If a big part of the problem is application, then in addition to something like math blaster to make the drill work a bit more fun, I'd do more with manipulatives--maybe even some work with graph paper to help make sure she understands what multiplication is all about.

YES! There are lots of other things than schoolwork that ADHD medication helps with. Impulse control, for instance. The comparison with glasses is apt. ADHD Mom with two ADHD grown children

Not for me it wasn't. Algebra lets you solve problems in ways that arithmetic alone cannot. It's a whole new way of seeing the world. Calculus is even better. Calculus lets you do related rates problems, which are mind-boggling and delightful. As an arithmetic hater who LOVES math, I am with your daughter. (I have eventually learned to appreciate arithmetic. But I hated it as a kid. The best thing my dad ever did for me was to respond to my "I hate math" with "All you've ever done is arithmetic--and arithmetic isn't all there is to math. It's just the boring part.")

I'm "officially" "gifted". And some of my education was in programs designed for gifted kids. Some of that saved my life; some of it was irrelevant. One ds was officially "gifted" according to the public schools, and spent some time in the GATE program. I'm not impressed that they did anything that would not also have been beneficial to the whole class--except that they figured that they gifted kids would not fall behind during the time that they got pulled out. I also felt like they were doing the kinds of enrichment that are precisely what hs moms usually find a way to do with all of their children. The two things you want to watch out for, IMHO, with gifted kids are boredom and coasting. Boredom becomes a crucial problem in the school system, because if you keep a kid at grade level and they are working way beyond grade level, then they may stop functioning completely. It was at the 8-12 grade level that a program for gifted children probably saved me. I was beginning to shut down and slump. Shifting to a school with teachers who didn't care what process I used, and who were absolutely adamant that I had the capacity and had better learn the challenging material they put before me was wonderful. They didn't have special teaching techniques, in fact they may have been less than ideal teachers--they just threw challenging stuff at us. In the homeschool environment, boredom is not so much of a problem because you are not going to keep reteaching your child something he already knows, and refuse to let him do something else. You can keep prodding him to learn something more/deeper/broader/better. Coasting, however, could be a problem with twins. How do you deal with the fact that the standards are ultimately going to be different for the two of them? If you reach a point where child 1 reads twice as fast as child 2, you need child 1 to understand that this does not just mean he spends half as much time reading as child 2. And you need both of them to understand that they ability to do scholastic work (and quite possibly a range of different sorts of mental work) faster and better does not make you a better person. And child 1 does need to learn to work hard at some point, because it seems to be the ability to persevere that makes the difference as to whether high IQ has any major results in a person's life. Anyway, people who are closer to the issues of hsing a gifted child than I am will have more useful information, but this is what my experience suggests. Have fun!

I can understand why she wants to make the point that what she is doing is different, and she has some valid issues. On the other hand, as I sent my kids back to school, the only way I could do that was with the realization that I was still one of my children's teachers. We had our reasons for not going the homeschool route. And yes, I called myself a part time homeschooler, at least in my mind. I can understand her reasons for rejecting the term. But I think that my reasons for adopting it were equally valid. It's a wonderful thing to be able to be off the school grid completely. But it does not work for everyone all of the time.

My own kids are long past this, but I know well the frustration of working with kids who have learning problems within the school system. Your description of dealing with a child worn out at the end of the day sounds achingly familiar, and I remember being so frustrated that the job of pushing my child through homework that was not helpful for their particular learning problems left him and me with no emotional energy to tackle anything that might have been helpful in getting him to learn. Here are some things that helped: 1. Absolutely communicate as clearly as you can with the teacher. Let them know that you are on their side, and that both of you together want your child to learn. But make sure the teacher also knows as much as s/he can about who your child is. 2. Do whatever it takes to get your child tested for learning problems. If she is having enough problems in school, you can probably get the school system to pay for this. Possibly this is something you can discuss with your child's teacher early in the school year. But if for some reason the school does not agree that your child's problems merit testing, then if you can possibly afford it, get her tested by a psychologist who can give you and the school system a report. The more you know, the better the school and you can do to help her. The better documentation you have, the more you can do to force the school to provide specific help or specific work arounds for your daughter's problems. Those can be formal or informal. I can't give examples for auditory processing disorder. But one of my sons is physically quite deaf in one ear. In fourth grade, at one point early in the year the teacher assigned a project to help the kids get to know each other, an information "scavenger hunt" where they would find someone with a dog, someone with a younger sister, etc. The result was cacaphony in the classroom, as everyone asked each other questions, and tried to collect appropriate signatures. It's a great group activity, and the teacher was quite annoyed that in the middle of it my son said "I can't do this", covered his ears, put his head down on the desk and refused to participate any further. I talked with my son, and as the whole story came out I concluded that he had done amazingly well under the circumstances. With hearing in only one ear, he cannot tell where a sound is coming from, and so sorting out different voices in the crowd is difficult. He was under a barrage of meaningless sound. At a younger stage, he might have screamed and possibly hit some one. All he did was withdraw. After that, we thought through situations that would make his monaural deafness a problem (he cannot, for instance, be blindfolded, and asked to respond to directions that depend on his being able to tell where sounds are coming from). There aren't many, and he doesn't need any special expensive help from the school to cope with this. But it makes a big difference for the teachers to know where there are potential problems. Now (he's grown, and a teacher in his own right) he can advocate for himself on these issues. Mostly it's a matter of making sure that people speak to his good side. 3. Without giving in on your position that the schools MUST do what is necessary for your daughter to be enabled to learn given her problem (it's the law), try not to be too inflexible about what that help will look like. I've gone in to the schools armed with what I thought was an important solution to a problem only to be shown a better idea by skilled and experienced teachers--but at the same time, had I not pointed out the problem, they might never have realized the need to do something. 4. Hang in there. Let your daughter know that she is going to be able to read well and do arithmetic well eventually--because you and she are going to do whatever it takes. As you learn more about the nature of her learning problem, help her to understand it to. "I have an auditory processing problem." is so much more helpful for a child to be saying to themselves than "I'm stupid." 5. I think it was in Junior High that a teacher finally said to me, "When your child has reached the breaking point, having worked hard on his homework, and you know he's done his best and cannot do any more, draw a line on the paper and sign it." You don't want to give up too easily. But we had a year in fourth grade where I was working 4 hours on Saturday and an hour a night throughout the week with my son just to get him through spelling homework that was unbelievably difficult and painful for him, and which did NOTHING to help him to learn to spell the words. Needless to say there was no energy left for activities that might have helped. I wish I had had the self-confidence at that point to go to the teacher and say, "I understand that these are wonderful exercises for most kids. We have tried hard, and this process is ripping our family apart. Please give me and him some space to try something different for a few weeks." It might not have worked. But it might have. 6. Do the best you can with the school system. But don't sacrifice your daughter. If it's not working, keep revisiting the homeschooling option with your husband. Best wishes. Don't lose sight of the fact that your daughter is a wonderful person.

Two that are not novels, but autobiographical: Darkness Visible by William Styron is a superbly written account of the writer's own descent into acute depression. A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis is his record of what he went through after his wife died. While this is not abnormal psych, it's full of very useful psychological insights. I don't think I saw anyone mention Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, dealing pretty much with depression in the aftermath of a rape (but sensitively dealt with, and an excellent YA novel IMHO.) Part of me says that if a child wants to go into this field, everything that they can read that's well-done literature about life will be all to the good. The more you understand about what people are like and how relationships can work, the better equipped you will be to help with and understand abnormalities.

What's nice is that this may mean she's on the right dosage. Ideally you barely notice how the medication feels--you just behave better on it. Over time, my two boys are very aware that they function much better with medication. I am the one (also with ADHD, but undiagnosed until I was an adult because my coping skills for academics are very good) who has had a hard time really believing that the medications make a difference. My husband has no difficulty in telling whether or not I'm taking my medication.

I would also seriously consider talking to your daughter's teacher about this. I teach writing at the college level, and I spend a LOT of time reteaching about plagiarism. The time to start teaching students that this is not acceptable is in grade school. Especially now, most kids who are doing this are using a cut and paste mechanism that makes them easy to catch with Google (and there are easier ways to do it that a teacher or school might want to invest in.) I remember hearing a 4th grade class getting a lecture about this during a library class I was sitting in on. The teacher had given all the plagiarized papers a zero.

As a veteran of a lot of AP exams (quite some time ago), I want to second what Momsinthegarden posted about the exams and preparing for them. In regular schools, teachers learn (often by failing with several classes) how to prepare students for these exams. At least, the good ones learn. The not-so-good teachers just offer the exams on a sink or swim basis. Obviously, homeschoolers can't afford to learn by trial and error--you only have the one batch of students, and you want them all to do well. Unlike many standardized tests, the AP exams are worth teaching to. They are very rigorous tests (in most areas) and they cover the subject matter well. If you've studied hard, the multiple choice sections are not bad. The essay sections are another matter. Practice makes a huge difference here. My teachers had looked at years worth of essay exams, and identified certain kinds of topics which were very likely to come up. We practiced writing essays on those topics multiple times. So for example, when it came to Biology (my first AP exam, one that every student in my high school was required to take) I had drawn and explained diagrams of animal and plant cells, both alone and in compare and contrast mode, I had memorized and could explain the Krebs cycle, I could go through the steps of cell division. I not only COULD do these things, I could do them quickly and without having to organize those essays from scratch. I didn't have the essays themselves memorized, but I knew that material COLD. That left me with time to concentrate on the essays that were more complicated, and less likely to show up from year to year. For what it is worth, we also spread that one year of college biology over two years of study--but my school was strange, and we took many subjects for multiple years. Hope some of this helps.

I remember when we got our two boys evaluated (different times) and put on meds. It was like someone had somehow slipped an extra split second for them in between the time they thought of something and the time it happened--and I was stunned at how often they made the right choice. I also remember telling the doctor doing the evaluation that I thought the problem might just be my poor parenting, and she told me every parent who came in thought that. She said that they'd done a study where they checked and found that yes, parents of ADD kids were using poor parenting skills. So they divided the kids into three groups: Medication; Medication plus training in parenting; training in parenting. And lo and behold the parents who improved their parenting skills were in two groups: Medication with no training and medication with training. What mattered was the child being able to respond to what the parent was doing, and (at least in some cases) that can take medication. Enjoy your new child.

My understanding from what I have read is that about 75 percent of the population are sequential learners and the rest of us are -- something else. My hunch is that being a slow learner doesn't change that, that there are non-sequential learners scattered among both quick and slow learners. I'll speak for myself. I HAVE to have some big picture elements in place before I go through sequential learning. If I try to learn something being built up just one step at a time, I get unbelievably frustrated. That does not mean that sequential learning materials are not valuable for me. It's just that I need some kind of framework to plug them into, to give me hope for the sequential process. I need to know in my gut where this sequence is going. Not everyone needs this. Like I said, maybe only 25%. And some of it you get serendipitously. When I was in fifth grade, I think my father kept me from shutting down completely in mathematics by showing me an algebra problem. I didn't understand the problem at all (though I tried). I wasn't really doing algebra until 8th grade. But the hope that injected into me was phenomenal. Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth.

Do figure out a way to get her checked for ADD, as the behavior sounds familiar.

I remember so well that stage of my son wanting to take a break between each numeral in the math problem. I thought I was going to go nuts. And if I wasn't right there by his side saying, "What's the next step? Good. Write it down. No, don't put down the pencil, keep going...." the whole process ground to a halt. Some of this happened while we were homeschooling, some with him in public school. I guess a little more (because it was while he was younger) during our public school days. I agree with so much of what has been said about whichever you do, not feeling guilty or hopeless. You'll still be doing a lot of teaching when she's in public school. The upside is that someone else is working on the problem too. The downside is that they are deciding for you what you will be teaching at night. That can actually be fine, unless and until you become convinced that you are spending all your evening time and you and your child's emotional energy doing something that isn't working, just so that you can say that the homework got completed. There can be a lot of time spent talking to teachers. My guess is that most public schools would be unlikely to put a child a year back at the third grade level just for being behind in math. But you have to talk to them about what they will do to help your child succeed in math. You need to get testing from the school system over the summer so that they can strategize interventions. I think that even if you don't end up putting your child in school, they may be required to test your child--but I'm not sure whether that's federal or state law, and I'm a good ten years out of the system. Hang in there. Having an LD/ADD kid takes all the energy you have sometimes and then a bit more. Whether homeschooling or other schooling, it still is a demanding job for the parent(s). But it does get better. My child who was most like what you describe is now teaching LD kids at the High School level. I couldn't be prouder.

I have used Rosetta Stone with other languages (mostly for myself), and think very highly of the program BUT I have read bad reviews specifically of the Hindi program, and the accents used by the speakers. At this point, I'm reluctant to invest in it for this language.

Getting as much diagnostic information as you possibly can is always a good idea (especially to the extent that they can get the school system to agree to it) and I agree with you that a dyslexia workup alone doesn't sound like it's the full issue. Having been there, I know how upsetting it can be to think about the school system testing and potentially labeling your kid, especially when you are confronted with the idea for the first time. And I felt like slugging the first person who suggested that I put my child on medication for ADHD. A concept that helped me back then was that LD is a much better label to have than "stupid". The more specific that LD label is the better. I would not assume no ADHD from a good hour with one-on-one attention.

Even if they find nothing in a vision exam, that can be helpful to know. This may sound strange, but one of my LD sons had his reading ability jump overnight when the doctor told him that his eyes were fine.

I don't have experience with the full-blown dyslexia programs. I do have two ADD/LD dyslexic kids who are now college graduates, one who may become a professional writer (but he's honing his skills while running a welding shop) and the other a high school teacher in a special academy for kids who are at least 3 years behind. So, I can't and won't say a full-blown dyslexia program isn't right for you. But I can say that you keep working with it until you find what works. I remember pretty clearly sitting beside my second son when he was in second grade, and telling him that he was going to learn to read and that he was going to be a good reader. It was just going to take a lot more work for both of us than it did for some kids. For what it's worth, I homeschooled my kids some, and also had them in public school some of the time--I got a chance to see what the "LD specialists" did. My strong impression was that they worked with the kids and kept trying different strategies until they found something that worked. Except that they were doing this with a roomful of children. They had some more experience and training in a bunch of different strategies, but they didn't know in advance what was going to work for a given student. My advantage as a parent was that I only had to worry about my own children. Other folks will have more helpful advice relevant to the specific curricula, I trust. I guess I'm just writing to say, hang in there and trust your gut. Whichever choice you make, your child will eventually get there, because you are going to stand by their side until they do.

If you're going to take group out of the sentence, you leave "Of men was/were walking" and then you realize that you took the wrong word out. Grammatically, it has to be "A group was walking." In terms of standard usage currently, I'm guessing this is not a heavily enforced rule. It depends on how pedantic you want to be, or circumstances require you to be. IMHO