maybe the sour ones?? https://www.worldofsweets.de/Marke+Boehme/Boehme-Fruchtkaramellen-sauer-300g.307338.html

was it these? http://www.germandeli.com/Boehme-Fruchtkaramellen-300g

Yes please do! We missed this too (also had March 1st on my calendar). We would love another section to open :001_smile:

It's pancake day in Britain!

I have no advice for you, but I wanted to give you a :grouphug:

My ds had Mrs Otto this year for EW2. He has enjoyed it, and we both think she is a pretty engaging teacher. I don't know about the other two though!

Oooohhhh this might be the one! He knows the capital letters ("because it's so annoying that the capital B is the same way around as the capital D")

Thank you all so much for your thoughts - apologies I didn't manage to get back to reply before now. We have had tears (his, not mine this time :)) over this issue this week, so it has been on my mind a lot. He KNOWS which is which, but the wrong one keeps coming out. Sigh... Just looked it up - it is like a thumbs up - we'll give it a whirl! Planning to print these for the wall! Yes, we did some cursive writing, but it was so painfully slow that I backed off it. He is keen to start again, and I can see why it might be helpful. Can you tell me which programme you used? We had the loopy cursive style before and I think that was just too much going on for him if I want him to write a sentence in a reasonable amount of time (some processing issues). Many, many thanks as usual!

My ds8 is thoroughly frustrated with himself and I don't know how to help him. Almost every time he writes the letters b or d he chooses the wrong one. Does anybody know of any great memory or visualisation techniques I can teach him, to help remember which way round they go? I'm not sure if it makes a difference but this is really only an issue when he writes, not when reading.

Thanks, that will help a lot!

Hello everybody! I missed a week (well, the thread anyway) - life got in the way. Happy to be reading what everybody is reading again! I finished The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett, and started on Queens Play. These have slowed me right down, because I am looking up all the references all the time. Should just read it, enjoy it, and remain ignorant. P.S. Can't work out how to post images of book covers....

I don't wash ground meat. However, I have multiple friends with Asian heritage (Pakistani, Bengali, Indian etc) who rinse ALL their meat including ground meat. I was totally shocked the first time I saw them do it!

Wow, that's a really rude word here in this part of the world! I had no idea people used it in normal life 😎

Week 3 and I'm still here! Yay, go me! I finished two books this week - The Mislabeled Child, and All Passion Spent. The first was useful and informative, the second was easy but thought-provoking. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to read next. My TBR list is ridiculously long from all of the ideas on these threads, and of course I could not decide. My grandma gave me some Dorothy Dunnetts a while back so I picked up Game of Kings and have started that instead. Which inevitably means that my TBR list is going to get completely out of control!

I hate that we can't like your posts anymore Rosie....yours are the best :001_wub: Ack...double post. Sorry!

I hate that we can't like your posts anymore Rosie.....yours are the best :001_wub:

I finished cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. I enjoyed all the medical details. It picked up at the end, but was a bit stodgy through the middle. Pretty proud of myself for reading a book longer than 500 pages in less than a week though (I am not a fast reader like many of you appear to be). I think I am going to start All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West tonight. I read it when I was a teen still living at home and found it whilst rummaging on my mum's bookshelves whilst we were visiting at Christmas. I vaguely remember enjoying it, so would like to see how much I have changed over the intervening years! After that I am excited to try one of the books mentioned on these threads. It's so nice to chat about books (even just listening in), because I don't really have anybody to chat to IRL about these things. My hubby just rolls his eyes 😂

I hope somebody more knowledgeable than me answers both your questions, because I have the same ones. Loving this epic thread, even though I am just reading along. My TBR pile grows steadily larger!

Can I join in please? (waves shyly :seeya: ) I am reading Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese and The Mislabeled Child by the Eides.

Thanks all, at least I know I'm not alone. To all those with easy-to-parent boys, I hope they stay easy (and is there a secret I am missing?!) Yes, I am finding this too, but it is hard. Ha - yup! I have 4 as well. This one is my eldest - that means I could potentially have 10 more years of this. :huh:

I am at my wits end. Sigh

:lurk5:

Sorry it has taken me a few days to get back on here. I really appreciate the responses (and the calming influences!) I have already read Dyslexic Advantage, and am currently reading Bright Kids who can't keep up. Will read a few more before jumping in to anything costing money. OneStepAtATime - thanks for all your suggestions. He is homeschooling - the teacher was working at a dyslexia charity. I have made a number of changes for him in the past year or so, compared to what I have done with my older two. It looks like a few of the things we have been doing would benefit from tweaking, although thankfully I think I have been moving in the right direction with him. I already scribe a lot, he reads books whilst listening at the same time, we have tried the odd dictation on the computer etc. Just need to decide what to focus on first, which direction might help him most? Geodob - I will start looking into typing programs I think. I did wonder about his ability to decode words along with a dyslexia diagnosis as well. I wonder if the answer is twofold?? (Mostly thinking out loud here) Firstly, the assessor said that he has clearly memorised a vast lexicon of words in his brain (significantly more than an average 8 year old), so that when he hears them, he knows them. However, the second part is that his brain is unable to encode the word again, despite the fact that he knows it, and he hears it correctly. He cannot spell orally or on paper, so this isn't only a writing issue (well at least I don't think it is), although writing words is significantly slower for him. Heather monster - another helpful post from you, thank you! My sister is an OT and it never even occurred to me to ask her! She doesn't do paediatric stuff now, but I think she will know more than me! Mistymountain - you mention about not needing to remediate reading. My gut feeling is that something like Barton might not hit the right spot for him. That is something that is worrying me - it seems like if he has dyslexia, then he must need to read better, right? But with ds, it seems to be all about the encoding rather than the decoding. Can I ask what strategies you have used with your son to help him?

A couple of weeks ago I had confirmation that my ds8 has dyslexia (something I have suspected for a while). He was tested by a teacher, who was only looking for dyslexia traits, so I do not know if he has any other 'diagnoses' (I am wondering about dysgraphia, but that only surfaced in my brain after the dyslexia test). To quote the letter she said, "his levels of attainment in literacy tasks, particularly his spelling, do not reflect his verbal abilities. This discrepancy, together with his uneven profile of cognitive processing skills, notably his speed when processing meaningful information, is consistent with the presence of dyslexia." On the tests he was given, he scored high or extremely high on the vast majority (for example verbal ability was 97th percentile, visual ability was 73rd percentile). He scored low on spelling on the WIAT-II test (I think this is a UK test?) where he placed in the 13th percentile, and he had low scores on parts of the TOMAL-2 tests (between 9th and 23rd percentiles). Interestingly, his phonological awareness composite (elision, blending, phoneme awareness) was in the 95th percentile. In school work, he really struggles to spell. His handwriting is messy and painfully slow. He enjoys reading books, and has good comprehension, although he does tend to guess a bit (a recent example would be reading Charlie instead of Charles). He will also add in, or take out little words at times. So where would you start with him? Does he need Barton to help him spell? Does he need All About Spelling? Something else? Do I need more tests? If I test him, will it really make much difference e.g. I already know we need to work on his handwriting, so what difference does it make if he has a dysgraphia diagnosis? I know I need to start some typing for him, but when? Clearly I'm in a muddle! I would appreciate, if anybody has managed to get to the end of this mammoth post, if you could just tell me where to start! Many, many thanks in advance.

These comments are really helpful. Many, many thanks. The stories are so reassuring. I already knew that spelling and writing are not his strong points. And that he is a bright, articulate, effervescent little guy. A diagnosis does nothing to change that. And as you all kindly point out, a diagnosis actually makes life easier, because I can better understand what I am dealing with. I have already started reading Dylexic Advantage, and that has been great so far. His reading has always been fine, although a bit slower to get through books than my other kids. When reading aloud he gets the gist, but does tend to skip little words or add them in or guess words from context and the starting letter. Overall though, he does ok. It was the struggle with spelling and writing that lead me to think I might be dealing with something more than just an average 8 year old boy. It is like he has so much information, ideas, words in his brain. But if you ask him to get them out on to paper there is a total block. His hand struggles to remember how to form the letters, his brain just simply cannot remember correct spellings. When we do free writes he can manage only a few sentences in the time we set, and those are completely phonetically spelled. I really think my main issue with him is spelling. Perhaps if he could spell more easily his writing would flow a bit easier?