Mom of a child with dyslexia here. Question to clarify your example of letter switching. In the example you gave, your daughter is spelling the word closer to the way it sounds. (At least how I pronounce the word. I don't say the /ar/ as in car at the end of calendar, but rather the /er/ sound. And I prounouce the word with more of a short e sound "en" in the middle rather than an "an" sound also.) So...is she spelling phonetically correct for how she pronouces the word, or is she switching sounds within words? Some simple examples of switching sounds, spelling "spot" when intending to spell "stop" or "spilt" instead of "split". If she's spelling irregular words phonetically correct, that's different situation than missing or switching sounds within words.

You are a homeschooling mom. That makes you a teacher. :D Did the donor limit the use to only public school teachers? If not, present yourself not just as their mom, but as their teacher. If you have a HSLDA teacher identification card, it might help to show it. (I obtained a teacher discount at a book store simply by showing my HSLDA i.d.) I wouldn't push it if they don't consider you a teacher, but it might be worth trying. I think its really cool that they offer parents access to some free resources, even if there are some restrictions.

I know some who have bought their own laminator. That might be cheaper than having it done. I thought about buying a laminator but don't have much that I wanted to laminate. Instead, I used a product that I found in the paper and school supplies at Walmart that "self laminates" by sticking a clear -sticky coating around the item. Those laminating sheets comes in various sizes, but they can't be cut.

Welcome to the special world of special education!:seeya: I think I've learned at least as much as my son these past couple of years. We're suppose to be the teachers, but our children have lots to teach us too.

We have one wall covered with chalk board paint. Chalk board paint comes in a variety of colors--ours is a bright green. A friend put a coat of magnetic paint underneath her chalk board paint. Nukeswife--I love your room with Jamacan Sea and Empress Teal and the white trim. Beautiful!

Praying.

:iagree: That's my understanding too. Here's a weblink to some speech therapy products developed just for "R" called The Entire World of R http://www.sayitright.org/EntireWorldofR.html The op probably doesn't need to worry about it yet as her child is just 5 1/2, but she might want to check out that websight. There are also speech sound development charts with ranges of what's "normal" for letter sounds, like this http://www.talkingchild.com/speechchart.html. If she's still worried or if the problem persists, she can ask a speech therapist to evaluate her child. What I'm going to mention next I hope does not cause any worry, but just something to be aware of, just in case. My son also had problems pronouncing various letter sounds and he was very difficult to understand. The first speech therapist from the school district assured me his speech was within the normal range. It was at the time, but his speech problems weren't simply caused immaturity and they didn't correct on their own. My son had problems distinguishing certain sounds from other similar sounds. If the op's child encounters problems with reading, it might be very helpful to evaluate the child's phonemic awareness. Speech and language therapists often can evaluate that too,

Okay, let me see if I understand this. Because you are sick, you don't crave chocolate. All along I knew there had to be something wrong with people who didn't crave chocolate.:D

What a great explanation of the reading comprehension process!

Thanks, Lisa for sharing your experience with the LMB clinics. We're going to do the whole V/V program at home this summer, but we haven't started yet. We used some of the V/V materials this school year, but didn't do the program start to finish. I suspect that just touching on the V/V program had not done much good and that we needed more intensity. I bought the first edition of the V/V manual, (which apparently was published before LMB had the product line of pictures, stories and books, etc.) I printed copies of pictures from the appendix in the back and spent an evening coloring them with crayons. (I felt like a kid again.) I found the highly imaged stories mentioned in the manual. The old manual spells things out clear enough and offers some scripting. It really doesn't look like it's going to be that hard to do, but it is different and unfamiliar. I'm nervous about getting started, just as I've been nervous when begining unfamiliar programs in the past. I might buy one training DVD to watch before I start to ease my fears. ($80 for one, $329 for all 5 at Gander Publishing, which is still much cheaper than their workshops or clinics.) I bought just one DVD for their LiPS program before I impemented that at home. Seeing that helped me feel more confident about what I was doing with LiPS. Then after spending a lot of money for a short training session on vowels, I wondered if I had really needed it. In retrospect, I did need that vowel training. And now that I'm writing about it, I really should just bite the bullet and buy a V/V training DVD or two--or perhaps the whole set. Sigh. I sympathize with the op who's running out of money for special ed programs. My ds is also almost ready to move onto the next level of Barton, so we'll be spending a few hundred dollars on that too.

May I ask what you find helpful about the ITBS for planning? We're required to test and have used the CAT with science and social studies. I'm thinking about looking for a different test for next year. What information does ITBS share beyond percentages and grade level in various areas? :bigear:

A child with dyslexia almost always has unexpected gaps in reading and spelling. That might be especially true for those with "only" mild dyslexia because they know a lot--and it's tricky to figure out what they know from what they don't know. If you can sort out what your child knows from what he doesn't know without a full blown program, then that might work, but it's very hard to do. It's probably much easier to discover the areas the child needs more work by going through an entire program start to finish. Otherwise some gaps might close while others remain in unexpected places. It's probably possible to make gains, perhaps even large gains, without using a full blown program, but if one wants to totally remediate the problem, then one needs to discover and fill in all the missing gaps. The advice to find a full blown program and work all the way through seems to me very good advice for the majority of people working with children who have dyslexia. Here's my personal experience with a full blown program and mild dyslexia. I bought Bartons for my 8 yo son (who has some serious problems simply learning to read.) Since we have the program now, I decided to use Bartons with my other children too. My 11 yo is not a good speller and might have very mild dyslexia, which he compensates for well. I have been looking for dyslexia since it can run in families--otherwise I probably would not have caught any problem as he reads above grade level. In using Barton's with my 11 yo, I have been very surprised to discover that he doesn't know some things that I thought he knew. We did phonics and spelling programs, but some things didn't sink in or we missed them somehow. We work on those weak areas at a slow pace, then he goes sailing through the program again until we encounter yet another area where he needs work. I can't imagine that I would have been able to discover all those knowledge gaps on my own.

I suspect standardized tests heavily use many common sight words and/or words that follow irregular or unusual spelling patterns. Also words can be spelled phonetically correct but still be spelled wrong. (notice: "many", not menny and "sight", not site or cite.)

Thanks! :) I liked this part By classical skills she means imitation, memorization, drill, recitation and above all grammar, not grammar as the study of the formal structure of sentences (although that is part of it), but grammar as the study of the formal structure of anything: “Every occupation, field of study or concept has a vocabulary that the student must acquire like a foreign language . . . . A basketball player practicing the fundamentals could be considered a grammarian . . . as he repeatedly drills the basic skills, of passing dribbling, and shooting.†“Every student,†Bortins counsels, “must learn to speak the language of the subject.†“Classical content†identifies just what the subjects to be classically studied are. They are the subjects informed and structured by “the ideas that make us human†— math, science, language, history, economics and literature, each of which, Bortins insists, can be mastered by the rigorous application of the skills of the classical Trivium, grammar, the study of basic forms, logic, the skill of abstracting from particulars and rhetoric, the ability to “speak and write persuasively and eloquently about any topic while integrating allusions and examples from one field of study to explain a point in another.†Assiduously practice, or as Bortins puts it, “overpractice†these skills, and “a student is prepared to study anything.â€

I ask myself some these same questions. To test or not to test? So far, we haven't done formal testing for dyslexia, but I have no doubt that my 8.5 yo son has dyslexia. I told myself at the start of this school year that if it didn't improve, we'd get him tested. But now he's made good progress having used LiPS and now using Bartons, plus some other Lindamood and special education materials. I don't think at this point testing would do anything other than confirm what I already know. And I'd rather spend the money on really good special education materials for him rather than testing. He still has reading problems, but he's doing MUCH better working with programs and materials developed to remediate dyslexia. I'd hate to go through all the time, trouble and cost for testing only to have it turned out to be an experience like yours. How awful!!! Did this testing reveal anything you didn't already know??? I really don't know much about AAS so I can't compare it with Barton. I can tell you my experience with Bartons. Bartons does mention in the training cd's that some children with dyslexia may also have ADHD. It offers some suggestions on how to work the program for children with attention problems. I'll also add that if you suspect some audiotory problems, check out the Barton student screening first. We bought Bartons then discovered my son needed LiPS first. (That's how I found out about Lindamood-Bell's programs.) I also use Barton to teach reading and spelling to my 6 yo who doesn't have dyslexia. (We started when she was 5 1/2.) She thinks it's fun to play with the letter tiles and she's making great progress. I figured we have this expensive program, so I might as well use it with her too. I don't know all the answers for my own family, so I certainly don't have the answers for yours. If you think there's more to what's going on than you know, maybe pursue more testing or do more research in the area that you most suspect to be the problem. Then pray that your next person you deal with is both more helpful and more professional! :grouphug:

If you haven't made "outside time" a regular and predictible part of your day, try that. Routinely go outside at a certain time or a couple times, like right after lunch or after snack. Remove the option of staying inside or going back inside until you say he can. Also, maybe bring some toys that he might play with by himself, (like little plastic army guys)outside to the playfort might help too. But one though... I notice you wrote about having snakes and who knows what else. Is it possible that your child fears the snakes and who knows what else might be out there? I wouldn't want to go outside if I thought there was a strong chance of running into a snake. Are there poisonous snakes in your area, and if so, does he know what to do? If not, does he know they aren't poisonous? Maybe the problem is somewhat normal 5 1/2 year old fears.

It might be developmental as Heather suggests, but it stood out to me that the op mentioned her child has autism. If I understand autism correctly, language processing can often be a concern. Here's a (long) talk Nanci Bell, (the woman who developed Visualizing and Verbalizing), gave on reading comprehension. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tarroahIHks&feature=channel She mentions a term "hyperlexia", where someone can read at a much higher level than comprehend.

It's not a spelling program, but LiPS is a program designed to help with sound recognition within words. http://www.ganderpublishing.com/LiPS/ It's expensive, but it teaches information that few educational programs ever teach. It was designed by a speech therapist and teaches people to recognize sounds by the way the lips, mouth and tongue, etc. produce the sounds. I don't know the extent of your daughter's problems, but if she can't distinguishing numerous sounds, it might be most helpful to remediate that problem first.

If your child need special work on fractions and decimals specifically, you might try setting aside formal "curriculum" and instead focus on play and real life examples of fractions and decimals. I saw a fraction game with cardboard pizzas like this one. http://www.lakeshorelearning.com/seo/ca%7CsearchResults~~p%7CDD847~~.jsp I thought about getting it, then decided real pizzas would be more fun! (You can buy several cheap, little pizzas and bake them all at once. Slice the pizzas, demonstrating half, quarters, eighths, etc. Added benefit: you cook lunch or dinner in the process. The sensory aspect of touching, seeing, smelling and even tasting & eating real food might boost her understanding. Money is a common everyday way to use and explain decimals. A penny is .01 of a dollar and 100 pennies equals a dollar. Ten pennies=one dime and ten dimes= one dollar. You can play with real money and use a white board to practice writing the value in decimals. Also point out decimals it on prices of items in stores. If you want some special ed curriculum about these things, it's available. It's often in the form of games, like the cardboard pizza game I mentioned. Here are some other special ed catalogs you can search for some ideas http://www.lakeshorelearning.com/seo/f%7C/Assortments/Lakeshore/ShopByCategory/mathematics/fractionsdecimalspercents.jsp and http://www.rempub.com/

I don't have a child with Down's Syndrome, but I have used some materials developed for children with special needs from Gander Publishing http://www.ganderpublishing.com/Browse-by-Subject.html and Remedia Publication http://www.rempub.com/. They have several books on life skills. And perhaps a program for language development, like Talkies might interest you http://www.ganderpublishing.com/Talkies.html I doubt that you'll find a program that's clearly planned out for each day of the school year. My experience with my special needs child (dyslexia and some language processing issues) shows me that my child doesn't always learn at a predictable rate. But special needs programs and workbooks have helped to keep the information at a level where he can work on them one step or one page at a time, with some predictibility that I can use for planning. Hope that helps and God bless you!

I :001_wub: scripted programs. Otherwise I'm inclined to give more information than my child can process at one time. I also moved from LiPS to Barton as soon as my child could qualify for Barton. I bought Barton's level one--then I discovered the pre-screening, which revealed my child needed to work with a program like LiPS first. Had the Bartons I box not already been in my living room awaiting us to be ready for it, I might have stuck with LiPS longer. There's some significant overlap between the two programs, especially in the early Barton's levels. Both LiPS and Bartons are scripted, but Bartons is more scripted.

I second Lizzy's suggestion about LiPS. When a child's phonological awareness is bad enough, reading phonetically is very, very difficult. (Slightly off topic but I wonder if the "look and see" method of reading was a bad attempt to teach children with audio-processing problems how read.) LiPS is a great program! There's strong research to back it up too, in addition to our own personal experience. I tried phonics programs, but until we did LiPS my son made little progress. My son couldn't hear the difference between some sounds, but the LiPS program taught him to feel and see the difference.

I used it with my son when he was little. It does tongue exercises not really singing, but the exercises are set to music. It might have helped-it probably did, but I don't really know for sure. His speech problems never qualified for speech therapy because he had the muscle development to make all the sounds. Maybe the speech-ercise helped develop his tongue muscles, or maybe it was just that his speech problems were caused primarily by his auditory processing issues. I don't know. But thanks for the reminder about this program because my kindergartener's speech is immature sounding, and I know enough now that I can tell it's not an auditory processing problem. Maybe it's time to pull out those old cd's and do some more tongue circles. :tongue_smilie:

I think that's a good idea. If they can do that, then he can learn the social skills and see his new friends. Sparrow, thinking about this rationally, what the school recommend for next year sounds significantly different from what your son thrived on this year. As I started to read your post, I expected your post was going to lament the loss of the nice things you had going with the school district. It seems like one of the things your child enjoys most is having met some friends and other "quirky" kids he gets along with well. If socialization is what you want for him from the school, the type of socialization he enjoyed (relating to people who shared a similar diagnosis) won't be there next year in the same way it was this year. Mainstreaming him in another writing class would completely change the dynamics.