I've never used SL, but I followed John's blog for a few years - here's my random musings. JH had a very open mind - he was willing to take seriously almost any view, enough to research it and see for himself whether there might be anything to it. I think he was a bit extra open to contrary views - the very fact a minority view was vilified was enough to catch his interest and kinda slightly predispose him to wanting to find *something* valid in it. In fact, I think overall he wanted to find something worthy in any viewpoint out there - if one person passionately believed and defended something, he wanted to *understand* why it mattered to them, and in understanding it he had a bit of sympathy toward it, however "out there" it was compared to "accepted" views. It made him an interesting blogger, one who had a ton of intellectual honesty and respect for contrary views. But at the same time, I sort of got a sense that those good traits weren't balanced enough by a critical skepticism - that he sometimes crossed the line between being *open* to anything and willing to *believe* anything. IDK, random thoughts I have as I've read various WTM threads on John vs Sarita.

I read it in 10th grade in ps.

My personal definition of overachiever is going above and beyond outside expectations - kind of being internally driven to excel beyond what "needs" to be done. Like Hermione Granger writing three feet on an essay that had a 10 inch minimum. I generally consider it a good thing, and I'm fine with the label - even embraced it at times. Granted, many times people said it in a bemused sort of tone that said, "You're *weird*", but I've also seen weird as a good thing, so people thinking I was weird for having high internal standards (a very good thing in my mind) didn't phase me a bit. There's some potential downsides to an overachieving attitude - namely when you forget that your high standards are *yours* and not other people's, and either try to hold everyone else to your standards instead of the generally accepted ones, or you start thinking other people are holding you to your own standards and feel like you *have* to go above and beyond or else something horrible will happen. That sucks, but imo it's more overachieving run amuck than overachieving itself.

I have a thread on the K-8 board, and a poster suggested I post it here; I'm not sure if there's an issue or not. We have not done a lot of work on handwriting, and I knew that dd7.5 was a bit behind because of it. But now I am wondering if there are more issues than just not enough practice. Today in Sunday school they were supposed to write down the Ten Commandments from memory. Dd7.5 was the only one who didn't finish - she had done two and a half (and the second one was incorrect - she left out all the little words and had a few words out of order); I'm fairly certain it was the writing and not the memory - she reported it that way, too, that everyone else could write faster and neater than she could. And that was more writing in one place (and neater, too) than I generally see her do - she starts out with boundless enthusiasm for her own projects and generally runs out of steam after the first line. She taught herself how to write the alphabet when she was 4, and her writing is not much better now than then. At Christmas I decided to focus on writing, and did a refresher on the alphabet (which did improve her neatness some, but maybe only in comparison to herself). Then I went to move into short sentences for copy work, but she balked at writing sentences - wanted to do just words. I started spelling to hit both handwriting and spelling, but in the process discovered that her phonemic awareness issues are bad enough that, even though she reads at a 4th or 5th grade level, she failed the Barton pre-screening test, so I bought LiPS and am reading through it to learn how to teach it. So in the meantime, I dropped spelling but wanted to continue with handwriting. So I restarted copy work. She's not a fan, and spends more time doing anything but copying, and her stamina is about five words. It's hard to judge how long it takes, what with all the playing, but I think it's at least one minute per word when actually writing (maybe faster for a three letter word). Again, she usually stops between letters, so it's hard to tell. (It was the same when we were doing spelling, even with me right there redirecting her back as soon as she got distracted.) She's my oldest, and I have no experience with how handwriting ought to be. It's not surprising she's slower than her peers, because we don't do nearly the volume of writing the ps does, but should she be *this* slow? And is there any sort of practice that will be more helpful than others in getting her up to speed? Eta: I've wondered a bit about stealth dyslexia, as she has some signs of it.

Watching her attempt to copy the first commandment over the course of 10 minutes and stopping with five words written, handwriting itself seems hard for her. (She's a lefty, if that makes any difference.) Wrt OT screening, what should I look for in terms of "not enough practice" versus "problem practice alone isn't going to solve"? (I'll look up what our insurance will cover, but anything it doesn't is going to be out of reach.) Also, we didn't do a formal handwriting program. Worth doing now?

I wondered. But is it really harder to write one four word sentence than to write four separate words? Genuinely asking here. I'm not seeing it, but dd7.5 definitely acted like multiple single words were easier than one sentence, so....

Ok, I just asked her, and she wrote them (or tried to) from memory. She said she was the only person who didn't finish (she only got part way through the third commandment), and she was sad about it plus sad that her writing was "squiggly" compared to the other students' neat writing. I'm pretty sure the memory part wasn't the issue - I've heard her recite them (although now that we are practicing, she asked me what the first commandment was, so...) - but the writing them part. Ugh. I feel pretty low now. And I'm being reminded of all the reasons that we don't get to writing, as dd5 must be involved (so I have to give her something to copy), and dd7.5 is stealing dd5's pencil and writing on her paper, and ds2.5 is getting into everything, and everyone is screeching and the girls are talking more than writing and now dd5 is scribbling on dd7.5's paper :gah. How long should it take for a 7.5yo to write a five word sentence? It's really hard to tell with her, because it takes too long, but so much of that is because she is doing everything *but* writing. But it probably takes her at least a minute to write one small word, which does seem long now that I think about it. And when she tries to speed up it looks messy fast.

Never really had a reason to think there was a vision issue (and I've read a lot of the threads here on such). But auditory processing issues have been on my radar ever since I found out that my mom's inability to sound out a word from a dictionary pronunciation guide was more than just "not getting phonics". Both mom and I have some signs of auditory processing issues, and with dd7.5's phonemic awareness issues, it was on my radar. But when I read over the characteristics of the various subtypes of auditory processing disorder, none of them really stick out. I've wondered dyslexia, because dd7.5 has some of the markers for that, and learning to read was hard for her until something clicked. But she always seems to be hovering on the edge of having an issue, and makes a jump just as I'm waffling about if there's a real issue (and on her PA issues it seems the jump was her learning to compensate).

We haven't done much in the way of writing thus far. And dd7.5's writing skills aren't very good. I've been assuming there was a very direct connection between the two ;). But now, as I've started doing copywork with her, I am wondering if there's a bit more than just not being taught much and not writing much. I've read a lot of the stealth dyslexia threads, and I see a lot of her there. Dd7.5 taught herself how to write the alphabet around age 4 and 5, and her writing now isn't much better than then. I ran through the alphabet over Christmas with her (which has helped her handwriting become more even) and I explicitly taught her about using her finger to space words (she'd run them together otherwise), and then tried to start copywork, but she balked at even 4 word sentences - wanted individual words. So I dropped copywork and tried to do spelling with her, but we had issues and it turns out her phonemic awareness is bad enough that she failed the Barton pre-screening. So I bought LiPS and am reading up on it, and dropped spelling for now. But I didn't want to give up on writing altogether, so I restarted copywork. She resists it - says it's hard - but she can do a short sentence. She does write on her own, but not as much as she used to - she just can't write what's in her head and it frustrates her (it's what prompted me to get off my duff and make writing a priority right now). She does do better on the iPad than handwriting - I don't know if that's because of the physical act of writing or what. I've pulled out my copy of The Writer's Jungle and have thought about buying Jot it Down, to keep on with the creative and thinking part of writing while we work on mechanics. WRT oral narrations, she resists telling me when I ask, but often narrates spontaneously (and very well), as well as incorporates what she reads and what I read to her into her play, so I don't know if that's an issue or not. Anyway, what prompted this post is that today she brought home some work from Sunday school, where she'd been copying down the Ten Commandments. The First Commandment is fine (and in fact we've done that as copywork at home), but the Second Commandment had several small words missing and had some of the words out of order, and generally didn't make sense. ("You shall misuse the name your God" was what she had.) Her handwriting and spacing was pretty good, though. And I was wondering if that is just inexperience or something more than that. (Although I wonder if it was from dictation rather than copywork, which with her PA issues could definitely be an issue.) Because I thought her phonemic awareness issues had improved when really she just got better at compensating for them. I've been sounding out words for her to spell since she was 4, and she *still* can't break down a word into phonemes on her own (thus the LiPS). I don't want to assume she just needs time and "regular" practice if she actually needs something more (that's what I thought with the PA issues, and I was wrong - she learned to read well without ever picking up those skills). But otoh, she's not had a lot of practice writing. To *me* missing those "little" words and writing the words out of order seems like more than just needing practice. But she's my first, so I don't really know what is typical.

I always knew I was at the top of the school, intelligence-wise, and I was in the gifted program (such as it was), but I didn't really get the magnitude of the difference until everyone took the SAT junior year and I apparently had the highest score by far (in a large suburban high school). My friends (all smart) reacted weirdly (and the fact my score was over 100 points higher than the next highest score in our group really surprised me) and my score caused one of my teachers to see me differently - because of it, he tried to dissuade me from going to one of the state flagship universities. Idk, my score didn't surprise *me*, because I knew I was capable of it, and it really surprised me that it surprised everyone else, and that people "in the know" looked at me a bit differently.

Yep, like that :). Or having a full-fledged movie playing. If you *see* anything in your mind's eye as you read, it counts for the purposes of this poll :).

In The Gift of Dyslexia, the author implies that people who comprehend via hearing the words spoken in their mind are auditory-sequential learners, and people who comprehend via seeing pictures are visual-spatial learners (and that people who do neither would have some serious issues with reading comprehension). And of course people can be both auditory-sequential *and* visual-spatial. I do both, and I do have both auditory-sequential and visual-spatial traits. Tangential, but I read on the boards about a student who seemed very auditory-sequential, but after she had vision therapy it turned out she was actually much stronger visual-spatially, only because of the vision issues she couldn't use those strengths, and so had compensated with her turned-out-to-be *weaker* auditory-sequential skills. I used to think I was a very visual learner, but now I'm wondering if some of that was me compensating for auditory processing weaknesses. Because for all that purely auditory input is a real weak point for me, and in fact I learned to read via whole words (which is supposed to favor visual-spatial strengths), I *cannot* read a word that I can't "hear" in my head. Simply can't - I have to stare and puzzle and ponder until I can figure out *some* sort of consistent pronunciation. And that has auditory-sequential written all over it. (And that combined with my auditory processing issues has caused some real problems with learning Greek.) Of course, as it turns out, I can't comprehend without being able to picture what I read, either. (Learned *that* doing Orberg's Lingua Latina. Foreign language learning is bringing out all my language weaknesses it seems.) And that has taught me that consciously visualizing what I read is actually a weak point for me. Which makes me wonder if it's not so much that I'm hugely visual, but that I've been using my relatively weaker visual-spatial skills to compensate for my auditory processing issues - that my auditory strengths are hidden because of the processing issues. In any case, in English the dual auditory and visual comprehension seems to complement each other - any glitches in one is made up for by the other, and in general comprehension is easy. But in foreign languages it's the opposite - I seem to need both at full power - and it's showing all the deficits I never was aware of before.

I can - I'm a night owl, and I enjoy driving the midnight-5am shift. And with small children it's an awesome way to do long drives, because they sleep for most of it. It lets us do an 18 hour drive with littles in one go, instead of taking two days. But it only works if we are going to visit family, because then our parents can watch the kids while dh and I sleep; otherwise we take two days (or sometimes three days, coming back, if the kids are having problems traveling). I grew up in a family that did 24 hour drives in 24 hours, so it's normal for me; although when my parents hit their 40s, they decided they were too old for driving all night, and we did 18 hours the first day, stopped for 6 hours of sleep, and did 6 hours the second day, which put us in just after lunch instead of just before breakfast. (And, as my parents pointed out, since they slept till lunch when we drove straight through, it was all about the same in terms of time spent with family anyway.)

Both of them failed part C, and dd5 also completely bombed part A (she counted phrases instead of words, and not consistently at that - it looked like she pulled down counters whenever she happened to pause in saying the sentence), while dd7.5 passed part B by the skin of her teeth - it probably doesn't really count as a pass, come to think of it. Dd5 rocked part B, though, which surprised me somewhat. And part C was really hard work for both of them - they were both tired by the end of it - and both felt really uncertain on several of them, looked to me for reassurance they were on the right track, even if they did have them right. This doesn't surprise me, honestly, although my 7.5yo is actually reading around a grade 4 or 5 level despite it, and loves to read, reads all the time. I taught her phonetically, and it was slow going until something clicked, but she still guesses like crazy and is in fact scary good at it. And her visual memory is phenomenal. She can somehow decipher any word, however long, that is in her spoken vocabulary, so long as she sees it in context. And she will remember it forever. But she can't sound out an unfamiliar multi-syllable word to save her life, and she sometimes can't put together syllables to make a word she does know - keeps adding or subtracting sounds, or miss ordering the syllables. I had started REWARDS to help with this, but now I am wondering if I should hold off on it until we do LiPS (just ordered it - I'd long thought it would be a good thing for us, but it was too expensive to order unless we actually needed it, and the screening results seem to show that in spades). Dd5 is desperate to learn to read, but can't blend to save her life, and the screening confirms the difficulty distinguishing sounds that I'd noticed. I have no idea what failing part A indicates, though, nor what I should do to help with it. We'd actually been doing that very exercise, from a phonemic awareness book, and I thought she had the idea better than she did - in retrospect I did have to correct her quite a bit, but she seemed to get it on the second go around. Seeing just how badly she did when I wasn't helping was a wake-up. Thoughts?

Depression complicated my problems. I hit what I thought was rock bottom multiple times, and found each time that, yes indeedy, I *could* fall farther. I had to completely get out of the triggering environment (school, for me) to stop falling, and I still wallowed around at the bottom for years before starting to get better. Even now, I still can't handle the core triggers, but I've arranged my life to avoid them, and I'm getting stronger baby step by baby step. But, yeah, my refusing to learn mystified *me*, and I was the one doing it, so I can only imagine how incomprehensible it looked from the outside. Cured me of my "logic is king" attitude, though, as I persisted in doing illogical-to-me things no matter how stupid I told myself it was - and it was stupid - and so was brought face to face with the reality that, clearly, logic isn't everything.

Well, I dropped out of college and spent years in a serious depression, but I eventually got it. Ten years later, here I am, facing the same lessons as before - only this time I am learning from past errors, instead of persisting in hoping that change will magically happen without me having to do anything different. It's possible :grouphug:.

EndofOrdinary, that's it exactly - I'm looking for a *starting* place. Or, more accurately, I'm looking for ways of making choosing a starting place more of an informed choice than a WAG ;).

:lol:

:lol: Yep, I went from knowing all the things (before I started) to knowing none of the things. I tell myself that it's really progress, because it means that I am closer to wisdom than I was ;).

SarahW, after our spelling program (R&S grade 2) crashed and burned, I ended up impulse-buying Spelling Through Morphographs (used at 75% off the list price, which manages to both feel like a real bargain while still being spendy in real dollars) on the same principle. I'm sort of hoping remedial for upper grades will move at a good clip with harder words and so will fit her better, although I know that people have found the opposite (still too easy and also above interest level). We'll see, anyway (I know the odds are that StM is a mistake, but one I should be able to sell for the same price I paid for it). Quark, I feel a bit like my middle right now, "I'm not a patient person!" :tongue_smilie:. Thanks for the encouragement :). It's good to remember there's no magic bullet - that it's always going to be hard work no matter how experienced I get at it (like parenting ;)). But that like parenting, accumulated experience is a big, big help, too. I remember the difference in how I felt when I brought dd7.5 home as a newborn ("they are trusting me with this child?!") and when I brought ds2.5 home.

It's my oldest, the 7.5yo. Thanks for the encouragement :grouphug:. Love the idea of just 15min mandatory, and continuing further if dd wants. I have a nasty habit of doing too much and then burning either me or dd or both of us out :doh. Now that I've gotten some of my angsting out ;), some ideas have occurred to me. I know the general sentiment was against the method in the "early radical acceleration" thread, but I thought that sounded really helpful, actually. My problem in math is that she knows some unknown amount beyond where we are, but not everything, and I need a method to move ahead faster (because she needs it badly) without ending up with a ton o' holes. And since doing it casually is still too slow (I've some hang-ups with wanting to do all the things, or some defined subset of all the things), getting some concrete data on what she does and doesn't know - and then filling in the holes before moving on - sounds really awesome, tbh. I was thinking that maybe I could use the sinagpore placements tests as the pre-test, and use the book's reviews for the post-test. IDK, it's not that I'm wanting to zoom ahead, sacrifice depth for speed, but she's spinning her wheels here, and this approach seems like it would help with the lack of data issue that is plaguing me so much. I might try it, see if it helps some, anyway, especially since my weakness is going too slow, not too fast.

I don't post much, but I just wanted to say that you are one of the posters I really respect - so very interesting and thoughtful, while also being polite and encouraging. When I read something of yours, I don't just see more possibilities than I could see before, but I feel inspired (and able) to actually go do it myself :). Your posts show us more *and* show us how we, too, can get there, if we want :grouphug:.

I always thought it would be easy-peasy to just follow my child, whatever her level, but I'm actually really struggling with it. I did fine when she was struggling with learning to read and we went slower than the book's pace, and I did fine when her pace and the book's pace coincided, and I did ok modifying things when she had her first leap and started outstripping the book, but that second leap of hers did me in, and I haven't felt on top of things since, in any subject. Stuff for the "typical child" goes like this: I place her, first day is hard, second day is just right, and third day starts at easy and ends at mindnumbingly easy - and that's in subjects that are "hard" for her. Yet she doesn't actually *know* the skills I haven't taught, so I'm hesitant to skip her ahead, but she masters things so dang *quick*, and hates doing easy things, that I've found it impossible - for me, anyway - to modify things *enough*. And so I drop stuff when it hits too easy and wing it for a while, but that's so haphazard and gets us nowhere that I look for structure, pick up a curriculum, place her, and within a week it's too easy and we drop it - again - and go back to winging it. Lather, rinse, repeat. IDK, compacting curriculum is easy in theory but is really, really hard for me in practice. The just-right level where we get "a-ha" moments changes by the day, and I feel like I need more than just winging it, yet absolutely nothing works as written, or even with minor modifications. I'm getting better at recognizing "this is too easy" behavior - and acting on it - and I'm letting dd judge the amount and difficulty of practice she needs, and encouraging her to change midstream if she realizes it's now too easy or too hard. On Thursday this was partly successful (she chose to start with IP, and then chose to drop back to the wb) and partly unsuccessful because it turned out the hard part was learning SM's particular format for showing intermediate steps, because the steps they wanted shown were so obvious to her that she overthought it like crazy and couldn't figure it out. And I didn't realize that until we'd spent 20 increasingly frustrating minutes on it. Basically, the majority of math that day was learning a particular method of bookkeeping that they phase out anyway :banghead. Which is the opposite of what I want to be doing. And it happens too much of the time - she struggles, and I slow down, drop back, review - when it turned out I needed to move forward, instead. I feel like I'm groping in the dark, wildly guessing about where to go next, and while I've found a few glimmers of a path, mostly it's a bunch of false starts. What I *have* found, that I'm clinging to as the *only* things that make any sense in figuring out what she needs: *"a-ha moments" are my best judge of "just right", both because too hard and too easy look the same sometimes, and because those moment are what learning is *about*. And I really worry about screwing her up by making school too boring for too long (in the mindnumbingly easy sense, not in the "lack of hoopla" sense). So, if we aren't getting a-ha's, I need to examine why. *I'm making a big effort to include her in determining if something is too easy or too hard, and I'm doubling down on emphasizing that school and learning are supposed to *make sense*. She'll start wildly guessing sometimes after too long of not getting something (usually when she's not getting something because the answer is just too obvious to be right), to make the problem go away, and that's pushes all my John Holt inspired buttons. Idk, it is just so vital to me that she not give up on school things making sense - that way leads to much badness - and given that all my fumbling around and going too slow has given lots of opportunities for "school answers" to seem ridiculous, I'm trying to make that explicit far more than I'm accidentally showing her that school learning asks for stupidly obvious things. Ugh, I never thought I'd have this problem - I really thought following the child would be as easy in academic things as it was when they were babies and toddlers and such (or even behavior issues now). But it's not, because while I can tell when things are wrong, I suck-diddly-uck at figuring out what's exactly wrong and what to do about it. And I'm not used to not getting things - I'm usually really good at finding just the right info right away to solve things, or at least get me started on finding a solution. But I'm fumbling in the dark here, and I've been doing it for the past year.

I want to third the rec for this link - so very much better than the "bright = achieving *within* the system", "gifted = achieving *out of* the system" stereotypes that litter the web - she explicitly allows kids to cross categories, to belong to one, some, all, or none of her three categories of high achieving, gifted, and creative.

This is to do with me, not my dc, but I put it here instead of in HS/Self-Ed because I thought more people here would be familiar with the program. I don't visualize particularly well - it's more hazy images, like a faded watercolor merged with a sketch of very few lines - more of a faint visual suggestion than an actual image . And it's very abstract at that - I *feel* that the hazy images in my mind mean "frog" or whatever, but there is almost zero recognizable "frog" imagery involved. But in any case it usually does the job. I only have to stop and visualize slowly and deliberately in very action-packed sequences that involve a decent bit of spatial changes (spatial skills are meh). So my comprehension is fine - in *English*. (Also, only in writing - I can't follow anything remotely complicated or unfamiliar that's aural without visual clues - simply can't process the words and turn them into an image fast enough.) But as I've been trying to learn Latin with Oerberg's Lingua Latina - which teaches through a running storyline completely in Latin - I realized that my comprehension was *horrible*, because I wasn't able to visualize the text automatically, and I can't understand anything I can't picture. So I started trying to deliberately visualize it, phrase by phrase, and it works, but it is extremely slow and tiring. I thought of Visualizing and Verbalizing - I wondered if it would help me progress better/faster than with my haphazard attempts. (I'd just be getting the manual to do with myself, too, if that's a factor - if it won't work to do it on yourself or something.) :bigear: