The authors of AAR have an article on their blog about breaking the word guessing habit: http://blog.allaboutlearningpress.com/break-the-word-guessing-habit/. It sounds like every. single. time. your ds guesses at a word, you pull out the tiles and go through the "tell the sounds, blend the sounds" process. Maybe you are already doing that. Anyway, over time it's supposed to transfer to his reading. With my middle dd, I use a notched card like a pp mentioned to force her to work through the word left-to-right when she starts guessing. My oldest dd ended up reading largely by sight even though I taught her strictly by phonics (turned out she didn't have sufficient enough phonemic awareness skills to be able to learn to read phonetically). She's a voracious reader - I couldn't imagine not letting her read on her own until we dealt with it - and so she's kept on reading, mostly by sight, as we work on her phonetic skills, both in reading and in spelling. And I've noticed her start to use the skills we are working on in her lessons on her own :thumbup:. It seems to lag a few months behind where we are in our lessons - either that they need time to sink in, or for her to become sufficiently practiced at them, or whatever. But they *are* transferring :).

You can copy the kids' worksheets for use within the family with WWE. (Or you can buy a pdf of the kids' worksheets and print them out.) Meaning you only need one copy of each level - you don't have to re-buy for each kid. I also look to buy them used on Amazon - to get a definitely clean copy you only save $5 or so off the new price on Amazon, but every little bit counts - I got WWE 1, 2, 3 for an average of $20 each, including shipping. I have the instructor's text (also available used, for a decent discount), and I thought it was pretty well laid out wrt what to look for, but in practice I needed open and go - I just didn't have the time or energy to do any prep. I'm very pleased with WWE 2 - no-prep open and go, and both dd9 and I like the selections chosen. (In fact, she wanted to read the entire books the selections were taken from - I just got a few from the library for her. It makes for a nice lit list for independent reading - bit more complex vocab and sentence structure than usual for books aimed at her age group.) ETA: Also, it would be entirely doable to write the work on a separate sheet - for the most part all the kids' workbook pages are just lined paper with a themed line drawing (plus the copywork passage typed out), and so it wouldn't be much trouble at all to do the work on your own paper. (Sometimes that's not so true - for example, the student workbook for FLL3 saves a lot of time and trouble compared to doing the work on your own paper - but for WWE I think it's very doable.)

Agree with pp that his expectations are whacked - jumping from fun twaddle-y entertainment reads straight to Shakespeare is a recipe for disaster at 18 or 28, let alone at 8 (setting aside the question of whether there is or isn't a place for fun entertainment reads in life). There is a lot to be said for gradually ramping up the difficulty with school books ahead of time - like the idea of reading the "1,000 Good Books" in preparation for reading the Great Books. My 9th grade Pre-AP English class took a boot camp approach to getting a bunch of unprepared-for-the-classics kids up to speed - we slogged through several of the "easier" 19th century classics in quick succession, which did work in terms of getting us classics-ready fast, but also ruined those novels for pretty much everyone, probably for life. My dd9 is like me - reads everything she gets her hands on, easy and hard, twaddle-y and classic (and I was the only person who actually enjoyed our boot camp books - apparently voracious reading of everything was decent enough prep). She's really enjoyed the Young Reader's Shakespeare series - illustrated retellings of the plays that incorporate a lot of the classic lines. We have all the ones out, and she has good feelings about Shakespeare because of them. She's also enjoyed the illustrated classics series - she's interested in whaling because of reading the abridged version of Moby Dick. We do WWE and I use the selections as a book list - dd9 is usually thrilled to read the whole thing, and the language is more complicated than the more modern twaddle she reads a lot of. I do have "school reading time", where she has to pick from one of our school book shelves (there's 7 - I'm kind of a bookaholic), but she reads from school shelves other times, too.

My dd9 is a struggling (but improving) speller. We do WWE, too, and I do the dictation as studied dictation. On copywork days, I have her mark up the passage with our spelling program's markings (Spelling You See, in our case) before she copies it. And on dictation days, I have her study the marked up passage, pointing out any tricky words, before doing the dictation. Maybe it would help to go over the passage AAS-style (build the words, mark the words, IDK exactly how AAS works) before the dictation. (Especially because WWE might have words whose phonograms/rules haven't been learned yet in AAS.)

Going along with that thought, most irl women's groups I've been in take overt disagreement, even polite overt disagreement, as a declaration that the disagree-er sees the disagree-ee as holding a position that is beyond acceptable boundaries - iow, overt disagreement means that the disagree-er is willing to break the relationship (such as it is) over this issue - it's not an agree-to-disagree thing (or else you wouldn't have been overtly disagreeing in the first place). Rather, acceptable disagreement involves first overtly affirming *something* worthy in what the other person said - overtly showing that we are all on the same side, that relationships are firmly in place - before moving into a positive statement of a position that is somewhat or entirely in disagreement with what the other person said, but without overtly making a point of the fact that there is disagreement. I joke with dh about "how women disagree" - saying that you totally agree, and then explain by saying the exact opposite :lol: - and it's kind of like that, sometimes, but the more I pay attention, the more I see nuances and subtleties and appreciate how it keeps the relationship at the forefront, allowing disagreement but keeping it secondary to the sense that we are all together in this. It's a learned language for me, though - I was the person obliviously overtly disagreeing left, right, and yonder, not realizing how it was taken by others - that they took it more to heart than I meant it. I figure it's a good practice to make sure I find *something* that I can see as genuinely worthy in the other person's position before disagreeing - at the very least, it's a point of commonality, which is always helpful.

My 9yo dd has read and enjoyed the Young Jedi Knights series, by Kevin J Anderson and Rebecca Moesta (although they don't match Force Awakens), the novelizations of the movies, the Jedi Apprentice series (about a young Obi-Wan, set prior to Phantom Menace), the Jedi Quest series (about a young Anakin, set between Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones), and Timothy Zahn's Heir to Empire trilogy (also doesn't match Force Awakens, but they are so dang awesome everyone ought to read them ;)).

No idea about common core, but Singapore Math does all of grade one that way (add/sub up to 100), using mental math techniques, and even after teaching the standard algorithm has occasional chapters using mental math techniques.

What kind of review are you doing with him? (I subscribe to the school of thought that initially learning something is only the beginning - long term retention takes review done over time. I don't bother with history, but for where I *am* working on long-term retention, I use Simply Charlotte Mason's review system (it's focused on memory work, particularly Scripture memory work, but I use it to schedule review of *anything* I want to get into long-term memory.)

In AP English, I was definitely stronger in the multiple choice section than with essays (I was very limited in my ability to analyze literature on my own - I couldn't usually come up with the answer myself, but I could recognize it when I saw it). I think it is generally easier to recognize the right answer (as you do with multiple choice) than to generate the answer yourself, in your own words - there's a lot more thinking involved in sorting and organizing all the information in your head and then putting it all into logical, coherent sentences. How does he do with narration and dictation, and with summarizing and outlining?

Dekodiphukan's sound pictures aren't really mnemonics - they are pictorial representations of the sound itself (grr'ing dog for/r/ and hissing snake for /s/) - but they've been so helpful in teaching reading and spelling here. (I don't remember the arguments against mnemonics so I'm not sure if the pictures being of the *sound* itself instead of a mnemonic to remember the sound is significant or not - I sort of think maybe it is, but not sure.)

Glad they are helping :). I don't think it was the learning-via-song thing (the girls sing all the time) but more that auditory learning for kids who seem to have auditory processing issues isn't likely to go all that well ;). (Random thing - the Letter Factory videos don't have closed captioning. Guess it makes sense because it's aimed at non-readers ;), but I know this because my oldest puts captioning on for everything (so do I - much, much easier to process auditory input with the additional visual input) and tried to do so for the LeapFrog videos, only to find it was a no-go :(). Also, the whole "put sounds together to make words" thing turned out to be hugely difficult for my girls - oldest dd knew her letter sounds since she was two, but she didn't figure out that /c/ /a/ /t/ put together makes /cat/ - that they were the same thing - till she was past 6 (after much work on both our parts). (That was what I was hoping she'd learn from LeapFrog, but it ended up taking a *lot* more than a video alone could offer.)

We've watched the Leap Frog Letter Factory videos umpteen zillion times, and nothing they learned (if they learned anything) transferred at all to reading. Didn't do any harm, either - it was just completely ineffective all the way around. Kind of disappointing, because they get such rave reviews, but oh well. Makes me glad I treated them as entertainment instead of letting them be part of school time, though.

The words you said she misspelled are mostly base words+prefixes/suffixes - was her mistake in spelling the base word, or in correctly adding the prefix/suffix? Megawords is for her age range - it teaches spelling through teaching how to add prefixes and suffixes to base words, and it's supposed to be good at building up missing skills in breaking words into syllables - people improve their reading and pronunciation as well as their spelling. That might be a program to look into. The bolded is me and my entire family - voracious readers, and our ability to correctly pronounce words we learned in our reading is next to nil. Dd9 has that plus major spelling trouble. For us, this was due to low phonemic awareness - particularly difficulty blending and manipulating sounds - which caused difficulties with applying phonics knowledge. (Phonics knowledge describes the connection between written language and spoken language, and since our oral language skills are shaky, we're correspondingly limited in how we can apply them to written language.) My family's *really* bad here - my dds both failed the Barton pre-screening (which measures whether a student has enough phonemic awareness skills to be able to learn to read phonetically), although my older dd was in fact already reading voraciously in spite of that. But you don't have to be *that* bad to have a few struggles. Anyway, things that are helping here: *REWARDS reading - it teaches all sorts of helpful skills: orally blending syllables together, breaking multisyllabic words into parts, reviewing multi-letter vowel phonograms, and reading long words using morphographs (breaking words into base words and added prefixes/suffixes). I got an old edition used on amazon for under $20 for teacher's edition and student book combined. *Using the sound pictures from Dekodiphukan (Decode-if-you-can) to practice/remediate blending. Dekodiphukan is a free reading program, available for downloading/printing and as a series of iPad apps, that teaches reading through intuitive sound pictures (for example, there's a buzzing bee for /z/ and a girl eating yummy honey for /m/). Eleven's a bit old for the rhyming story that introduces the sound pictures, but my already-reading oldest enjoyed it, as well as the puzzle aspect of decoding words written in sound pictures. She's learning cursive and covertly remediating blending skills by writing words that are written in sound pictures - I'm writing up all the words in her old reading program (current reading program for my middle) in sound pictures, so she is forced to learn them phonetically. (I taught her via phonics, but as it turned out she didn't have the PA skills necessary to learn to read via phonics, and she ended up reading mostly by sight, haphazardly applying her formal phonics knowledge to decoding unfamiliar words, with high success when the word is in her oral vocabulary, but with iffy success when it isn't.) *Spelling You See's visual marking system. Dd9 isn't good at breaking wholes into parts, so she doesn't perceive the details of the words when she reads and so doesn't learn to spell that way, and with her iffy PA skills, she can't orally break the word down and spell it that way. Marking words with SYS's color-coded system (yellow for multi-letter vowel phonograms, purple for r-controlled vowels, green for y-as-a-vowel, blue for multi-letter consonant phonograms, orange for silent letters, and red/pink for prefixes/suffixes (we've added brown for blends, because dd9 can't break them down to save her life)) has done wonders for getting her to focus on the individual parts of the word and learn them. IDK if this would be much different than the Spalding marking she already knows, though. ETA: We do studied dictation, where I have her mark up the passage with the SYS markings (Spalding markings would work, too) and copy it one day, and the next day have her study the marked-up passage and then dictate it to her.

I love those sound pictures so much I want to marry them :lol:. I've probably gotten the most use out of the sound picture font they have - I made magnetic tiles plus the spelling chart plus all the flashcards (plus a bunch of stickers so the kids could write in sound pictures, but those haven't gotten much use yet). The font format is old, but I was able to find a free web app to convert it to a true-type font. I'll have to see if I can upload the true-type font file somewhere - it was somewhat annoying to convert, but totally worth the effort :thumbup:. And the story is really cute and effective - I had most of the sounds memorized after the second or third go-around, and I've probably read it a dozen times and I'm not tired of it. (Also, the iPad app can read the story aloud to the kids, which is also very helpful.)

Another option is Dekodiphukan (Decode-if-you-can) - it teaches reading by introducing intuitive sound pictures for each sound through a rhyming story (for example, there's a buzzing bee for /z/, and a girl eating yummy honey for /m/). It teaches blending two and then three sound pictures together to make a word, and transitions to print through using a chart that has all the spellings for each sound picture, color-coded (white for most-used spelling, and then down the rainbow for second, third, fourth, etc. spellings). It's offered for free on the web - you can download and print some or all of the activities, plus they have also put together a user-friendly set of iPad apps. We've only dabbled in the apps, but we've read the story several times and I use the sound pictures heavily with our main reading/spelling program (and have made my own sound-picture-to-spelling chart, that we use in conjunction with the Spelling You See markings) - they've been *extremely* helpful with my phonemic awareness-challenged kids. Sound pictures forced my whole-word-reading oldest to learn to blend, and it was much easier for my middle to learn to blend together sound pictures then to blend together letters - we work through each new word in sound pictures before working through it in print (I made sound picture tiles, like AAS's phonogram tiles - they go together very nicely). I've made 400 and counting flashcards for reading/spelling with the word in sound pictures (and coded to match our spelling chart) - the girls do 20 a day for spelling/reading practice (cursive reading and writing practice for my oldest). I tried teaching phonograms with all the different sounds to my maybe-dyslexic oldest, and it confused the heck out of her. She needed to work on one sound-one spelling for quite a while before she was able to make the leap.

At my university, it was easier to be accepted into the engineering college than it was to switch into it after you were enrolled. So my sister applied as an engineering major, even though she wasn't sure, and later switched to a math major (which was easy - she was welcomed with open arms ;)).

I was on Wellbutrin for a few months, and I felt awesome - like my old self, the one who had energy and ambition and managed to *do* things without it feeling like a huge production. (But it did react very badly with my birth control pill, when I started that, which is why I went off the Wellbutrin. In retrospect I probably should have stopped the pill instead.) I agree with all the pp about not making major decisions while depressed :grouphug:. I was majorly depressed in college (I was unable to make the transition to college-level study habits), and I fantasized about running away, from college and my family (who was trying to help me get better, only I didn't want to do the hard work to get better), and be *forced* by being all on my own to somehow magically get it together and be able to work hard without the hard work of *learning* to work hard. Fortunately I never got it together enough to actually *try* that, but I was so desperate to escape the hell my life currently was and my perception was *so* blinded by the depression, that it genuinely seemed like a good plan. I did not realize how much the depression was affecting my perception until I'd gotten out of the black hole - I knew things were "bad" and that I'd changed because of it all, but I had *no clue* just *how* far I'd fallen until I was mostly out of it. Right now I manage my SAD with light therapy, vitamins (multi, B complex, omega3s), daily exercise (walk plus T-Tapp), healthy-ish eating (more protein, less carbs, low sugar and low processed foods), and getting sufficient sleep (8-9 hours a night), all integrated into my overall life of faith. When I stay up on it, I do fairly well; when I was catching up from a month of too-little light (before I got my therapy lamp), I felt like I was one step from falling over the edge, but after a month or so, I built up enough of a reserve that I feel fairly stable. However, I do believe that the nature and demands of modern life has made depression more prevalent, and has removed many of the supports that used to be in place for dealing with it naturally. My understanding is that, ideally, you use meds to give you an artificial boost of energy, so that you are *able* to build up a natural framework for dealing with depression. I mean, this year I planned to buy a therapy lamp in August, because by the time I *need* the lamp, I'm too far gone to be able to deal with *buying* the lamp (it's why I didn't get one the year before - I was looking in Nov, and it was already too late - I didn't realize how bad I am after just a month of not enough light until this year, when I started using my lamp mid-Oct, and after a month of use I realized how much *better* I was feeling). Anyway, this is getting away from me, but ideally, depression meds are supposed to boost you far enough out of the depression hole that you are able to make lifestyle changes that will themselves keep the depression at bay. Once the lifestyle changes are habitual, then you can step off the meds. Sometimes (not always) I think that people use meds to enable themselves to keep going in an unsustainable lifestyle, and so if they try to get off them, of course they crash right back down - the meds were the only thing keeping them going. (I believe that depression (and anxiety) are often signs that our lifestyle is hurting us - when we change our life, we can relieve (some of) the pressures that brought on the depression. On a micro level, I find that too much internet time messes me up emotionally. Combine this with a habit to ignore life via internet surfing when I feel down, and you have a recipe for a quick spiralling down. Recognizing the first signs of emotional problems and responding to that by finding something better to do (for me, a productive task to sink my whole body and mind into for at least 30min) can stop the whole cycle in its tracks :thumbup:.)

My dd9 isn't nearly as good of a speller as your ds, but this is exactly what I have her do with WWE copywork/dictation and any other copywork/dictation we do (except we are using the Spelling You See marking system instead of WRTR-style markings). We are going through a formal spelling program as well, because there's still a lot for dd9 to *learn* (and we add in each new thing she learns into our copywork/dictation marking system). Basically, I think of the formal spelling program as how she *learns* all the components to spelling - phonograms and syllables and how to break apart and put together words into their syllables and sounds, along with prefixes/suffixes and how to add them to base words - and studied dictation as where she *practices* spelling and spelling analysis. Do you think your ds needs more advanced spelling tools, or do you think he already has all the tools he needs to analyze most any word that crosses his path and he just needs to practice them? Personally I'd only do a spelling program if it was teaching him something new (or if you wanted already prepared copywork/dictation, with the passages already marked for you, instead of you needing to be able to analyze the spelling yourself) - if all he needs is to practice using the knowledge he already has, then I don't know that you'd really need anything more than studied dictation using the marking system he's already learned. (And even if you were doing a formal program, I do think there's a lot of benefit in practicing with studied dictation alongside it.)

We're still in the middle of working on cursive with my lefty (dd9 has learned all the letters and is currently practicing on CCVC words - it's a slow process because she has dyslexic/dysgraphic tendencies), but I taught her a slanted hand (Smith-hand) and she naturally writes it vertically. She seems to write fairly smoothly and with fairly good form - it hasn't been a problem. Which is to say, in my limited experience, writing a slanted hand vertically with my lefty occurred naturally and was never a problem, so I'd think going with the program you like and have ought to work fine - I just wouldn't push the slant if it causes problems. (One thing I did was to practice writing with my left hand, so that I had firsthand experience of how to position the paper and my hand, and what problems tend to crop up.)

Yes, I do think that the core of SYS's approach is its "guided copywork" - copying words after you've analyzed them, so that you are guided to see (and copy) the words in logical chunks (instead of letter by letter). I *love* SYS's marking system - I use it with all the copywork/dictation that we do. I think of SYS's approach as a particular kind of prepared dictation, with the marking providing guidance and a visual cue for what to be focusing on. Regular copywork wasn't doing dd9's spelling all that much good - she wasn't taking in the spelling - but incorporating the SYS markings into it has helped her to really *see* all the bits of the words, and she has a lot more success with spelling things in dictation after she's marked and copied it (and I let her study the marked passage, pointing out potentially tricky words, right before doing the dictation). I don't think she really ever saw words as a collection of logical parts before, but as wholes, where the parts were kind of blurry. SYS's marking has brought the individual parts into focus and shown how they fit into the whole word.

A quick googling suggests it's probably because Oprah isn't just doing WW but also made a significant investment in them (bought 10% of their stock).

Different poster, but I'm quite introverted, and I was never that isolated except when I was seriously depressed. I'm generally happy on my own, but I only start actively avoiding social situations and going full-on hermit when depressed. (It's something I have to watch for - when I start dreading going places in general, it's a sign that I'm slipping into depression. And *because* I'm an introvert, it's easy to not notice the change until I wake up one day and realize I forgot what it was like to ever want to leave the house.) (I also completely and utterly neglected keeping up my home/dorm-room/apt while depressed, too. I've never been a great housekeeper, and my living spaces have always been dusty and in a state of cheerful clutteredness, so I didn't realize how *drastic* the change was till I came out of my depressed fog and realized how *huge* the different is between "hardly cleans (but sorta kinda keeps things up)" and "never cleans, never keeps anything up".) I still don't have any close friends outside the family, though. If it weren't for our church, and the visibility that comes with dh being a pastor, I'd have a rough time getting references myself. It's something to think about.

My top bit of advice is to make fastpass reservations. Also, if you have a smart phone or tablet, you can download the mydisneyexperience app, and do all sorts of things on the fly - look up ride line times, look up maps, make or change fastpass reservations.

I've been using the Abacus Adventure app ($1.99, and there's also a free trial version): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/abacus-adventure-1/id568745401?mt=8 The instruction's not quite sufficient if you have no idea how to use an abacus (I have a basic idea and it helps me expand on the instruction for dd9), but the progression is pretty good and you can repeat levels (with different problems) as many times as you want. Whenever dd9 gets stuck, we go back several levels. Usually when we get back to the difficult level it's not so difficult anymore :). One note: if you try out the free version and like it, when you buy the paid version you have to start over from the beginning.

Learning cursive has been a slow process for my maybe-dyslexic lefty. Smith-hand is our program, but I've added a *lot* to it. The program itself teaches four strokes and then teaches letters that use similar strokes together, along with a few practice words. Moving quickly from letters to words, often with two syllables or more (some of which she couldn't spell while writing in print), was a complete no-go for dd9. I ended up moving from individual letters to phonograms (indexed a list of phonograms by Smith-hand lessons), doing about 5 a day (repeating the troublesome ones), which took about three months. Then we moved to CVC words, going through ~260 of them at 20/day, which was relatively easy practice (it was combination spelling and cursive practice - I have all the words written on flash cards in Dekodiphukan sound pictures, so it's kind of like visual dictation ;)). Now we are working through CCVC words, which has been a bit harder. I don't know when she'll move to doing all cursive - some time after we get through all the one syllable words in her old reading program and go through Spelling Through Morphographs (which I think I'm going to require her to do in cursive - we'll see how it goes). (Smith-hand is a slant hand, but I'm pretty sure she writes it mostly vertically.)