That's awesome. She can do a lot more writing than she probably thinks she can. Is she able to write a multi-paragraph factual essay, or multi-paragraph book/chapter summary? Have her history classes required her to do anything like "Evaluate the extent of change in United States political parties in the period 1791 to 1833"?

LToW is really good at forcing you to *think*. (It's one of the things my dd *didn't* like about it, lol.) And there's a ton of scaffolding, for getting from your initial ANI chart (how they organize your brainstorming), to guiding *how* to think wider and deeper, to generating your main points and supporting commentary from your revised ANI chart and putting them on an outline. (And going on to generate your body paragraphs and your intro/conclusion, and into revising.) My oldest dd is an intuitive creative writer, but struggles with making her thinking *explicit*. She needed a lot of guidance and some pushing from me on all the various "forcing you to think through your topic" parts of LToW. I'd teach them and then we'd apply the new bit to the previous essay together. Then she gave it a go on her own on the new essay topic. Often she could only come up with some of it, or the answers she gave were only so-so, so then we'd go over it together next lesson. Honestly, discussion together, with me drawing her out (and with me basically doing it myself alongside her, so *I'd* interacted with the topic sufficiently) was really, really key. LToW gave us a good structure for thinking in, so that we could think in productive directions, be stretched to think in new directions - but it couldn't think for us. We got out what we put in. (Which made keeping to a schedule hard, and I did have problems knowing how much I should push the first time we'd encountered something, versus pushing a little more each time we saw it.) I found that we lived or died based on our topic (which we selected ourselves) - we had to care enough about it to keep pushing our thinking deeper and wider (and it had to have enough to it to reward such thinking). (And it's one of those programs that I don't think I'll really understand how to teach it till I've taught it all the way through once, but I was learning more every lesson.) ~*~ However, a lot of what LToW does in the Invention stage, in guiding *how* to think deeper and wider and in productive directions, is not unique to them - it's their take on Aristotle's Common Topics. Writing With Skill, Classical Writing, and CAP's Argument Builder, among others, also use the Common Topics. (I do think that WWS might be worth looking at, starting at Level 1. SWB does a good job breaking things down into logical, explicit steps, and a lot of the early exercises provide all the content you need to build your argument - you just pick and choose from what's already there, instead of having to come up with stuff from out of your head.) CAP's Argument Builder is actually a logic text (albeit one that has a heavy crossover with classical-inspired writing programs), and that might be another avenue to pursue: studying word-based logic. The intersection of logical thinking and working with words might help harness some of her math strengths. ~*~ Another resource that comes to mind is The Writing Revolution. It's not a curriculum, but an approach (aka not open and go). They take a writing-is-thinking approach, and integrate writing with other subjects - the idea is that you teach writing through learning other subjects and teach other subjects through learning writing. So *all* their exercises, from the easiest to the most advanced, involve *thinking* about what you are writing, require you to *interact* with your subject. They have a nice scaffolded approach to moving from sentences to one paragraph compositions to multi-paragraph essays to argumentative essays. The idea is that the rigor of the subject drives the rigor of the thinking and thus the rigor of the writing. So little kids can start learning to think and interact about what they learn, using easy subjects, while older kids can use the same tools to interact with their more difficult subjects. They treat sentences as mini-compositions, and a single paragraph as a mini-essay - so you can learn to interact and think about your subject through first expanding simple sentences. They bridge from sentences to single paragraphs by expanding on an expanded sentence. It teaches the sort of thinking that goes into longer essays without overwhelming their composition skills. They hold that you can't write an effective multi-paragraph essay before being able to write an effective single paragraph composition.

Being able to take effective notes is great. When she takes notes, does she summarize and paraphrase and pick out key items in her notes, and does she organize the information in any way? Or does she just write all the things down, without interacting with it at all? My point is, all those "interact with the material in taking notes" things are also *writing* skills. So if she does *anything* beyond straight "hear fact, write fact" - those are skills that transfer to writing that she *already has*. That's why so many writing programs start with teaching note-taking. (If she doesn't do anything beyond "hear fact, write fact", then she might benefit from doing some work on note-taking, or at least on summarizing.) Also, are there any short answer questions on the tests, or are they just multiple choice? Any idea how much the course tests straight recall vs requires the student to do something further with their knowledge? I'm thinking this (along with not wanting to think) is a key factor. She hasn't had a lot of practice interacting with written ideas, doesn't have nearly as much background knowledge or as strong an intuitive sense of what words do and how they do them. How's her oral logic? If she wants something, if a sibling annoys her - can she "use her words" effectively enough in trying to get what she wants? Or is she fairly inarticulate even when the topic at hand is of immediate personal import? Does she talk much, in everyday life? I mean, does she talk about things of interest, like her animals, or is she pretty quiet? ~*~ I'm with square25, in that with her being good with math and computers - which require logical thinking - there really ought to be a way to harness that to help with writing. The things she identified as her biggest struggles from Lori D's list - multi-stage writing process, building a supported argument, and writing commentary sentences - that middle one, building a supporting argument, that's really logical. Somehow it seems like there ought to be a way to connect that to what she can do in math. How does she do with word problems in math? Can she write her answer in a sentence? Also, does she do any kind of short answer questions in science; if so, how does she do on them? I mean, is she effective at *any* kind of writing, such as short, 2-3 sentence, factual-type things. From what you've said, she's good at taking notes, and bad at multi-paragraph essays. But there's a lot of in-between area - can she do writing that's shorter, or that is more factual, or that is more narrow in scope? Can she do summaries?

One thing about learning grammar mostly/solely through Latin is that it's a pretty slow progression - unless you're learning at a college pace, it usually takes years before you get to complex sentence structures. And that is a real drawback if you mean to apply your grammar knowledge in your composition work (and weren't hardcore classical enough to have *finished* your Latin grammar *before* you hit middle school, lol). We started Latin (in 7th) with very minimal grammar knowledge (parts of speech, DO/IO) that we spent minimal time learning (maybe 5 hours total, done here and there over the course of a school year). The rest I'd figure we'd learn as we learned Latin. It was convenient to have already learned the basic grammar concept before learning it in Latin, but learning as we went was quite doable (just took a bit longer, and was a bit haphazard because *I*, too, was learning the grammar as we went). But I realized, as we started more formal composition work and I saw how to integrate grammar with writing (and how that integration was the missing piece to learning grammar for me), that there was a huge gap between the complex English sentences she was writing and the simple Latin sentences we were diagramming - and I didn't want to wait two or three or four more years to learn the needed grammar through Latin. So in 8th grade we started doing English grammar in its own right, with a writing focus (combined diagramming and sentence imitation), really focusing on what it *means,* in practice, for something to be this grammar concept versus that grammar concept. (I also added composition into Latin, writing an imitation (in Latin) of the Latin sentences she diagrammed and translated.) It was probably one-third grammar theory to two-thirds writing-centric application. I really liked how it worked out, enough to make it a key part of how we approach writing going forward, and as it turns out, what I cobbled together is very like how CW approaches grammar application.

Pretty much this. They invited me to call them Mom and Dad (and that's how they sign things), but while I'm not offended or upset at the idea or anything, it just felt awkward. First names also sounded awkward (although that's how my parents refer to their inlaws, and how dh refers to my parents), so I just avoided direct address. It was so freeing when oldest was born and Grandma and Papa became options, lol.

That's interesting, that visuals in general don't improve her comprehension, but only a specific type/style of visuals (animation/comics) helps. Wonder if she finds them easier to *understand* or easier to *pay attention* to, or if it's a mutually-reinforcing cycle: she can understand it better because she can pay attention better because she can understand it better.... It's just a WAG, but specifically understanding animated shows while having trouble with live action shows - I wonder if that's ASD-related.

I admit, for me personally, even though I'm pretty good at reading aloud (I read Scripture during church services and such), it takes *more* concentration for me to comprehend well while reading aloud than it does to comprehend reading silently. How's her comprehension of movies/tv shows? You said the only thing she retains reading-wise is graphic novels - is her comprehension there genuinely *good* or just relatively good in comparison to her other lack-of-comprehension?

That's great that she's more interested when you read. Could be a phonics/decoding thing, could be that you are taking some of the (non-decoding-related) comprehension load off by reading it to her, could be that everything's better with Mom :). How's her oral reading - can she read aloud well? Does she remember/enjoy better when she reads aloud than reading silently? In any case, that she enjoys being read to - that's huge for helping her to like reading and books, gives her pleasant book experiences.

While it might be worthwhile to use something like ElizabethB's nonsense word list or her syllable-based lessons, to check for phonics issues, to me what you've written suggests more ASD-related comprehension issues. People say that reading comprehension is something like 90% background knowledge - and as I understand it, having ASD makes it a lot harder to pick up understanding-people-related background knowledge. Does she have more interest in books if you read them aloud to her? Does she comprehend better when you read them aloud? Might want to poke @PeterPan - this sounds like something in her wheelhouse.

Not precisely what you described - it's not really time travel, but more an alternate/faerie/more-real-than-mundane-reality realm - but otherwise very like, is Stephen Lawhead's Song of Albion trilogy (The Endless Knot, The Silver Hand, and The Paradise War). I've reread them several times.

This was my second year back in TX after nine years up north (after a lifetime living in the south). I never used to suffer from seasonal depression, before moving up north, and I was hoping moving back south would solve it, but it seems that, having become susceptible, I remain susceptible, even in TX <sigh>. But not as severely, thank God. But wrt covid, the usual depression-fueled existential angst slid smoothly into depression-fueled covid angst. (Ironically, the covid angst was actually easier to handle.) But thankfully most of it lifted when the seasonal depression lifted (around the shift to daylight savings).

I've used "barely hanging on by my fingernails" to describe how I often feel come Feb - the slide down all winter, till reaching the edge of the gaping chasm, one wrong move knocking you off and into freefall.

"Wretchedly miserable" - slightly different flavor, but I do like that phrase 👍. "Stark raving insane" just occurred to me as an option.

"Losing my f-ing sh-t"? :shifty: So, between winter depression and year-round anxiety, I feel like this a lot, and I'd like a less-vulgar way to express it. "Losing my mind" simply doesn't cut it - it doesn't capture the intensity. "Losing my ever-loving mind" comes closer, but still not quite it. I figure *someone* literary has got to have described this sort of feeling before, but nothing is coming to mind. So I'm canvassing the hive mind :).

I hadn't either - I googled it plus Saxon and got a helpful YouTube video that gave me the example I used. It was for Saxon Alg 1/2, not Alg 1, but the solving approach was a little more ... idk, mechanical? Formulaic? See this-do that? than I prefer. But I didn't see what came before or after, so idk how it fits in to the overall program.

Problems like "what decimal part of 240 is 90?" - answer 0.375 of 240 = 90 - is that what you mean? I have no idea how Saxon approaches them, but we did a bunch of "___ of ___ = ___" problems in Dolciani, where the first blank could be a fraction, decimal, or percentage. It was a pretty flexible and useful equation template - we set up and solved lots of different kinds of word problems with it. And it was a good test of understanding for dd - successfully setting up and solving those problems required a strong, flexible understanding of fractions/decimals/percentages.

As I understand it, all the Grammar for the Well-Trained Mind workbooks are non-sequential. They all cover the same ground, just with different exercises, so they can be done in any order. None are "higher level" than the others. ETA: Is your 4th grader just finishing 4th grade or going to be starting 4th grade in the fall? In that the rec'd age range is 11yo+/5th+.

That's what I do - the rule with ds9 wrt playing with the neighbor kid is outside-only and no screens. Tbh violent video games isn't my top worry here (and all the kids game with DH, but never unsupervised) - it's unsupervised internet access and too-much-screens/lack-of-movement in general - but in any case just shutting down screens altogether is less tricky than trying to define what is and isn't appropriate screen use. Plus I just don't want them defaulting to screens, period. So far the rule has worked well. Eta: I've never talked about it with the parents, just ds9 (with neighbor boy listening in).

When I was on pg Medicaid (over a decade ago), they included the unborn baby in the household count. With a household of four (counting baby), dh was able to work full time, at above minimum wage, and we were well under the income limits for pg Medicaid and also for under-5 Medicaid. (We were too high for older kid and non-pg adult medicaid.) We also were eligible for WIC, but not food stamps. Definitely research the limits - pg Medicaid limits were higher (at the time, anyway) than other Medicaid limits, and they counted the unborn babies in the household, too.

Your summary sounds good to me 👍. I expect you could just jump into DDbD. SYS provides the world's most open-and-go spiral dictation program - it is extremely convenient and easy to use. But most of the value comes from how they've laid it all out for you, and hold your hand as much you need through it. (Also, philosophy-wise, they aren't all that OG - I brought in some extra OG focus.) But with having done AAS, I expect you have all the knowledge you need to apply AAS's approach to word analysis to DDbD. Marking-wise, here's the categories: vowel digraphs, r-controlled vowels, y-as-a-vowel, consonant digraphs, silent letters, prefixes, suffixes; each category gets its own color. I added in blends (between silent letters and affixes), because my girls had a really rough time hearing the separate sounds (let me know if you want my comprehensive list of consonant blends). ETA: I also added in a misc color, because in DDbD my middle was constantly misusing colors (marking as a suffix, say, something that wasn't a suffix, because she felt that it was worth highlighting, but it didn't fit into any category, so she'd (mis)use whatever category she thought was closest), so I gave her a color to use specially for marking things that weren't in a category but that she wanted to highlight to help her remember. ~*~ Just to be complete, I incorporated cursive writing into my teaching of spelling, and I think the cursive aspect was very helpful for my girls. Learning cursive was hard for them, especially for my oldest - I basically ran them, as fluent readers, through the equivalent of a cursive-first spell-to-read approach over the course of a year, right back through the phonics book starting at the beginning - but the connections made were very helpful. I've read that to read cursive you have to be able to read in syllables, not individual letters or phonograms; and to write in cursive you have to be able to spell by syllables, not by individual letters or phonograms. Oldest dd couldn't do that at all when we started, but by the end of spelling through first the phonograms (as she learned new strokes and new letters, I had her practice every phonogram that contained the letters she'd learnt) and then the first 2,000 words in our phonics book (arranged by phonics pattern) - she could. This was in direct contradiction to SYS, btw (lol). They are hardcore practice-spelling-in-print-only, with the idea that it helps to imprint the visual image of the word when there's consistency between book fonts and handwriting fonts. I don't disagree with them, actually, but since I have kids with excellent visual memories and horrible phonemic awareness, I'm constantly trying to find ways to force them to use their ears. And the visual disruption different fonts provide forces them to think through the word phonetically, instead of just relying on their visual memories.

Forgot to mention, Dictation Day by Day is free online - it's in the public domain: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A"Kate+Van+Wagenen" Turns out I am actually using Modern Speller, which is a compilation of several Dictation Day by Day volumes. Modern Speller Vol 1 is 2nd-4th Year, and Vol 2 is 5th-8th Year. I started with "Fourth Year - First Half", partly so it would be fairly easy, and also because the Fourth Year has pictures and the Fifth Year does not, and my dd likes to color the pictures. I printed out the pages, using the "fit to printer margins" setting (which enlarged it), which makes it easy for dd to mark up. ETA: Also, in terms of "spelling things I've done", I've also done Touch, Type, Read and Spell with the girls, which uses an OG progression. Oldest dd took a little over 1.5yr to finish, while middle dd is 3/4 done in two school years (middle dd hit a wall last year and backed way up when she restarted this year); I'm planning for middle dd to continue over the summer, in the hopes she can finish before this year's subscription is up in mid-August.

What I do is basically SYS, but using my own models (also I incorporated the OG-based sound-spelling correspondence charts we used for phonics and the prefix/suffix chart from Rewards, instead of just using SYS's phonogram/affix lists - so there was continuity with our previous formal study). I suppose it's a subset of studied dictation, in that the "study before" is guided OG word analysis (through marking up the passage SYS-style) + copywork, instead of leaving it entirely up to the kid how they study it. (The latter wouldn't have worked here, either.) It's similar to CW Aesop's approach to word study, in that it's not a *replacement* for a formal spelling program, but instead is guided practice in *applying* the tools learned in a formal program to real-life, uncontrolled models, first by analyzing the words in the passage (using the tools learned in your formal program), next by copying the passage, and finally by writing the passage from dictation. Since I came to studied dictation via SYS (and first applied it to WWE, which introduces dictation by having them use the passage as copywork before writing it from dictation), I forget that the CM approach to studied dictation is a lot more freeform. ETA: With my middle, after she finished the SYS book we had, I started a spiralling dictation program, Dictation Day by Day, which I do in my modified SYS-style. She marks up the passage and then copies it in the morning, and I dictate it to her in the afternoon. And she got tired of marking up her WWE dictation, so she now does it mostly cold (before the dictation, I go over any words I think she might have trouble with). She usually only needs me to go over the words SWB mentions going over.

It's more that I think that *dictation* is super important. WRT studied vs cold dictation, it's not really that I think one is more *important* than the other, but that they do somewhat different things. When it comes to getting spelling to transfer over to in-the-wild writing, I'm not sure there's a big difference between studied dictation and cold dictation; heck, cold dictation, being closer to in-the-wild writing, might actually be more effective. *If* the student can be successful at it. And that right there is why I first started with studied dictation - because cold dictation was just too hard for my oldest. We were doing WWE2, and there was just. no. way. she could have done the dictations cold - her spelling was just too bad. Studied dictation allowed her to spell things she couldn't otherwise spell. Studied dictation was kind of a bridge between formal spelling lessons and in-the-wild writing; it had the uncontrolled vocabulary of in-the-wild writing, but it used the analysis tools she'd learned and practiced in formal lessons. In effect, it was applied spelling, guided practice in applying spelling tools to words in the wild. So, mostly I hit studied dictation so much because my kids find it a lot more doable than cold dictation. And I use the SYS markings because it's a fun, efficient way to analyze the words. I do move away from studied dictation to cold dictation (and writing from memory) once they no longer need that sort of guided practice. ETA: Studied dictation has been really helpful in the in-between stage - where they are successful in their spelling program, but it hasn't really hit all the common-but-phonetically-weird words yet (instead working on phonetically regular words and common patterns), and so no matter how good their learned spelling, they miss all these common-but-unlearned words in their writing. Studied dictation allows them to get some guided practice on those words before they study them formally, and so gives a big bump to their outside writing, but is still treating the words phonetically and not as sight words. ETA2: It helps with common multi-syllable words that they haven't gotten to yet in their spelling program, too.

I'm assuming, given your concern plus the stealth dyslexia comment, that your dc's spelling is quite a bit below grade level. My oldest was similar (and my middle not far behind her). My oldest's "in the wild" spelling at the end of 5th wasn't great - she was guaranteed to have several misspellings in anything she wrote, and I strongly encouraged her to do rough drafts (that I would spell-check) before she wrote anything she meant to give to someone. (Even so, the garden-variety "bad spelling" she had at the end of 5th was a genuine improvement over the truly wretched spelling she had at the end of 3rd, where anything over CVC was more likely to be misspelled than not.) But by the end of 7th, she was fairly decent, and now she's fairly effective. She can spell most of the top 2,000 words "in the wild", and she can effectively use a dictionary to look up words she isn't sure of. (She says spell-check is only helpful when she's just switched the order of two letters, but otherwise she has more success looking a word up in the dictionary than in spell-check recognizing her attempts.) A key thing is that, between her spelling and dictionary skills, she can figure out most any word - she's no longer having to censor herself, avoiding using words because she doesn't know how to spell them. In general, to get my girls spelling, I've been doing a three-pronged approach to spelling: 1) work on phonemic awareness (breaking one-syllable words into phonemes and combining phonemes into words, and breaking multi-syllable words into morphemes and combining morphemes into words); I used my homegrown OG-style approach (using Dekodiphukan's sound pictures) for another pass through their phonics book plus Rewards Reading, 2) direct instruction on phonetic spelling (my homegrown OG approach) and then on spelling by morphographs (I used Spelling through Morphographs), and 3) studied dictation, using Spelling You See's visual marking system (we've done a level of SYS, modified WWE dictation to use SYS markings, and done Dictation Day by Day); really, just about everything we did for LA in upper elementary I modified to use SYS markings. Once they had the tools to break words into morphemes and phonemes (and were able to apply them to new words) and were generally successful in their spelling program, studied dictation (and later, once their spelling was good enough, cold dictation) was a big help in getting their spelling skills to transfer to their "in the wild" writing. ~*~ What sorts of things can your dc spell successfully, and what sort of errors do they make? Would you say AAS is working, in the sense that your dc is successfully learning what it is teaching? In general, if AAS is working, I'd continue it, especially since you own it. I'd be more prone to do Megawords (or another morphograph-based spelling program, like Apples & Pears or Spelling through Morphographs) *after* you finish AAS, not *instead* of AAS. If your dc is successful in their spelling program, but it's not transferring to their writing, you could add in some studied dictation alongside your program and see if it helps.

I remember seeing something here about a writing program for upper elementary that was centered around letter-writing, but my google-fu is failing me. Any ideas?