she puts a percentage score that represents his accuracy rating according to the speech assessment she gave him to get that percentage. Since our son has apraxia, when he meets one goal, she replaces that goal with another since his speech needed so much work in the beginning. And graduation isn't always the end of speech. Our son will probably graduate just after his 6th birthday but if his speech falls behind again, for example he turns 8yo and is still making 5yo speech mistakes, we can have him evaluated again and start speech again. If your son really is age appropriate right now but doesn't make age appropriate progress as he gets older, you can put him in speech again. And yes, if your son isn't intelligible to say, maybe a preschool teacher friend of yours or someone you know who works with preschoolers and kindergarteners daily, I would find a new SLP and get a second opinion.

They can continue to ice skate for fun if they really enjoy it. If they are truly gifted at ice skating and want to compete, opporunities to continue training will come and some sort of agreement can be worked out to keep it affordable. Just hanging around the rink and letting them skate for fun can bring those opportunites if a coach happens to see them skate and sees talent. Personally, I would just pay for lessons for as long as they are affordable and if they want to keep skating, let them skate for fun after that. If it does become a thing for them, let the opportunities come to them.

Exactly. I wasn't worried at all about the dress code. I thought it was extreme but it was their party so to speak so whatever. Being that it was a military community, there were more than a couple families where the mom was the service member and dad was the one that homeschooled the kids. These homeschool dads were not welcome at homeschool swim day and they were turned away on more than one occaision. Under the guise of protecting the little boys in the locker room. I really didn't want my boys exposed to the idea that they were somehow guilty of something just based on gender nor did I want my girls to think that all men are peeping toms or worse based on gender.

Having dealt with this type of uber exclusive, statement of faith type homeschool group in the deep south myself when we lived in the deep south, another thing that comes to mind is the dress code mentioned by 'it's my party' girl. The homeschool group I dealt with used to organize homeschool pool days with a dress code. They would never, ever take their children to the pool on public swim days because of the swimwear other people wore, so on their homeschool swim days, there was a dress code. Boys had to were long board short type swim trunks and a non-white, loose fitting top. Girls had to wear swim dresses that reached at least to the knees and was not form fitting. And fathers were not welcome on homeschool swim day 'for the other children's safety'... needless to say we did not attend their swim day, which they claimed was open to all homeschoolers not just their members, and opted to just go to the pool on public swim days in our normal swim attire.

I think you are talking about Dragonbox Numbers? The C-rods-like characters in the game are called Nooms? I would highly recommend both Dragonbox Numbers and Dragonbox Big Numbers for a 4yo. Oh and Todo Math would be great app for them as well. The Amazon App store has an app called "Phonics Fun On Farm" that is really good for reading.

A good place to start would be MommySpeechTherapy.com and SuperStarSpeech.com. Most therapy offices in our area will do a free evaluation to see if your child even needs services. If they don't do free evaluations in your area, the school district SPED services definitely will do it for free. All you have to do is submit a request for an evaluation to the SPED coordinator for the school district. It could be helpful to have a professional tell you exactly what it is that is making your child's speech hard to understand. At least then you have a better idea of how to help them if you know what you are dealing with. I know my youngest son's SLP, which he sees on an IEP through the schools even though we homeschool, takes on clients just through the summer to bridge the gap for her income wise and to help the kids she works with during the school year keep up and not backslide over the summer. She bills our insurance for it but she also does sliding scale fees for those that would have to pay out of pocket. I'm not sure how much she charges but I know she has a full schedule all summer and more kids apply than she has slots for so I can't imagine it is too unreasonable. Even if you only do a summer session, an SLP can help narrow down the speech issue your child has and give you lots of ideas for working with them at home or after summer therapy ends. Well worth the time and any money spent on it IMO.

Much the same as HomeAgain, I'm unsure how to answer because most of the changes are not visible to the naked eye. I'm much more confident teaching my 6th kindergartener this year than I was with my first kindergartener 15 years ago. I am able to more freely pick and choose what parts of a curriculum to use and what parts to skip without worrying that I am "doing it right". I worry far less about making sure my 6th child is "socialized" because I worry less what other people (including family members) think in general now that I'm older and wiser. Our schooling in general looks more like a homeschool now and less like school at home. My expectations of what school should look like is probably the most dramatic and noticeable change to an outsider

"First Grade Instructional Level" is rather ambiguous. Some first graders are still struggling to read BOB books while others are reading Frog and Toad books and still others are reading Charlotte's Web. Any of those could be Instructional Level books, it just depends on the child and where they are in the process of learning to read. Bob Books could be instructional level if the child is still learning to sound out CVC words. If a child can comfortably sound out CVC words and is working on learning blends, BOB books would be "At Level" most likely because they should be able to read them comfortably but not fluently. If they can read a BOB book fluently then they would be "Below Level". Nora Gaydos readers and the I See Sam books would be about the same level as BOB books. You could Google for "CVC beginner readers" and get tons of printable beginner reader options.

Instructional level would books that they can read but need help with some of the words. Instructional level books have phonics concepts they may not have encountered yet or have only learned very recently. At level books would be ones that they should be able to read on their own without too much difficulty and practice the phonics concepts they are currently working on. Below level would be books that they can read easily for enjoyment or fluency practice and books that are far too easy for for them. These books have only phonics concepts that they have already learned and practiced for a while so they can easily read them for information or enjoyment without constantly stumbling over words they have to decode.

I also have several email accounts but I use an email software that allows me to check all of them in one place. I can filter the emails by email address so that I don't even have to look at all the emails from the "subscribe to my emails to get your freebie" type of emails if I don't want to. I use Mailbird which I paid for the lifetime membership a long time ago. But something like Thunderbird or even Outlook would work too.

My 5yo has his own tower pc that is his computer. He can watch shows on it and it has a few games for him so far. Honestly though he prefers to play games on the tablet. The tower we have for him is an old hand-me-down tower that a friend of dh's gave us because they got a new one. The hardware is a bit dated of course, after all it is more than 5 years old, but it does what we need it to do. Netflix, VLC, TuxPaint and older PC games all work great on it. The monitor was $15 from a thrift store and works perfectly. The mouse and keyboard were less than $20 put together at back to school sales. We've had it since he was 3yo and it is still running strong. I have it set up so that he cannot do too much damage. His account is child locked with parental controls which makes it a pain sometimes when I need to install something but at least I know he can't accidentally install something somehow. Most newer kids games are tablet or cloud based. You download and install so I guess in theory a chromebook could work. We don't have continuous access to internet so a chromebook hasn't been something that we have ever seriously considered, especially when a tower is so much cheaper and more versatile in terms of what it can and can't do. But if you have continuous access to internet and don't mind sticking to what can be played online or is in the app store, a chromebook could work for you.

We do the same. In a fireproof document safe actually. Only taken out to present it to whatever entity needs to see it and then put back in the safe immediately when we get home. You can pick up the document safes for a reasonable price ($40 or less) at most home improvement stores or walmart type stores. They usually come with two keys. One is kept on the same ring as the car keys (unlikely to lose those) and the other is stored somewhere near the safe. SS cards are a pain to replace. I agree with talking to someone above the person at the counter at both the DMV and the SSA. Explain the situation, ask them how you can fulfill the requirement when the typical documents are not available. We had to talk to supervisors at both the DMV and the SSA and then get them to talk to each other on the phone before we could get IDs replaced when we had to do it. It was a pain in the behind but we were able to do it and now we have a fire safe to prevent having to do it again. ;-)

A severe panic attack can mimic many things, including a partial seizure. A competent psychiatric doctor or nurse would be able to prescribe anti-anxiety meds and an anti-epileptic med if they deemed it necessary or worth trying. My dh has partial seizures in his sleep but is not epileptic. He has tried several anti-seizure medications but he had horrible reactions to them. Since the seizures aren't life threatening in his case, we just do sleep studies to monitor them and just live with it. I was thinking a lot about this post last night and how I would handle the situation... as much as I wouldn't want my daughters (or my sons for that matter) to be in a relationship where the other person seemed to be a burden rather than a partner to them, I also remember being a teenager and have teenage and young adult children of my own. I doubt trying to separate them is going to cause anything but rebellion and cause them to try to continue seeing each other behind my back. I would rather be able to openly monitor the situation than have them try to hide it. Sure, there are some very dangerous aspects of this relationship but I would rather know about it than worry about my child hiding it from me because they know I disapprove. I cannot help them navigate these troubled waters if they won't listen to me because they think I'm just trying to drive them apart.

I just wanted to echo that SSRIs can be wonderful and very helpful for anxiety if it is the right medication for that particular person. That's why there are so many different ones available, there isn't one type that works for everyone and it can take the better part of a year or longer sometimes to find the right depression/anxiety medication for any given individual. I had to try 4 different SSRIs before we found the one that works best for me. Each time it was a couple of months of trying it to see if it worked. We finally tried an SNRI and that was actually what worked best for me but it still wasn't quite enough to quiet the anxiety to a more tolerable level. So now I am three weeks into trying another medication on top of the SNRI which seems to be helping but I'm still waiting to get in with a new therapist. Which brings me to my next point, I have found it rare that you can just walk into a therapist clinic and be seen immediately even when you are having frequent panic attacks that hinder having a normal life. At best, it's at least 2-3 weeks before you can do the intake and then another week at least before you start therapy. The worst I've seen was when we lived in a large city and there was only one therapy place that accepted our insurance, and sadly most people in the area had the same insurance. It was 8 weeks to get an intake appointment and once that was done, you could typically only get an appointment every 4 - 6 weeks with your therapist. And all this assumes that you aren't also fighting against your insurance to get them to cover mental health benefits like they say they will. Then you just have to hope that the therapist is a good fit for you otherwise you get to start this process all over again. Sigh. As a child of divorce and a divorcee myself I understand the absurdity of it all from the inside and how it looks from the outside looking in. The 'good news', if you can call it that, is that he is almost 17. It is unlikely that any judge is going to change custody when he is so close to legal age unless there is gross negligence or abuse. Homeschooling a high school age child is unlikely to convince a judge of that. Also, at his age, his opinion of where he wants to live will be taken far more seriously. There are always curve ball cases where a crazy parent has way more pull in court than they should and stupid things happen, trust me I have been there, done that, been told I should write a book about it. But on the whole, I think it's pretty unlikely that the court stuff in your daughter's bf's case will be anything more than a waste of time and money for his parents to pick at each other some more.

We have the HP Envy 4520 printer as well and the HP Instant Ink plan. Love, love, LOVE it! It prints very well for most things. Pictures print well but not portrait quality but I wasn't looking for a photo printer nor is this printer marketed as a photo printer so I'm fine with that. It can duplex print which is awesome and has settings to print things like primary lined paper or graph paper directly from the printer touch screen. We paid $65 for the printer itself on Amazon. The Instant Ink program is what sold me on this printer. I did the math and paying $10 a month for ink was less than what I was spending on cartridges per year so it works out well for us. We've gone over our allotted page count once or twice and it has never been more than a couple extra dollars for more pages. If you consistently print significantly more than 300 pages per month, you probably want to look at a laser printer anyways. We always have ink so we never worry about printing in color anymore, even super colorful full page graphics. It doesn't matter if a page is full color or b&w, it still counts as one page against your page count so we just print what we want and know that we always have ink when we need it. Oh and you can still use store bought cartridges if you want to and they do not count against your page count. So that's an option if you want to print a huge job and not use up all your Instant Ink but I honestly find it cheaper to pay a couple of extra dollars for extra pages in a month when we need to. Cheaper than a set of cartridges and cheaper than paying per page at any of the local copy stores. And the Instant Ink cartridges are huge. Even printing everything we want and more, it takes a while to go through the Instant Ink cartridges, they are larger than even the XL cartridges at the store.

Audiobooks in the car, during quiet time, and any other time I can squeeze them in. I never saw anywhere in the homeschool rule book that said I always had to be the one reading aloud for it to count, lol. My voice tends to give out when reading aloud frequently so mixing in audiobooks whenever I could find a reader that we all liked was a life saver. We also do/did read alouds and/or audiobooks during meals, during bath time, while painting, coloring or drawing, while building with legos, while playing with train tracks, on nice days we would all go lay out on the trampoline and I would read while they laid on the trampoline with me or played quietly near the trampoline. In the summer, it wasn't unusual for all their friends to be sitting listening to our current read aloud as well. It's one of my favorite homeschooling memories of when my big kids (older teens and adults now) were late elementary and early middle school age.

I think there is a huge difference between early academics and early learning. You cannot stop a child from learning and providing an environment that allows a child to explore their interests and understand their world is NOT the same as early academics. Exposing a preschooler to letter sounds and blending exercises is NOT the same thing as setting an unrealistic expectation that all children will read by the time they reach first grade and therefore causing damage to a child's self-esteem and natural curiosity. Exploring numbers and number relationships through play is NOT the same thing as drilling math facts. I believe you can do damage with forced early academics but you cannot stop early learning. Aiding a curious or precocious child eager to learn about the world around them is never a bad thing. Forcing an uninterested child to do lessons they are not developmentally ready for is almost certainly going to end in disaster or, at the very least, produce undesirable results that are likely the opposite of the intended result. Listen to your young children's cues, if they are dying to do more, feed their interest. If they balk or frustrate easily, they probably aren't ready for the material and it should be shelved for a while. Out of my six children, only two were ready for academic work before the age of 6 and even then it was never a requirement before age 6. If they were not interested in academics on a given day, I didn't force it. Even if they lost interest half way through a lesson. Just because only two of my six kids were ready for academic work before age six doesn't mean that all we did was play all day with no learning. We still read books, played games that worked on different skills, watched videos that introduced facts about all kinds of things and explored the world around us. At the end of the day, you know your children better than any "expert". Follow your instincts and take expert advice with a grain of salt and you and your children will be fine.

I definitely agree with most of the above posters that it is unrealistic to expect most six year olds to write much of anything on their own with out a model to copy or some kind of word wall. Even then, some children will artificially limit the vocabulary they use to just the words they can find on the word wall. By refusing to misspell a word, he is actually doing himself a favor. Instead of using a multi-sensory approach to possibly imprint a wrong spelling, he is asking for multi-sensory input to imprint a correct spelling. That is a good thing and will make things easier for both of you in the long run. Is he a prolific writer? Does he spend tons of time everyday wanting to write on his own? Is this creative writing or narrations for school work? When my oldest three kids were little, I would write out their narrations, school related or just for fun when they wanted to write, on a piece of paper and they would happily copy it on their sheet. It didn't take but a few minutes. As they got older, they would just ask for a list of words they were unsure about or use the book they were narrating from for reference. By they time they were between 8 - 10, I wasn't writing out entire narrations very often anymore. They had gained the confidence to write independently for the most part. It can seem like you are spending an inordinate amount of time spelling for him now, but it is time very well spent in these early years and will pay you back tenfold over the long haul. This time is brief even if the days are long. I have absolutely no experience with Alexa but can it differentiate homophones? New or knew? There, their or they're? Weigh, way or whey? I used those teachable moments a lot with my kids when they would ask how to spell and I would be afraid those moments would be lost when asking a computer of any kind to spell for them.

I could see this being helpful for the students with severe anxiety or spectrum disorders situations too. I would like to see it done with parent involvement so that these parents learn how best to help their child. But that didn't seem to be the types of situations the article was talking about at all. It seemed to be more focused on 'organic juice and sailing club parents' as a previous poster put it. The type that push their children from a young age to excel so they can get a name brand college education on scholarship. I do realize there are situations where the parent-child relationship is so broken that the child is better off relying on a third party for the things a parent should be giving them. My relationships with my parents were like that. But my parents didn't really have the money to spend on such a thing, even if it had existed when I was a teenager, and they were too prideful to admit their own shortcomings as parents to even consider it. So the exact type of child who could really use such a service is unlikely to have access to it. Like I said, my previous post was my first thoughts on the article based on the type of child described in the article. They didn't seem to be the type of children who were born with differences that need to be mitigated or raised in a home where parents do not know how to support their child. The children described in the article seemed to be children of upper middle class and above whose parents just outsource that which is inconvenient for them to deal with. I feel sorry for these children because not only are they not getting the chance to have a normal parent-child relationship but they are also getting the idea that it is normal to need a professional to help with things like this. When they have children of their own, they are likely to think that they too need a professional to help them cope with school stress because in their experience, that is normal. Only a few, in my experience, will realize that they are perfectly capable of parenting their children and they do not have to outsource it.

A five year old, especially one who is trying to please a bully, does not get to make these kinds of decisions. I'm normally one for giving kids a say as well but she obviously doesn't understand she is being manipulated by this girl and her clique. Add to that an apathetic school counselor and an abusive principal, (confronting a bully and victim together? keeping you from leaving? Who does those things?) I would be telling my child, 'I'm sorry you are disappointed with my decision but sometimes as your mommy I have to make choices to keep you safe that you won't agree with. I not trying to be mean, I love you very much and sometimes that means I have to choose keeping you safe over letting you have what you want or go places where people don't have your best interests at heart. Now, what should we do first in our new homeschool adventure?'

If she can color say a color by number picture the right colors as prescribed by the instructions, what she does in her coloring pages or her own drawings is her choice, imo. Dyslexics don't usually present with oddly colored pictures. And age seven, though on the later end of the spectrum, is still normal for picking up reading. When taught sight words, mixing up visually similar words like on and no is normal. I'd be more concerned if she was mixing up non- visually similar words like the & and.

My first thought was how sad for those kids, their parents are paying others to help their kids learn how to organize their time, do well in school and be their cheerleader and support system to keep their spirits up when they are stressed. I mean at least they are making sure that their child's needs are met but I just cannot imagine paying someone else to parent my child in that way.

If I read your signature right, you've homeschooled a whole year, with no more than 2 - 3 days off since the baby was 2 months old. I'm going to hazard a guess that you started in June because you took April and May off last year for the new baby. It is more than ok to just take a break already! When my 5th child was a baby and I was homeschooling similar ages as you, we were on a 6 weeks on 1 week off schedule. That week off every six weeks was what kept my sanity with 5 kids under 10yo in the house 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! I can't imagine only getting enough time off to catch my breath a little and keep chugging. It's time to recharge your batteries before you run dry! And I would have to agree that math books being finished is absolutely negotiable, especially in first grade. You will cover it all again in the beginning of second grade. And the beginning of third grade. It may be a little more iffy for the 4th grader since there is less overlap year to year by that point but you could always just do a few pages of math each week over your break or just pick up where you left off next year before moving on to the next book. There is no penalty from the homeschool police for not finishing a given school book in 9 months time. ;) We moved across the country when I was 8yo and in second grade. It was April when we had to move and by the time we got to where we were going, found a new house and got settled in, there was only about 4 weeks of school left. The schools even told my parents there was no point in enrolling so close to the end of the year and just enroll me for third grade the next year. So I got a 5 month summer break that year. I suffered no ill effects from taking an extended break and not finishing 2nd grade, lol! I was still in the accelerated class even without missing a beat.