Sylvan doesn't treat that. At least it didn't when I worked for them before I started staying home with the kids. By all means, feel free to call them if inclined, but I don't think their program has anything to do with recommended methods for dyslexia if that turns out to be your child's reading problem, unless they have drastically updated their program since I was there. I've seen their program help many kids, but they aren't a miracle cure for everything. I'm annoyed on your behalf that the psych would suggest that without any testing. All states are federally mandated to do the testing themselves if you request it in writing. Most states are not required to provide services to homeschoolers after the testing, but a few actually do. Here's a link to the homeschooling special needs law state by state, regarding whether they provide services to homeschoolers (and in a few rare states, whether you'll need to submit anything extra in terms of required paperwork to homeschool a child with identified special needs). http://www.hslda.org/strugglinglearner/sn_states.asp Just remember that the initial testing is a federal right, the same in all states. This link is more about what happens after you finally get over that hurdle, but I thought I'd include it while you're in the thick of getting pressured to enroll your child, so that you know your rights and responsibilities as a homeschooler. If you have a Scottish Rite in your state, they may provide testing and help. I think they're free. www.dys-add.org has some good info about symptoms of dyslexia, which won't help you as much as detailed testing, but it can be a good place to start to see whether it sounds familiar, and what to do as a homeschooler to teach your child while you wait for clearer answers.

That's an idea. This coming year is actually 8th grade, so in my mind, I was thinking to explore languages now, before I have to put it on the transcript. I *think* that if I don't stress over quantity completed, we can add it in lightly as one more independent subject...this past year was a struggle, as almost all of everyone's subjects needed me personally. So, this year I'm trying to be intentional about scheduling more ways for her to do extra on her own, while siblings are reading to me, etc. But, if that casual attitude of "go do your language while I'm busy" just doesn't pan out in terms of reinforcing the language enough for retention, on top of the rest of her regular academics, we could just drop it until the end. (I'm having a real war within myself over how I'd teach language ideally for fluency, with lots of interaction and constantly reinforcing lessons, versus whether it's more realistic under our constraints to let this be a year of exploration in which I let her putter through it independently without serious concern over whether or not it sticks as well as it might under heavy-duty effort.) I'll have to keep googling on career quizzes. I haven't had much luck yet with free ones. I've given serious thought to paying for a reputable in-depth one...it just hasn't risen to the top of the budget yet. This is going to be the year where we add some more assistive technology to gain more writing independence, and maybe braces, and maybe an extracurricular that's going to mean buying equipment, but hopefully also a good career quiz soon. We've been going to every free hands-on community activity we can find, but yes...camps would be awesome. I missed a bunch this summer (everything gets advertised through the school, of course), but now I know a couple places to watch for next year.

Well, what I'm thinking is that while the English "a" does sometimes make the same sound in Spanish as in taco...it took us a long, long time to master WHICH sounds the other vowels make instead of making random guesses. So, I'm not worried about whether she could pronounce the Spanish sounds...I'm worried about teaching her to consistently look at the written vowel and mentally produce the sound that it makes in Spanish instead of English, while keeping it compartmentalized to not start doing that while reading English, precisely because they are the same sounds but attached to different vowels. Like the "e" in English rarely ever says the Spanish sound other than in the vowel teams for weigh, neighbor, sleigh, etc. It took a long, long time to train her to see that letter and produce the short e sound in CVC words, and an even longer time to transition into producing the long vowel sound when needed. Ditto for the remaining vowels, with lots of instances of mixing them up, lots of guessing the wrong vowel sound. At least in Japanese, the pictographs look different than letters, so it should stay compartmentalized. I'm just kind of sad that this isn't quite what I'd imagined...I always thought I'd teach my kids Spanish from an early age, and yet we haven't even had time to think about adding electives with all the effort it has taken to remediate dyslexia/dysgraphia. Now that we're at the standard age for introducing a language (later than I'd wished), it most likely won't be Spanish that she learns, if she's even successful at foreign language at all. (The specifics with rote memory, working memory, visual memory, auditory memory, etc., may yet hold her back to be one for whom the exemption is necessary...we'll have to see how this goes.) Maybe I'll learn Japanese with her, just like I've learned to become an unofficial special ed teacher, reading specialist, OT, PT, speech pathologist, etc. (Not that I'm really qualified in all that professionally, but you know what I mean, when you research remediation to death because your kid needs you to know...I'd always wanted to learn a third or fourth language, but...not under this type of pressure.)

This really hits the nail on the head as to what we face. The librarians to whom I've mentioned dyslexia probably think I'm nuts, seeing the steady stream of book series that dd checks out and skims through faster than a typical dyslexic, but I can't even begin to tell you the frustration over single word accuracy, reading letters that AREN'T THERE. Your post was very encouraging. Thank you for sharing your dd's experience.

Unfortunately, despite having had some intentional career exploration discussions over the past couple years, she still hasn't hit upon anything yet as far as intended career, major, university, etc., for us to research specific requirements. The stealth dyslexia (and dysgraphia that is partially motor-based) puts us in a really awkward place. She's very much a kinesthetic learner and feels that she'd prefer a more hands-on career to something that requires a ton of constant written output. Fair enough. Her main interest is animals, but she feels like she might be too squeamish to handle being a veterinarian or other health related careers. Her main hobby lately has been sketching Pokémon characters, including original creations. So, she's got the strength of creativity...but her art generally doesn't come out as well as the picture in her head. So, I'm working on figuring out how to get her more experience with digital art, photography, web design, etc., where she could be creative without having the fine control of a traditional artist, but we're still at the beginning of exploring that. As far as the hands-on trades offered by the local vo-tech school if she decides to go that route instead of a college-based career, we've ruled out construction trades, repair, cosmetology, culinary arts. She's played with computer programing a bit because it was offered as a class locally, but while I'm continuing to encourage exploration of it, I'm also not really seeing that as a great fit with her personality, so I will be surprised if she takes that up as a career. So, kind of just going around in circles at the moment, knowing that she's a bright kid and hoping to keep her options open by giving her a generally good broad education until she hits upon a career path to know where to focus further. For the Spanish, I'm looking at having my elementary and preschool children work through PBS Salsa this year. So, mostly oral...it's video episodes all in Spanish, but with visual context clues, repetition, emphasis, etc. to highlight certain words/concepts. She watched the first couple episodes with us last year, before we were gifted with the Japanese curriculum over the summer. So...it's very young for her, but somewhat effective compared to a written curriculum...the main decision is whether to have her continue to join us, or whether to use the time to listen to her Japanese tapes, or any other age-appropriate work that we aren't doing as a group. I just think that she's going to need a lot of reinforcement to retain any language, and practically speaking, I'm not even sure whether we could keep that up with both ASL and Japanese, let alone with THREE languages for a child who may struggle to learn even one. I'm feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of adding language this year, because I know how much time it really needs to be done well....on top of making decisions about remedial work, writing skills, more challenging curriculum in general. For the person that mentioned Chinese...we actually do have a connection to a native speaker, and it's offered at the local CC. So, in some ways, I feel like that would be an even better choice. But, she isn't as enthusiastic about it as Japanese, and we don't own any curriculum on it. So, I think that yes, it might have to wait until college....if she does well with the Japanese as a pictorial language and finds that Chinese is more readily available and practical, perhaps she'll switch. But I think it's between Japanese and ASL right now. But yes, maybe it will be a springboard to learning Chinese someday...

I believe ours evaluated her as having a "fine motor delay" or working on "fine motor control."

As we gear up into the high school years, my dd with stealth dyslexia is actually excited about potentially learning ASL and Japanese. I keep reading, however, about how dyslexics generally have trouble learning foreign languages and may need documentation in order to get an exemption from them for college, etc. So, we're tentatively looking at these two languages, but I'm nervous and want to talk through long-term plans realistically with those of you who've been there. (Sorry for the lengthy post...skip to the last paragraph if you don't want the remaining details.) First off, I have actually taught Spanish I and II before. But I feel a little sick thinking of trying to teach dd to consistently read the vowels as Spanish sounds considering how long it's taken for her to mostly master them as English vowels. So, I think that's off the table. That said, I'm fluent. I'm thinking to still work on that with at least my one youngr child without dyslexia, but it's going to be weird to not be a group subject. Still, I should keep her out of that, right? Too confusing? So as an alternative, I figured we'd try ASL. I barely know any, but we know a certified ASL teacher who offers community classes, so we took one last spring in 7th grade to explore it. We covered the very basics...greetings, alphabet, numbers, time, feelings, people...a lot less than full semester of an academic class, but a good start, and she seemed to do well. If we go this route, it's probably going to mean checking out every instructional video the library has, watching Signing Time for little kids, exploring that one website for older students, and then trying to dual enroll in community college classes for it after she has a reasonable enough foundation to not be utterly swamped by the pace of Level I. We DON'T live in a large enough area to have very many opportunities for practice outside of CC classes, so that's one downside. Her exposure to actual deaf culture would be virtually nil. And she does have motor planning issues and visual issues, so while it's working so far with actual human interaction, imitation of higher levels from computerized lessons or a less-involved instructor could become more difficult. The third option which just came up...another friend gave us PowerGlide Japanese. Since dd's learning disability is only stealth dyslexia, she actually does binge-read books that come in a series, and one of her current obsessions is Japanese-style (translated into English) comic books (Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh, Bakugan, etc.). So, she is suddenly very excited about this option which I hadn't even considered previously. So far, the intro pages to the PowerGlide are very right-brained and auditory, so she's enjoying the first week of it, on her own initiative, and seems to be doing okay. My concern is that while she actually has reasonable big-picture auditory comprehension when her ADHD isn't getting in the way, her auditory processing of details is affected by the dyslexia. This is my child who still says things like "buh-cept" (except) and "tooken" (taken) and mispronounces the majority of words that she decodes as new vocabulary and then struggles to revise them once given the correct form, and when we're doing phonics, she tells me that some of her errors are more of a praxis issue than decoding...that she knows she's saying it wrong but can't quite make her mouth pronounce the word we're trying to decode. So, I don't know how pronouncing Japanese is going to go, realistically. In terms of local opportunities...it's not offered at the CC, nor is there a community of speakers. So here's my dilemma....do I let her run with Japanese since she's so enthusiastic? Do I press for her to continue with ASL as more realistic? Just doing one is going to be an incredible commitment....I can't possibly keep both of them going simultaneously for a kid who already struggles and already needs a significant amount of time to work on her writing skills in her other coursework, can I? A part of me wonders whether I should even schedule a language for her at all, or whether I should just cut our losses and devote our time to the rest of her REQUIRED work. But, I don't want to short change her if she is capable, or if she can't get an exception later. As a 2E kid who can read on grade level, her official diagnosis thus far is only dysgraphia. But everything I've read and observed myself says it's stealth dyslexia...she makes all the classic decoding errors, has all the trouble with sequencing, directionality, rote memory, etc., but the school wouldn't dx it as dyslexia because it didn't impact her comprehension of a science passage about which she probably could have answered the questions from background knowledge alone. Advice? I feel like we've hit the age where it all matters...where we start building the transcript and hope for the future. It's not helping that we live in a high regulation state where I have to declare in advance what we're going to attempt for the year, and report back on how it's going.

Mine don't work well at night. We can do read alouds, but actual work on something like math or LA, especially if affected by LDs, goes right down the tubes after about 6 or 7pm. Literally, I had an assignment once that we started in the afternoon and tried to finish after dinner which had probably twice the mistakes during the evening hours compared to the portion done earlier. It wasn't a matter of forgetting the material either, I'm talking more about handwriting, spelling, and general retention...the motivation was there to finish it that day, but the quality is better in the morning as long as the kiddo has had time for breakfast and waking up.

I agree with your assessment that the SAT is probably a better tool than the ACT for admissions purposes. A practice ACT might give better info for helping figure out what she actually knows, and if she scores well on it, by all means consider submitting scores as proof that she didn't goof off entirely for high school...but the SAT's emphasis on aptitude instead of achievement is more strategic to submit for a student who might be bright (lots of aptitude) with less actual education (achievement). I like the plan someone suggested earlier about looking further into how the dream school treats transfer students if she were to do CC for an Associates and then attend the dream school for the rest of a 4yr degree, then apply for the Certificate? (Presuming they don't accept her straight into the certificate program after the CC, but certainly apply if they take applicants after 60hrs as someone mentioned about Temple doing.) That way, she'd have the determination of having applied twice, plus the 4yr degree in something related from the dream school, so I'd think that would be enough edge to get her in. In the meanwhile, she'd have a low-cost Associate's degree, if it can be obtained for cheaper than going to either of the 4yrs, or if neither accepts her. The thing about an Associate's degree is that it's still a degree. If life interferes with completing the entire four years in a timely manner....say finances, pregnancy, illness, program changes, anything...people who have an Associates still have a degree, while people in a straight-forward 4yr program have a diploma plus "some college classes." In some ways, I do feel like it can be a disadvantage to have all of one's general ed requirements completed during the first two years, because that really elevates the difficulty level of the next couple years, having to finish all the real major requirements at once with nothing easy to intersperse. But, if she's pretty focused anyhow, maybe it won't be so bad for her to do the CC route to get into the dream school. I think I'd call to inquire a little further about the in-state policies, too, unless the answer is spelled out...specifically, I know that generally residency cannot be established by a student moving to town for less than a year, nor can it be established while attending....BUT, if her mother moves there after retiring like she's talking about, so that it's a family move rather than a student move, I wonder whether there's any exception. Or the idea of going to CC there...that probably won't establish residency, but maybe it's worth asking.

Just an offhand comment from experience as a needy college student...poor kids don't go home 3hrs on the weekend to do laundry. It's a drive you make only on long breaks where the university shuts down...iow, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, Summer. Not saying that to change plans, just adjusting expectations. Plus the whole awkwardness of visiting extended family too often in a way that's imposing. They'll probably welcome her once a year or once a semester when she can't afford to go all the way home, but mostly it will be a matter of learning to do laundry on campus. No biggie, just 3hrs is a considered a long way in PA with all the hills and such...no matter how nice her family is, they won't go pick her up on weekends, because that's 12hrs driving for them round trip for them to fetch her and back, or 6hrs if she finds another student to take her.

I don't think they'd count the father's sate of residency unless they were to transfer custody legally...and even then, there might still be a time requirement. Worth digging up the info from that specific state to be sure, but it seems unlikely without moving there to do her senior year with him.

Since part of this mess is the reorganization of his major...is there anyone else in his major in this same boat? Maybe that's the stone left to be turned. Does he have any summer contact info for any of those particular classmates? Emails, facebook...? That might be the best/safest avenue for hunting down a last minute roommate...reaching out to former cast mates and classmates to make sure to contact everyone he knows, absolutely everyone including people who weren't necessarily close friends, to see whether they've already obtained housing and where, hoping that someone he knows only vaguely is off-campus or still looking. If there's anything still set up electronically...such as a defunct facebook group for the cast of his last performance...maybe posting to the group will still reach some members, or private messaging the individuals. Or maybe if the rehearsal schedule was sent out via email, as long as it was carbon copied to everyone and not blind carbon copied. Any sort of a class directory? People he did group projects with? Understudies that had to be notified if you were going to be absent, or student directors who maybe also needed to be notified?

If you decide to go with a prescription, know that Nystatin is nearly worthless. Over half of cases are resistant to it, just like bacteria is becoming resistant to antibiotics, AND even if it works, the yeast has been found to begin regrowth within 45min, so current recommendations are to coat the mouth every 90min all day. If you go longer than 3hrs overnight, you'll undo your hard work. So, another vote for Gentian Violet if it's just your mouth. If you're feeling it anywhere else, a Diflucan prescription might be better. It's absorbed systematically, so you don't have to take it nearly as often as the Nystatin, and it will help flush the yeast out of the rest of your digestive tract and anywhere else. Just make sure you get the systemic dose that you take for a week or two, instead of the single pill that is prescribed for GYN issues. You can also eat a couple cloves of raw garlic a day as another systemic option, if Diflucan isn't an option for you.

For test prep books, I've had success with an earlier version of Barron's SAT Math Workbook that was good at really breaking down the problems step by step, through remembering how to do fractions and everything else. I'm going to assume the current version is similar, but you'd want to check the sample to see. My favorite overall SAT test prep book, however, was Kaplan's, and it does cover more strategy than the workbook. Again, it was an earlier version, and they change constantly. But, they did a good job of covering both strategy and specific key problem types. I see that Kaplan also produces a Math Workbook, but I haven't used it. Both Kaplan and Barron's are available on Kindle, so you could request the sample Kindle chapter if the Look Inside feature on Amazon doesn't show enough for you to decide between them. ETA: Ftr, I didn't care for Barron's general book, even though I liked the math workbook. Basically, for someone that far behind, I'd have her take the ACT vs. SAT quiz that someone mentioned above, then a sample test of each. Buy a math workbook from one of the major test prep companies to start work immediately, and decide whether her verbal will need the same approach or whether it's strong enough to get away with a general book. Plan on her working through those almost daily right up until the test. Plan on at least 8 hrs (2hrs/wk for a month) of working through the main ideas of a general test prep book, plus time to take at least portions of practice tests every week for that last month or two. (Of course, it's up to her whether she'll put that time in, but those are the timeframes I recall from my days of tutoring professionally. But really, 8-16hr to FLY through the general test prep book together is about as fast as it will go realistically for someone who isn't prepared, and even longer for the depth of the math-specific workbook.) Regarding the transcript, if mom is being this vague...does the student have any recollection of topics studied? Did she ever follow any sort of plan, suggestion, or booklist, even one that she found on her own? I'd pretty much go down through a list of what normal students study and see what rings a bell, as well as having her describe what stands out to her as major interests. So...ancient history? Middle ages? Renaissance? the age of exploration? American history--colonies, revolution, pioneers, civil war, World Wars? History or geography of any other countries? American literature? British literature? Poetry? Drama? What does she read? Algebra, Geometry, Statistics? Biology, chemistry, physics, geology, meterology, botany (gardening?), anatomy and physiology (in her study of martial arts perhaps), technology such as computer science? I'm going to guess that a lot of these are going to get you blank stares, but maybe if you can walk her backward or forward through time, perhaps you'll hit upon some major interest that fits somewhere. For Spanish, trying to afford Spanish I and II at the CC as duel enrollment sounds like the best option. If that ends up being out of reach financially, my other thought would be something like using Rosetta Stone to attempt to earn CLEP credit. Either way, that's a lot to bite off while also doing heavy duty test prep, but perhaps the Latin roots will help her with her SAT vocab indirectly.

How far away are we talking? Would he lose any scholarships if he took a semester or year off? I would be very, very careful with this...taking one semester instead of a whole year can particularly derail how much aid is given out, as it is set aside by class year and scarcer in the spring, but if he already lost his scholarships during the previous snafu and is just receiving Pell Grants, Stafford loans, etc., I would strongly consider having him take a year of absence and stay home to work in the meanwhile. Major life lesson in regards to procrastination and bureaucracy...some mistakes actually can't be fixed. What is the dorm policy on overnight guests? Do off-campus students have to sign in to visit their friends in dorms? I doubt overnight "visitors" are allowed the first week, particularly fellow students who are not really visiting from out of town, but my only other thought is crashing on the floor if he has any buddies who are already rooming together in the dorms. Or on the couch of someone lucky enough to have an on-campus apartment. I'm sure that's frowned upon, so it would be a risky option. What's the refund policy if he shows up, starts attending with a temporary solution, and then open-change week doesn't pan out in a spot for him? If he withdraws at that point, is he liable for tuition?

To note, the district in the article was not only low-income, but also over 70% of the kids spoke native languages other than English, which implies to me that the majority of parents in the district are non-native speakers as well. Where I live, in a community with a strong homeschool support network in a primarily English-speaking area, there are a few bilingual families who are comfortable homeschooling with all of the social opportunities still available for their children, particularly bilingual professionals who are already confident in their own fluency . But in a district with those demographics, a lot of parents rely on the school to be their children's primary source of exposure to English other than tv, parents who care greatly about their children receiving an education and becoming academically fluent. There can be a significant language barrier and cultural gap, in which the school district may not even TRY to include parents from other language backgrounds, and parents may find it intimidating or even culturally unheard of to go barging up to the school demanding a better education from the people who are supposed to be the authorities on how to make children learn. There's a disconnect here, in which districts with these student demographics can get to where they are trying to administer without any input or concern about backlash, the way there would be in an affluent district trying to keep its parents happy, while the majority of the parents do not have homeschooling or private schooling even on the table as options. Our local districts have been losing a steady stream of kids as they implement Common Core to everyone's horror, but in a district like in the article, there's a good chance the kids aren't going anywhere until the parents move for employment reasons, so no need to worry about keeping them happy. And while high dropout rates affect a school's rating if they are making the students miserable enough, all that's left are the best students...which artificially boosts test scores to a higher average. They're treating these kids like inmates rather than people. They are micromanaging them like criminals, rather than treating them like children. They are expecting the worst behaviorally and disciplining it to the detriment of learning. If you read any article about a successful urban school, there's a theme of administrators who praise their students and teachers and expect the best from them. (And that includes students who ARE criminals, literally, whose principals still give them a chance to live up to high expectations and hope.) There's rarely ever any mention of some new discipline program being given credit for schools that have turned their reputation around from desperate to excelling. The only exception I can think of, where I've seen articles about discipline training being credited as helping...are the stories about the guy who wrote The Explosive Child. Some of his work with difficult children has been brought into schools, teaching staff to de-escalate situations by...guess what?...treating the kids as individuals, offering them more grace and patience than punishment, and developing relationships and trust. Which sounds a whole lot like what the other successful tough urban schools are doing instinctively. Since this is a homeschooling board, I'll go ahead and say it. This is why I homeschool, rather than using my degree for employment. This is why I haven't enrolled my kids. Because top-down micromanaging on a large scale rarely has a positive effect on students or teachers.

Actually, it's just the opposite. Most teacher education programs do NOT teach classroom management. State certification requirements legislate what must be taught in an accredited teacher training degree, and classroom management rarely makes the cut. During my time in college, two of our best classes with fieldwork had been reduced to half credit without fieldwork to make room for some other new requirement, and there was already no way to graduate in 4 years without taking summer classes or entering with AP/CLEP credits. Nope, no time to add a course on management. My guess is that this lack of classroom management preparation creates a void. First year teachers often struggle to learn it on the job as quickly as possible, and low-income urban districts often have a very high rate of teacher turnover. As the blogger mentions, it takes time to establish trust. Part of that is trust that you aren't going to be gone by mid-semester or next year. In a district with high turnover, and correspondingly high levels of discipline problems, a creepy solution like this must sound like a life preserver when principals think about what kind of teacher training could get their schools onto an even keel. Did you notice in the example that the assistant principal (usually the one who handles student discipline while the senior principal handles more of the administrative paperwork) AND the school's behavioral specialist were BOTH in their first year, too??? Talk about the blind leading the blind here. But that's what happens when a district can't seem to reach the critical mass of having enough staff stick around long enough to become good enough at their jobs through experience to make the place somewhere pleasant enough that other staff want to stay longer as well. The discipline issues become this negative spiral in which there are too many new people to effectively mentor and turn the tide. So junk like this looks deceptively appealing. And then the second part of your post... Some learning does take place in the process of building trust, but you're right that a huge chunk will be lost next fall when they go replacing this teacher, and the kids put their guards up again. A huge component of building trust is establishing that the work is meaningful and possible...the kids have to trust you that their schoolwork is worthwhile, and that you are providing them with the tools to succeed at it. They won't be motivated to do work that is too easy and dumbed down, because that's insultingly boring and meaningless. On the opposite side of the coin, they will likewise shut down and stop trying if they think that it is impossible to succeed in your classroom, whether that be because you are asking them to do work for which they are unprepared, or because you aren't giving them a fair chance subjectively. Giving a detention to the kid who interrupts out of his enthusiasm? There's no way that it's ever going to feel safe for him to fully buy in and participate wholeheartedly if his teacher is too inflexible to understand the difference between ADHD and rudeness. Automatic detention is not how you teach an impulsive kid how to manage himself. And other kids see that. They see that there is no room for mistakes. And that means that it is not safe to step out and do anything new. And THAT...that natural childish wiliness to blurt things out and make mistakes...THAT is what language researchers are currently crediting as to why children seem to become fluent faster than adults...because they take more risks in using the language without the same self-consciousness that inhibits teens and adults into not wanting to practice in ways that others might hear them fail. This discipline style is the antithesis of what that district needs to actually promote fluency and learning in general. My guess is that they are selling this as a way that minority students can at least know that they won't be treated WORSE than other students, in terms of racial or personal bias. But if you don't know your students individually, you miss things like good intentions expressed poorly. You miss things like stealth dyslexia, in which the child who just read the chapter silently really can't write about it without extra support. You miss things like the vocabulary word that an ESL child truly misunderstood and therefore didn't know how to start the assignment and was trying to discreetly ask a neighbor for a better explanation or translation. And as others have expressed, how can it possibly not feel like racism to realize that your teacher doesn't see you as an individual human being, just a faceless member of the group to be treated with robot-like precision? Isn't treating an entire group as homogenous the very definition of stereotyping? And the narration...most students would just about die of embarrassment if the teacher narrated aloud that they were further ahead on the page than others, or further behind. Either way is setting someone up for ridicule. I was taught to protect their dignity as much as possible, to try to avoid some of the older methods of grading each other's papers and passing back tests in a way where other students might see who failed miserably and who got a 100% on the test everyone else failed, etc. That kind of convenience for the teacher isn't worth the social impact on kids who don't fall near the middle. And yet this foolish method wants the teacher to constantly give everyone updates on what everyone else is doing??? Are they trying to stir up some sort of peer pressure for everyone to stay on task? Yeah, right. How about the kids with ADHD who were on task, until you interrupted? How about the kids who need extra time, who were on task and perhaps even nearly caught up, but are now starting to melt down into a puddle of frustration and embarrassment over how they're always last no matter how hard they try? This is awful. It goes against good thing I was ever taught about teaching well.

Ok, so he has some phonemic awareness (able to blend), but struggles with segmenting and rhyming (and possibly deletion and substitution, since those also require some segmenting). AAS doesn't have the cut and paste of AAR, and that's where I discovered that my dd couldn't segment, despite having learned to read with the guessing you describe, so that's one possible program. That said, even though it did help us to get through that, there were stops and starts where I had to really stretch the lessons with my own ideas to get over particular difficulties. Barton has been around longer and includes both the rules for spelling and the rules for reading, and has an entire tutor support website to address areas that might cause trouble for individual children. I'd probably go with either Barton, possibly Dancing Bears...but again...you'd need to ask people who've actually used both for a comparison. I know Barton works very hard on the phonemic awareness skills in the first level. If you can afford to get it confirmed via testing, go for it. That opens up to you things like Learning Ally for support, research, and sources of recorded literature, and testing accomodations down the road, and just the peace of mind of knowing that it's a real thing and not in your imagination, not your fault or his fault. If you can't, or if it's going to take a while to save up or to get an appointment, I'd probably go ahead with treating it as such in the meanwhile...research dyslexia over on www.dys-add.com , choose a curriculum for it, etc. It won't hurt a neurotypical kid to go through Barton, other than wanting to do the lessons as fast as the child absorbs the material, to stave off boredom. (And the resale value is high, so you can get most of your money back when you're done.) But it will slow down a dyslexic child to spend even more time fooling around with miscellaneous phonics programs waiting to see whether it's a real disability or just maturity. I'm also a member of the "wish I hadn't waited" club, still sloughing through remediation in middle school because we didn't figure out that it was dyslexia until a few years ago. We have some great compensation strategies to make sure that we're still doing middle school work in everything but phonics, but the closer we get to the workload of high school, the more I wish we'd done this during the earlier years of elementary when there's simply more time available.

I also meant to ask...how did your ds do with AAR's pre-level program? Did he seem to be blending, segmenting, substituting sounds when asked to do so? Was he actually able to play the phonemic awareness games well, or did you have to kind of drag him through that part...? Or did he mostly do the workbook pages without the spoken games? When you say that he hates sounding out words...if you play a guessing game in which you tell him 3 sounds (in order) that make up a CVC word, can he tell you the word? How about 4 sounds? (so, a word with a consonant blend where you can hear each consonant seperately) How about just 2 sounds? (at, to, on, in, no, ma, pa, am)

I think that "highly trained consultant" is probably someone capable of diagnosing dyslexia, such as a retired teacher who knows what to test and has worked with students with dyslexia extensively, but might not be acceptable to the school for getting an IEP for lack of a formal psych degree. Sounds like a reasonable (and probably cheaper) place to start as a homeschooling family. Dancing Bears works for some students with dyslexia, so it's probably the best program you've mentioned so far, and probably wouldn't hurt to do consistently even if that isn't his issue. Barton might be better, though. I haven't personally used both, but I'll bet there are parents on the learning challenges board who could compare them for you. The types of errors you describe him making sound familiar to me as a parent of a child with mild dyslexia. The inconsistency of recognizing the word in one sentence but not later on the same page/next page, the guessing by the first sound, the missing of the word with the addition of just one more letter (the plural s)...I can't say for sure whether that's always dyslexia, perhaps some kids might employ similar guessing strategies with visual or attention issues, but...if it quacks like a duck....I would definitely be looking into dyslexia. As others have mentioned, it's possible (common even) for it to be a combination of issues...at least 40% of people with dyslexia are thought to also have ADHD according to one statistic. A certain percentage have scotopic sensitivity (I think that's also known as Irlen syndrome) in which the letters are hard to see because of the glare from the white background. And then there's all the visual quirks that a COVD doctor can test. Mine came home from the COVD optometrist with far-sighted glasses AND eye exercises to do. Those helped the poor kid be able to SEE the letters in our still-necessary phonics program. As someone mentioned above, Barton discourages making your child read additional material until after he has completed a certain level of phonics. I will tell you from experience that trying to teach my child to STOP GUESSING has been one of the most frustrating aspects of our journey, and the habit was ingrained by years of reading via context clues before receiving dyslexia remediation to learn how to really look at all of the letters to actually sound it out. I would stop using readers from other programs, or random books in general. Use audiobooks to keep your child on track for developing a love of literature, but making him try to read aloud outside a controlled phonics lesson is going to backfire with his current levels of inconsistency. That said, we did find that Progressive Phonics worked for one of my children with vision problems. They're free online readers available in pdf, so you can enlarge them to gigantic proportions. They are NOT a great dyslexia phonics program with solid explanations, so I would still hold off until your son gets to equivalent level in a more appropriate program...to where he CAN sound out words without balking...but if you really, really, really want him to "read more books," you might try these as another source of controlled phonics readers that *might* be clearer to him if part of his issues are visual. Just try to match them up with what he has learned via his main program, whether that ends up being Dancing Bears or Barton, etc.

Oh! If she doesn't have an IEP yet, I would totally let go of tutoring her until after school starts, after the school has done all of its baseline testing. You may want to bring up the fact that she failed part of the Barton screening exam, and request that a Speech Language Pathologist be part of her evaluation to determine whether she needs additional work on phonological processing in order to fully benefit from the O-G program...that she absolutely does need O-G because of her dyslexia diagnosis, but may need preliminary work via a program such as LiPS, which is generally handled by SLPs. There is a good chance that the average principal will have no clue what you're talking about, so I would make sure you are very clear and firm in order to ensure this part isn't glossed over inadvertently, and that clear that you are not in any way suggesting NOT doing O-G, just covering the bases to make sure that she has the necessary foundation built, so that the O-G program will work for her as designed. There is a possibility that the intervention teacher may be familiar with LiPS instead of the SLP, but I would rather bring in both to be sure.

I would see whether there's any way to email the O-G teacher to ask. Yes, it's summer. Yes, it's her vacation. But I think she could probably respond letting you know which O-G program she uses, so that you could compare. The principal or special ed department chair (if there is one) might also know which program, if either of them is in the office.

It's definitely worth teaching him to be AWARE of which tools are designed to be right handed, which are safe to be used left-handed, and which are not. But there may be some that he will simply be more skillful at using a tool designed for his dominant hand. My woodshop teacher in school used to tell us the story of a lefty who tried to use a right-handled circular saw with his left hand, with his wrist crossing right in front of the blade. Shudder. All of us lefties were very, very aware of making sure to use the hand nearest the handle on power tools after that. But for someone less ambidextrous than I am, who owned such a machine in his own shop, it would be well worth reversing the handle rather than holding the wood awkwardly and risking an instinctive mistake like that. Also, I'm relatively good at the many things I've learned through right-handed practice over the years, but I could totally see a more dominant leftie simply avoiding going into such a career because of the extra effort and awkwardness, even someone with a lot of creative potential and talent otherwise.

Establishing handedness varies a lot. I have a picture of my leftie industriously scribbling away with her crayons always in her left hand before she even turned two. (Obviously, we kept a close eye to make sure she didn't eat any, but she really, really, really wanted to color.) By contrast, I did most of my kindergarten work ambidextrously and got seriously annoyed at my teacher making me pick one hand to focus on! Interesting to note, ambidextrous children do have a higher correlation with being dyslexic. It's not a 100% correlation...I wasn't...but it is high, so good to research other early warning signs so you can choose your curriculum appropriately if needed. www.dys-add.com has a page about identifying preschoolers, kindergarteners, etc., and early intervention seems to help a lot.

Official resources: 1. Reading through the educational code on your state board of education website. 2. Asking the principal and superintendent what their policy is, without fully trusting that it will remain so. 3. Methodically calling every private school in your area, to see whether any are secular and whether any would do it. 4. Methodically calling every public charter in your area. 5. Investigating online charter options. 6. Investigating homeschool curriculum to do this on your own. The message board here could probably give you a ton of resources if you wanted to gather homeschool curriculum options...there are gifted learners here, struggling learners here, people who've done a gap year within homeschooling (not going back to public, though, but completely on our own through graduation). A few people here may have experience with online charters or with local charters that are partial homeschool, like university models. However, all of that becomes a moot point if you strike out on your state laws or your local district allowing it. (besides all of the reasons not to do it that have been discussed ad nauseum). If your local district or state law indicate a viable loophole, then it becomes a matter of narrowing it down to which format is most likely to fit the loophole. You'll probably get the most response once you get that far. For example: "I've eliminated all of the local charter options, so now I want to compare K-12 with Connections Academy (two online options)." or "What math could you recommend for a gap year at home, for a child who has finished Algebra I but doesn't want to start the next math for another year?" But for the moment, while your topic is still very broad and hypothetical, hinging on whether your district would squash your attempt or not, I'm afraid it's likely to keep on circling around the notion of "it's probably not allowed, and probably not advisable." I'd encourage your husband to read through the opinions here, especially since many of us were young in our grade, or had children we pulled out of the school system for being too young. His experience went poorly, so I empathize with wanting to correct that for your son, but the general consensus seems to be that your son isn't quite so bad off, having never accelerated, and it's better leaving well enough alone at this point. Those of us who have pulled children out have mostly homeschooled for the long-term, continuing through graduation, or perhaps sending them back to their original grade after several years of catching up.