Thanks, Pam. Very thought-provoking read.

Teaching to mastery means being able to get the concept correct. You choose a criteria. Personally I use 90% as the criteria before moving on AND I come back and review. Others use 80%. However, that does NOT count errors of other issues that are not math. The way that I would handle the other types of errors is to have her redo the problem Transposing numbers or miscopying problems are NOT part of the mastery of the MATH. (And actually, in the public schools, I would expect the same accomodations to be made for a child with those problems, just as spelling is not counted off except in spelling for a child with dyslexia or dysgraphia.) Once she has redone the problem, I'd then count it in the total score. Saxon is a really hard program to work towards mastery in, though, because there are so few problems of each kind. The issue of transposing, miscopying, etc. are separate issues and when you're ready, you can handle them. If she has vision difficulties or attention issues, then you would tailor the approach to what was causing the issues. Also, just using graph paper for the math might help. For now, as a starting place, I'd circle the problems where she has miscopied and give her several seconds to see if she can see her error. If she can, great. You're working on her self-monitoring skills. If she can't, point it out, and have her redo the math part.

You certainly describe a cluster of problems. The difficulty with gross motor skills, fine motor skills, high decoding in reading compared to much lower comprehension, poor spatial relations (the messy room), and distractibility could have several explanations. Does your son have any social difficulties? Difficulties with transitions? Rigidity? One possibility if the social issues are present is nonverbal learning disability (caution: do not read Rourke's site if you go googling. It's needlessly negative). That would cover everything you mentioned, but it could also be a combination of other things. Like Claire and Kathy, I would suggest an occupational therapy evaluation. They can evaluate the problems with balance, coordination, and fine and gross motor skills. They will not make any diagnoses other than in their field. (ie you already know there are balance, fine, and gross motor problems. They will tell you that. However, they will also treat those problems.) The neurological system is very interwoven, so treating those issues can impact academic issues as well, even though you don't think of them as directly related. You could also be looking at auditory processing skills (has this been evaluated or just suspected?) A good neuropyschological eval would include a WISC IV that would tell you if there are disparities between verbal IQ and the rest of the IQ substests. A neuropsychologist is also qualified to make the diagnosis of ADD, which could also account for the distractibility. Below, I posted a link to a series of articles on attention that were on Mel Levine's site. You might find a suggestion for working with your son's distractibility in those articles.

They often do do a speech and language evaluation if there are problems with reading and writing.

Here is the url for Mel Levine's site, A Mind at a Time. You can also subscribe to email updates. I always learn something. http://www.allkindsofminds.org/LearningBaseCategory.aspx?categoryID=4

Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) is all about taking the "I don't know what to write about" out of writing and focusing on structure and style. It is step-by-step. That part may appeal to your son as well. Personally, I don't like the style part, but have been able to adjust it.

Our OT experience was similar to Claire's with regard to the brushing (that would help with the tactile defensiveness) and the exercise with the mouth for food sensitivities. OUrs didn't do the taste thing, but that might have helped.

Thanks, Everyone. I'll check out those shampoos. I am using a clarifying shampoo, but not those brands. I'll look around for them. I was afraid someone would tell me I need a swim cap. I hate them. :(

I've recently started taking my kiddos swimming and using the time of their lessons to get some exercise myself. I really enjoy it, but the chlorine is killing my hair. I've tried wetting it, and working in conditioner and leaving the conditioner in before going in the pool, but the chlorine still penetrates my hair. I have porous hair anyway (can't do a temporary color rinse--it never washes out), so the problem may be even worse for my hair than normal hair. What have you tried that has worked?

"Compensation is not remediation." Great point! Michelle, I wonder what would happen if you were to ask your speech-language therapist to work with your son without the compensating strategies--to just have him rely on his auditory processing, and then see what she thinks. You could couch it in the language of "Now that he's met his goals with the visual aids to help him compensate, I'd like you to take him to the next step of functioning without the visual aids."

Thanks, Nancy. My big question about Neuronet is the emphasis on the auditory side, since it seems like my son is ok in that area. (Again, no testing done.) I think his SID is substantially remediated, but it's still there. There were huge improvements the first time we did OT, so much so that I thought things were close to normal, except for the difficulty with handwriting. I've emailed Nancy Rowe. I'll see what she says. Thanks for the suggestions about what order to do things in. Learning Rx in our area is $3000-10,000. It's 3,000 for the 12 wk. course without Mastering the Code and with one visit per week, $5000 for the same and two visits per week. You get up to $10,000 for Learning Rx plus Mastering the Code together twice per week.

Thanks very much! What is Nancy Rowe's background? How old is your son? Does your son have similar issues to mine? How much does it cost?

A new neruopsych eval we got for our ds has propelled me into pursuing means in addition to OT to help remediate his visual perceptual and motor skills. He has issues with the vestibular system , bilaterality, & fine and gross motor skills. Visual perception and active working memory are also relative problems, but not as much as the others. He has problems with distractibility and impulsivity in school work or clinical settings. (I don't really see impulsivity any more in social situations or judgment). Has sensory integration issues, too. Whew. Too many dys-es as one of my friends put it! He may be ADHD, but the clinician couldn't be sure because of the other stuff. We may do a trial of meds to see if that helps. My current plan is to pursue vision therapy to see if we can refine the improvement in eye movement that we got during our first course of OT. From what I remember reading here, it's preferable to get the eye movement stuff taken care of before moving on to cognitive skills training. There is an IM provider who is nearby and is also a highly regarded OT. (Would mean switching from current OT) Don't know about Neuronet providers yet. There is a Learning Rx provider an hour away. I had originally just thought I'd do vision therapy followed by Learning Rx, but now am wondering if I should do IM and/or Neuronet in the meantime. I've never had any auditory processing testing done, though I haven't observed anything that would lead me to believe it's a problem.

It is not too late. If it's dyslexia, even adult dyslexics can be remediated with proper methods. A child of nine still has tons of plasticity in the brain. You're wise to pursue the testing. Why do you have to wait months, though? Is there only one provider in your area? About curriculum: honestly, there are only one or two methods that work for kids with reading issues, and they are much closer together than they are apart. 80% of kids learn to read no matter how you teach them. The other 20% need specific phonemic instruction and phonics. The other 80% will learn this way too. So why isn't all instruction done this way? No clue. ( I just visited a school this week with a child I tutor and the whole classroom was whole language. The little bit of phonics the teacher was doing was being done incorrectly.) Even if a child has suspected difficulties with visual issues, there still should be research-based instruction. Hopefully, I've linked a site (first try on the new format with linking) that has an excellent online publication on reading instruction. You can order a free hard copy as well. Get the teacher copy, not the parent one. http://www.nifl.gov/partnershipforreading/publications/reading_first1.html The advice you were given by the public school is still being given, despite overwhelming research that indicates that retention at any grade is associated with higher rates of dropping out, drugs, etc. by middle and high school. This is true even if it seems that it benefits the child the first year or two after retention. What works is to pass children and give them additional services to remediate the problem. Duh. You are not to blame for the poor advice given by people who are the "professionals." The homeschool community is just as guilty of promoting the misinformation about late bloomers. Statistically speaking, there ARE late bloomers, but it is a small percentage of the normal curve. The much more likely explanation for reading difficulties is dyslexia (about 20% of the population.) Homeschoolers continue to pass on the late-bloomer myth like it's common. A friend of mine who has taught 4th-5th grade for 30 years says that she has NEVER seen a child of that age suddenly "get it" when they've been struggling prior to that. It's rare. A lot of kids read late in homeschools because the parent pulls back on attempting to teach them, or switches methods willy nilly.

Kathy, Dysthymia is depression. Back when I was in practice, the two kinds of depression in the DSM III were Major Depression and dysthymia. Dysthymia is less intense, but tends to be more chronic.

It's a problem with word retrieval. We had a foster dd who was like that. It got her into trouble when she was older and there was an incident with CPS, because they thought she was lying, and it was trying to get the right word out. Anyway, with her, there were so many issues, that the language was just a tiny piece of it for her and we focused more on other things, and just waited patiently for the "secretary" in her brain to locate the correct "file. " I can't tell you more other than that it is a language problem, and a speech/language therapist would be the one to treat it. You can google " problems with word retrieval" and see what you come up with.

I think that dictation is likely to meet your child's needs better than a particular program. I've used both Shurley and FLL. Liked Shurley for teaching parts of speech, but not for language mechanics. I think FLL's strength is also parts of speech, though it is better on mechanics than Shurley, imo. I also liked the poetry memorization, etc. It might be a little young for an 11 year old. What I have done with my two ds's with dyslexia (one of whom is also ADHD and dysgraphic) is to dictate sentences that incorporate the spelling and language mechanics that we are working on. DIctation has an advantage over workbooks and programs in that the child is doing everything he will need to do in his own writing except thinking up the sentence. This accomplishes the generalization that is needed in a way that doing prepared exercises often does not. Additionally, as the mom, you can see where your child still needs work and where he can move on. A program can't do that. Dictation shouldn't be arduous. I dictate maybe 6-10 sentences a day for my 11 yo. They are as short as possible while including all his spelling words. First, the sentences I dictate are simple statements. I will work on the first letter being capitalized and a period at the end. Then, I begin to throw in some questions. The child needs to start to differentiate between a statement and a question. Later, some exclamations are added. Then items in a list, quotations, etc. Somewhere along the line, I learned a little trick for reminding kids to check that the first word is capitalized and the punctuation added. You say, "Tip tap," when they're done their sentence. The "tip" is a cue to touch the tip of their pencil to the end of the sentence to check for the end mark. The "tap" is a cue to touch their pencil to the beginning of the sentence to check for the capitalization. Kids like the sound of the phrase, and because you are not saying, "Check your endmark" that little added step of thinking about it helps them start checking on their own. Because I use the overteaching method (described on the old boards if you do a search), the repetition needed for retention is built in. Finally, I would teach keyboarding asap if you haven't already done so. I do all our dictation at the computer. This makes it so much easier for a child with dysgraphia. Additionally, I can think of very little writing nowadays that is not done on the computer.

We may disagree about the remedy part. I believe dyslexia can be remediated. Remediated dyslexics may retain some vestiges of the dyslexia (spelling issues and slow reading speed are the two most common) but most can be brought to a level near to, or at, their potential with the right remediation strategies. By far the most common issue underlying dyslexia is difficulty with phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the brain's ability to "get" that words are made up of individual sounds. It includes the ability to both blend and segment those sounds. Phonics is the overt teaching that this sound is reflected by this (or these) symbols. But if the brain doesn't get the individual sound part, the phonics part won't work well. "Overcoming Dyslexia" by Sally Shaywitz is an excellent compilation of the latest research. I highly recommend it. Reading Reflex works strongly with phonemic awareness, and is a program that is pretty easy for a parent to teach. The Sound Reading CD is an excellent complement to RR. I have used both. I have seen ABCDarian (sp) recommended on this board as another option using similar strategies. Another type of intervention is Orton-Gillingham types of interventions. The Wilson method, which I use in tutoring, is very strong on building phonemic awareness, in phonics, and in fluency. If your child can already read phonetically regular, single syllable short vowel words , including nonsense words like blant, shrump, glam then REWARDS secondary or intermediate is an excellent next step. It is critical to include repeated oral readings of the same passage in order to build fluency. Google "Put Reading First" and you'll find an excellent, free, online publication on the important components of teaching reading. Aside from remediating reading, yes, I do make efforts to build on my children's strengths. One of my dyslexic kids is very strong in math, and so I have accelerated him in that. The other has other "dys-es" that impede many more areas, but has an excellent auditory memory, amazing creativity, and a flair for drama. For him, I use a lot of books on tape, and give him a free rein with the creativity. We look for opportunities for him to participate in drama. This is really no different than what I do for my other two who are normal learners: we work to make sure they keep pace in areas that are relative weaknesses, and give them lots of opportunities with their strengths. Not all kids with dyslexia are visual-spatial learners. Have you had your child tested and do you know that for a fact? The child of a friend of mine is gifted this way, but not all dyslexics are. A smaller subset of kids with dyslexia also have visual issues which interfere with their reading. (Again, one of mine does, the other does not.) If there are visual issues with eye tracking, etc., then the visual-spatial intelligence will be negatively impacted and less developed than other parts of a child's brain. Right now, occupational therapy, vision therapy, and cognitive skills training are the available treatment options for kids with this component to their reading difficulties. One thing to be sure to allow lots of opportunity for is the development of social skills. Many dyslexics learn to compensate this way, and actually make up a very significant portion of entrepreneurs--much, much higher than their proportion of the population. Speculation is that they don't tend to be detail oriented and so trust the details to others (instead of the deadly micromanaging) and their excellent social skills are an advantage as well. So be sure to support and include lots of social interacting in your dyslexic child's education plan! HTH

Could you be more specific? Are you asking how to remediate dyslexia or something else?

I thought some of you might like to know more about REWARDS Plus. My ds had completed REWARDS intermediate, but needed more reinforcement, so I bought REWARDS Plus Science. REWARDS Plus Science (Social Studies is also available) is designed to follow either REWARDS intermediate or REWARDS secondary. However, it is not "more of the same" but a program with a different set of strengths and probable usefulness to a wider range of disabilities than REWARDS intermediate or secondary. The passages are at an 8th grade reading level, but because so much prereading is done, the authors say that the program can be used for a child on a 6th grade reading level or above. The greatest strength of the REWARDS intermediate and secondary (R-i or R-s) is the strategy taught for decoding multisyllabic words. I would rate fluency building as a secondary strength; however, it is not introduced until the end of either book, so there isn't enough of it. I purchased REWARDS Plus thinking I would get more lessons of the same type as are found at the end of REWARDS. There is that, but there is much more. In fact, I would say the strengths of REWARDS Plus are fluency, reading Comprehension & test-taking strategies, including writing short answer or essay questions. Application of REWARDs decoding appears to be a secondary strength of the program. A student who needed work on decoding skills should not start with the REWARDS Plus books. However, for a student with decent decoding skills (6th grade level), but difficulties in reading comprehension, REWARDS Plus seems like an excellent place to start. Because of this, it might be a good match for kids who have difficulty with active working memory (teaches several skills for noting info as you go along) , kids with nonverbal ld's (the verbal repetition of step by step strategies for comprehension and inference seems well matched) , and/or kids with a need for vocabulary development within a content area. Additionally, there is a decent expository writing component. REWARDS Plus is set up with 6 review lessons that assume that the student has completed a REWARDS course prior to REWARDS Plus. Those lessons are more abbreviated that the REWARDS lessons but do include reading sentences using the words decoded in the lesson. Following the review lessons are 15 application lessons. Each application lesson contains the following activities: A: Vocabulary lists (There are 3) Like the end of the R-i or R-s , the first part of the list are words that don't lend themselves quite as well to the strategy; these words are read to the student. The REWARDS decoding strategy is then applied to List 2 words. The meaning of each word is also covered, to build vocab. List 3 are words in word families. Going a bit beyond R-i or R-s, these are grouped into verbs, nouns, and adjectives, so energize, energy, energizer, energetic. B: Spelling dictation C. Passage reading and comprehension 1. Passage is previewed by reading title and headings. 2. The passage is broken into sections of 2 or more paragraphs each. A paragraph of the first section is read silently, then aloud. A comprehension question is asked. This process is repeated until the section is done. 3. After a section is completed, the student fills out an information web: a graphic organizer with fill in the blank "notes" from the reading. 4. After the information web is complete, the student uses the web to narrate the main points of the passage back to a partner or tutor. D: Fluency building: Done using 3 one-minute whisper readings prior to the reading aloud. Each reading is timed and the words per minute recorded. E. Comprehension questions: multiple choice (This walks kids through strategies for answering multiple choice questions) F. Vocabulary activity: This includes thought questions that incorporate vocab words. Eg Are all organisms predators? Why or why not? G. Expository writing: multiparagraph answer: Guides students through answering a comprehension question in essay form. Several steps are included. A rubric is included in the test for evaluating. It is a decent way to craft an essay. The thing that I think could use fleshing out is how to craft a topic sentence. H Comprehension: single paragraph answer This requires students to answer a "What if" question, crafting a hypothesis that extrapolates material they have just read. Eg. After reading about ecosystems, the What if question involved the impact of the humans in the ecosystem constructing a mall on the wooded edges of a city. ***** We will be focusing on the reading portions. I"m guessing that we will need 3 days per lesson just to get through all the reading activities. Ds generally gets comprehension fine and needs practice on the decoding strategies so that they become automatic and he doesn't slip back to using context clues and an initial peek at the word to guess. However, because I think the comprehension strategies are so well done, we'll do those so that he has some tools for material that is more difficult than the novels and history books he's been reading--such as textbook readings like the examples in the book. I'm not sure ds is at the point where he can do the expository writing. I may try it, skip it, or save it for later! Dunno yet. HTH others.

Chris, What a specialist has is experience with a method that works. Mothers can implement programs that work, but sometimes run into difficulties due to inexperience. Here are some pitfalls to avoid: 1) Not judging if adequate progress is being made. I see a lot of moms feel some progress is enough. What you want to see is your child closing the gap with her peers, not just moving along to the next step. 2) Jumping ship too fast. Moving from one method to another just because someone else is using method B successfully. There are a few methods with very good track records, but you've got to stick with them. 3) Both the above are related to lack of experience. You need to be able to interpret dd's MISTAKES to design the next day's lesson. This is not to focus on mistakes with dd, but the mistakes made show what the child is not getting. A good tutor uses mistakes to guide the next day's lesson. 4) Not teaching to automaticity. A good tutor will work with the child until the new thing being taught is automatic--the child no longer has to stop and think about it. Only then will the tutor add a new step. Sometimes you stay on something a long time, and when it comes "unstuck" it's like breaking a logjam. 5) Not incorporating fluency readings. One thing that can be ideal is to find a tutor who will work with you to train and supervise you as the parent. You can let the tutor do an assessment, and a few lessons while you watch, then pay for consultations as you move along. This saves money but gives you the benefit of that experience. Dyslexia simply means "difficulty with language" and specifically reading. It is not a specific diagnosis beyond that. The book Overcoming Dyslexia is a good compilation of research on overcoming dyslexia specifically, and just solid reading practices. Reading Reflex is a good program to start with. If that approach is going to work, you will usually see leaps of progress within a few months. I have read (though have no experience with it) that ABCDarian (sp?) spells things out well for parents and uses similar methodology. The Sound Reading CD is also excellent. A computer does phonemic awareness exercises with the child. You can watch and see how they're done and do them with letter tiles. I tutor with Wilson and I like that program a lot. It tends to move a bit slower than Reading Reflex, but for kids who do not get the leap with RR, it's what I would recommend. A parent could do it, but I think it would be hard to do it right without some training first, or oversight by a trained tutor. HTH

The message entitled "I think all moms of kids with special needs struggle with this" was supposed to go under the Taking Care of yourself" post elsewhere. I don't know how it got here. I don't even know if this post will go in the correct place.

Let's face it--all moms need a break, and our kids are more frustrated and frustrating than your run of the mill kid. Some things I do: Exercise. It's the best mood stabilizer there is. It's been shown in study after study to be as good as anti-depressant medication. (And I just read a news article this past weekend saying that studies that show that meds are NOT effective are hugely less likely to be published in journals than those that say that they ARE effective. This is an effect at the level of journals, not just an effect of the drug companies doing the research.) In addition to being as good as meds for depression, it's good for anger, anxiety, hormonal stuff, etc. I have found that the only way for me to consistently exercise is to do it with the kids. We take a "family walk" or hike in nice weather, and have been swimming now that it's winter. Support group: our church has a support group for moms of kids with special needs. Sharing with other moms is so helpful. We've found that even though our dc have widely varying diagnoses, our experience as moms with special needs kids is more similar than different. I struggle to get alone time because I homeschool multiple kids and work part-time. I probably need more R&R. I tend to use the computer to relax a bit, but I'm not sure that it's really rest or more like pseudo-rest.

Given that she was a late talker and is having trouble with reading, dyslexia seems very likely. You can get an eval from the school, as you indicate, for starters. That will keep your testing $$ down and will, at minimum, get you an IQ test, an achievement test, and possibly some others. You will want to write a letter to the person in charge of special needs (or it may be called exceptional children or something similar) and indicate that you think your child may have a learning disability and in what areas. I would mention all three areas: reading, written language, and math. Specify that you think she has problems with visual motor skills (that would be the written stuff) as well. That should get you a Beery VMI thrown in. Once the school is done, you can take those results to other private professionals and see if there are other tests that could help tease things out. Be sure to read Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz. It's a really good compilation of the latest research that is written in a way that is accessible for lay people. (She does say to leave teaching reading to the professionals, but you can skip that part!) One thing that is important to understand, is that the basis for most dyslexia is difficulty with phonemic awareness. That is a level deeper than phonics, and phonics won't "take" if phonemic awareness is weak. Phonemic awareness is the brain's ability to perceive that words are composed of individual sounds, to hear those sounds separately, and to blend a string of sounds into a word. If the brain isn't doing tho se things effeciently, and you bring phonics along, which says, "This sound is symbolized by this letter...or this one...or these two.." you can see where things break down. Reading Reflex is good at working on phonemic awareness. I tutor using the Wilson program, which has some wonderful methods for developing phonemic awareness as well. It's a little more complicated to learn, but I think do-able. In addition to the school eval, I would check out an occupational therapy evaluation for the difficulty in writing/making numbers, etc. Before making the appointment, read the book, The Out of Sync Child to see if you think your child might have sensory integration issues. They are common when the child has other issues, and resolving them can help tremendously with the other issues. If you think your child does have sensory processing issues, ask for an evaluation of that as well from the OT.

My ds, just diagnosed with ADHD, describes a similar phenomenon. He also has sensory processing issues, and some learning disabilities. I think what your child is describing is the difficulty keeping attention focused.