I think that's just her poor reading fluency you're seeing. She's not without her problems but none of the autism symptoms have ever fit her.

I've heard it variously described as Orton-Gillingham "plus"? Reading their website and talking to the center director, my personal take is that they just want to use their own language/descriptions so that they sound like they have some secret sauce. Hearing what they actually do, it sounds very similar to her current O.G. tutoring.

Yeah, I've heard that. It's a downside and arguably over-priced. 😞 I guess the counter-point is supposed to be that they're swapping out teachers every hour (so she'd have 4 shots at a different teacher), and that's is highly scripted and that the teachers are all being monitored and supervised in the center. I also think frankly that it would be good for her to get out and work with other people.... being an only child stuck at home right now is pretty isolating.

Thanks again for all your replies and suggestions. Thinking it over, I agree a singular, integrated program would be the best. We are admittedly coming from a public school perspective where she would be doing tutoring outside of school, so running on two separate tracks didn’t initially strike as incongruous, but with the shut-down, it really is a missed opportunity to not take just one cohesive approach. It now does appears that the Lindamood Bell in our area is offering in-person instruction. I called them up and think this might be the type of approach we’re looking for. Since we did un-enroll her from school, we really do want to remediate as much as we can. And if she went to Lindamood Bell in the morning, then she could come home, and we’d only have to worry about a little math and some fun activities. That’s a huge bonus for us as working parents. In hindsight, if we had discovered Barton a year ago, and just went with that (instead of listening to reassurances from her first-grade teacher, grumble grumble….), that admittedly sounds like a great singular option. On what she should be reading, here is her reading Magic Treehouse with me. This is one a first go. I mean, obviously she does have dyslexia, and I’m not under the impression she’s knocking it out of the park, but would you say this book is above her level? It might not be clear from the video, but I do jump in to check any mistakes, so unless I was saying something, she was reading accurately. FullSizeRender.mov

Thanks for all the responses. Lots to think about and still digesting! One of the biggest problems is that her O.G. tutoring – which should be the cornerstone of her remediation – is not going well at all. It’s all virtual, which is horrible for her ADHD-Inattentive. But everything is still very shut down in our area (public schools all 100% virtual), so finding an in-person, certified O.G. tutor isn’t likely, at least in the near-term. (It is definitely our plan long-term.) I am reluctant to take on this main task myself because I am also working from home full-time. We are trying to do a lot, and certainly I don’t want to work at cross-purposes with her tutor. I told her tutor in August about our homeschooling, and she had no suggestions/comments. I sent her and her supervisor her neuro-psych report, requesting to discuss, including implications for the tutoring and our home-schooling, and no response yet. Sigh. It is a good program – a highly regarded organization and program in our area – but I have the sense they want to do “their program,” rather than collaborate with us. Much more typical is that their students are, in addition to the tutoring, also enrolled in a separate full-time school. So we are really an anomaly here due to Covid. For what it’s worth, my daughter has taken well to AAS, at least so far. Dancing Bears (we are still on Book A) did seem to fill in important gaps with things like vowel teams and r-controlled vowel. At the rate her tutor is going, I don’t see her covering those until 1-2 years out. I do agree that subsequent books might be too much for her and that she will need more basic, repetitive fluency practice. My initial purpose in using Dancing Bears was to provide some basic decoding and fluency practice. It seems tricky, on the one hand, my daughter does need intervention . . .. but on the other hand, she isn’t reading at ground-zero, and does seem to be picking up concepts. Much of her poor accuracy I attribute to her vision tracking and inattention. We’re “plowing” through Magic Treehouse because she loves the series, I didn’t mean the word negatively! Any word she needed help sounding out I circle – and in the last couple books, on average she needed help with only a few words in each chapter. Her errors are generally things like leaving out words, reading words in the wrong order, or saying the wrong word (which, when prompted, she is able to correct, without further explicit direction/instruction). I'm thinking the last type of error relates to her poor RAN--she knows the word, but can't rapidly/automatically retrieve it. The series might be technically above her reading level, but with tracking scaffolding it doesn’t seem frustratingly difficult.

Thanks, is the thought that actual writing would be too much for her? That's what confuses me regarding my expectations -- on her testing, she was at or even a smidge 'above' 'grade level' on any writing measures. She wasn't diagnosed with dysgraphia. So with scaffolding for spelling and organization, and in the context of one of one home-school instruction, wouldn't sentences and up to a paragraph be appropriate?

Hi, New to these forums, but was hoping I could dive in now that we officially know what’s going on with our daughter. We just received the results from her neuro-psych exam in September. She’s 7.5, second grade. Diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD-Inattention. Over the summer, she was also diagnosed with a developmental vision problem (tracking), for which she’s been receiving vision therapy. We already started O.G. tutoring over the summer, and will continue to do that 5x a week. The psychologist was light, however, on any recommendations specific/tailored to my daughter’s individual profile. Any advice/recommendations here? More specifically, we’re home schooling this year, so in addition to O.G. tutoring, we’re currently using: 1) All About Spelling (currently at Level 2), 2) Lexia Core (currently on grade-level for those activities), and 3) Dancing Bears. She has started some typing activities, and are planning to start Touch-type Read & Spell. We read two hours a day; recently, I’ve been trying to do a roughly equal mix of Dancing Bears, “on level” oral reading (currently plowing through the Magic Treehouse series), and higher-level, children’s classics that I read to her (such as A Secret Garden, the Narnia series, etc.). While she doesn’t seem to struggle with understanding grade-level grammatical concepts or parts of speech (she can do grade-level worksheets just fine), she struggles with generating writing (not physically, more substantively). So far I’ve been focusing on sentence-level work, and heavy scaffolding for idea generation, organization, and outlining. Do these seem like the right things to be doing? Her reading accuracy is her lowest score, so I was thinking about working in some type of fluency/timed drills? Would that make sense? We chose to homeschool this year so that we could remediate as much as possible while we have the opportunity. Our jobs will not have the same work-at-home flexibility when Covid is “over,” meaning we’ll have to send her back to public school, where she’s unlikely to get remediation. (Though we will certainly fight for accommodations.) Also, on math, it was also concerning that her timed math fluency was so low. Have others been able to improve these figures with flash cards, drills, etc.? She seems to have real math potential so I’d hate for her to get bogged down by this. We are also following up with a psychiatrist regarding medication and behavioral therapy. Thank you in advance for any advice! Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children– Fifth Edition (WISC-V) Verbal Comprehension (VCI) 124 95% 114-130 Very High Visual Spatial (VSI) 129 97% 119-134 Very High Fluid Reasoning Index (FRI) 123 94% 114-129 Very High Working Memory (WMI) 88 21% 81-97 Low Average Processing Speed (PSI) 111 77% 101-119 High Average FULL SCALE (FSIQ) 120 91% 114-125 Very High GENERAL ABILITY (GAI) 127 96% 120-132 Very High COGNITIVE PROFICIENCY (CPI) 100 50% 93-107 Average Wechsler Individual Achievement Test – Third Edition (WIAT-III) Basic Reading 86 N/A 18% Below Average Word Reading 97 2.0 (GE) 42% Average Pseudoword Decoding 76 < 1.0 (GE) 5% Poor Reading Comprehension 105 2.7 (GE) 63% Average Sentence Composition 105 2.9 (GE) 63% Average Sentence Combining 112 N/A 79% Above Average Sentence Building 98 N/A 45% Average Spelling 109 3.1 (GE) 73% Average Mathematics 142 N/A > 99% Very Superior Numerical Operations 158 4.5 (GE) > 99.9% Very Superior Math Problem Solving 122 3.4 (GE) 93% Superior Math Fluency 90 N/A 25% Average Addition 92 1.8 (GE) 30 Average Subtraction 91 1.7 (GE) 27 Average Test of Word Reading Efficiency, Second Edition – Form A Sight Word Efficiency 100 50% 2.0 (GE) Average Phonetic Decoding Efficiency 84 14% 1.2 (GE) Below Average Total Word Reading Efficiency 92 30% N/A Average Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, Second Edition (CTOPP-2) Phonological Awareness 94 35% Average Rapid Naming 67 1% Very Poor Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing Subtests (CTOPP-2) Elision 7 16% Blending Words 13 84% Phoneme Isolation 7 16% Rapid Digit Naming 4 2% Rapid Letter Naming 5 5% Test of Orthographic Competence (TOC) Signs and Symbols 11 63% Average Grapheme Matching 14 91% Above Average Homophone Choice 9 37% Average Punctuation 9 37% Average Orthographic Ability SS = 105 63% Average Gray Oral Reading Tests (GORT- 5); Form A Rate 9 37% 2.0 (GE) Average Accuracy 8 25% 1.2 (GE) Average Fluency Score 8 25% 1.7 (GE) Average Comprehension Score 10 50% 2.2 (GE) Average Oral Reading Quotient SS = 94 34% N/A Average

Just to chime in on AAS: it doesn’t require worksheets. Each lesson is a new phoneme and/or spelling rule. You tap or clap phonemes or syllables, spell with tiles, then spell with paper. Not exciting, but the tiles/multi-sensory can be good for younger learners. If you kids take to the phonic and rule based method, it could be a simple and efficient method. If they are going to require more reinforcement, yes, it definitely can get tedious, and it doesn’t include any fun bells and whistles.