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Lots of boys

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  1. I liked AAS but I too found it too long (took too much of my time). I also find the word "chunking" sort of strategy in A&P's seems to work better for my kids than the rules. I actually love the rules and want them to know them too, but it wasn't translating to better spelling and A&P's is.

     

    I just do A&P's with my oldest two (9&11) and I have them do one page a day together at the table with me dictating. It takes only a few minutes and they actually like it. It is how we start each day.

  2. Hi, I was in the same boat as you. I have three boys and all of them struggle with spelling. My oldest has an official diagnosis of a Specified Learning Disability in Written Expression (specifically spelling) and in Reading (dyslexia). We used AAS for three years before we switched to A&P's. I much prefer A&P's. We started right at the beginning in book A and we do half of a lesson a day and it takes us 5-10 minutes a day. We could probably do a whole lesson but with my ds's struggles I don't want to move too quickly. He is feeling quite confident in this program and so I don't want to mess that up.

     

    I also switched my youngest ds who is a struggling reader over to Dancing Bears (from AAR) and it has been much better aswell. I just found AAR moved way too quickly for him. I still love some of AAR's games but I use them along side DB's and it works great.

     

    Apples and Pear's isn't that expensive so I would give it a try. Good Luck.

  3. My ds in gr. 5 would spell that sentence in a very similar way. I had my ds tested at a NP a year ago and he tested in the 1st pecentile for spelling - yikes! He is very 2E with scores off the charts in other areas.

     

    I have used AAS for years with him but he is still struggling. He is making progress but it is slow. I have recently bought Apples and Pears and plan to start it next week with him as well. Good Luck!

  4. I'm in Canada and my dyslexic son was given access to CNIB audio books. I don't think they have text books, but they have a lot of excellent fiction and non-fiction books that my son enjoys. It is a bit of a process to get set up, but it has really helped him a lot. Contact your local CNIB and ask about it. I was surprosed when I realized they will assist anyone with a print disability, not just those with vision loss.

     

     

  5. I am watching this thread too. My oldest is in 5th right now doing CLE 5. We have worked through both MM and CLE from the beginning. We will follow CLE into 6th and love the spiral for my ds. I am really stuck where to go after that. We have Lials BCM and beginning and intermediate Algebra but I haven't thought about Geometry at all.

     

    Watching with interest!

  6. If having the actual cash would be a problem, could you either buy an amazon gift card (or even rainbow resource or something, somewhere with a wide variety) or a prepaid Visa card, and then just use the funds on that as needed?

     

    I wouldn't buy more than a year or two ahead, with certain exceptions. My son loves Singapore math, so I'd buy it ahead, especially since there are three boys behind him.

    I love the gift card idea and had not thought of that at all! Thanks.

  7. It has been a stressful year for us as I had to go from working part time to full time plus homeschooling (homeschool in the morning, work afternoon and evenings). We are all exhausted from the schedule and have decided that I will quit work and just focus on homeschooling. Money will be extremely tight for us and so I would like to buy most of what I need now. I know things may change but could you help me think about what I should buy.

     

    I have all the stuff I need for k-5. I just need to get what I need for 6-8.

     

    What math should we get after CLE 6?

    What language arts? My oldest is using SWI-a - would the continuation course be enough after that until high School?

    I think I am ok for science and geography but would love some recs for history, and anything else I am missing.

     

    Any extras that would be nice to have in advance?

     

    Thanks

  8. This has been a year of transition for us with me heading back to work most afternoons. It has taken a lot of patience for all of us. So, we simplified and here is our list:

     

    Hits:

    -SWI

    - Math Mammoth and Math Reflex

    -Daily Science

    - Liberty Kids :)

     

    Misses:

    -AAS was good but too hard to implement under tight time frames

    -WWE

    -SYRWTL French

  9. If you don't mind me asking, why do you want to change? To answer your question, I have both and CLE lines up pretty much with MM. But MM is pretty advanced in concepts. Did you try placement test for CLE?

    My son finds the crowded pages of MM to be overwhelming. He also forgets the material from one section to another and I thought the spiral approach might be a good fit. I like MM a lot but I just don't know if it is a good fit for him. I also like that CLE has more levels (covering pre A).

  10. :grouphug: I know. Our SLP, who is awesome btw and whom we love, told us ds has pure apraxia, nothing else, blah blah. I'm so literal and naive I believed her. When I realized more was going on, it made me so sick my whole system stopped. We're clicking along now, but I know that whole process is horrible. You don't realize how long the apraxia will affect them. It goes beyond articulation and into word retrieval, lexicon (how their brains organize the words), etc. On top of that you've got the autism. We don't know if he's spectrum. He doesn't have autism the way yours does, but he's still quirky.

     

    You want to talk with your SLP about these issues like word retrieval and lexicon, because there are actually things you can do about it. Lexicon is how the words organize in the brain. Jean DeGaetano has workbooks for all kinds of stuff on the Great Ideas for Teaching website. They're a little pricy, but they're easy to implement and very effective. Our SLP uses a number of them, and I've been trying to buy more to use with him. She has one specifically on word retrieval. You have to organize the vocabulary for a scene so it's all in the same file folder in the brain. It takes some intentional effort.

     

    That's all for now. Back later. You're doing great though. :)

    Thanks so much. I agree, I really didn't realize how much the apraxia affected more than just the way he sounds. It is just so hard for him to say what he wants to say.

     

    We have a great SLP too that we will be going back to soon. Our ds has been away from her for a year now while he was in the Autism therapy so I look forward to reconnecting with her and getting more feedback.

     

    I looked up the Ronit Bird books and have ordered one. I am also going to do the Barton screening this weekend with him. I'll keep you posted :)

  11. I think you can talk with your SLP about the grammar and word retrieval issues to see what they advise you do to work on them.

     

    You could make a couple beanbag creatures that look like Angry Birds or get a couple small AB toys and have the birds read the words, the birds fly through the air while you recite memory work, etc.

     

    LIPS is by Lindamoodbell, and it's to try to connect speech and written for kids who can't hear it.

     

    Earobics is software for phonemic awareness.

     

    My ds doesn't have a delay, meaning I don't have a lot of personal experience to speak, but it seems to me if you know he has a delay and see where he's at, you just roll with it, kwim? Picture books and short read alouds are a place to be, so you start there and move forward. I'm not sure it's typical to have reading happen at 5.5 or 6 if the person has a 2-3 year delay, kwim? I'm not meaning to be rough, but I'm hearing numbers more in the 8-12 range from people in that position with those labels. Maybe you could give yourself permission to meet him where he is? I don't think Barton solves a developmental delay or timetable issue. It's just a help if dyslexia is the issue. He might need time more than he needs Barton.

    Thanks so much. It has taken me a while to wrap my head around the fact that he is his own little person on his own timetable. I use to think/hope that once his speech was better he would be on a typical timetable but I realize now we just need to go at whatever pace works for him.

  12. LOB, have you done the Barton pre-test to see if he's actually ready to learn to read? Have you gone through Earobics or something similar yet? I was reading recently on an apraxia FB group, and it seemed like some of the kids had fine phonemic awareness and learned to read with no difficulty at all and other kids had severe, severe problems (dyslexia). My ds is the same age as yours, and he can't distinguish vowels. He's only just in the past few months gotten to where he can discriminate s/sh with some consistency. For him, I had to back up and do LIPS. Earobics we did quite a bit, but the auditory working memory stuff frustrated him immensely. He only started hearing rhyming relatively consistently in the last few months.

     

    Oh, I got AAR pre- with him, and while it was immensely fun, when we tried it at the normal age he wasn't even CLOSE to being able to do it. But there's just no way to say, kwim? These kids just vary. IF he can't distinguish sounds or hear individual sounds in words, you're probably going to have some more work to do before he's ready.

     

    You mention he's turning 6 soon. I've noticed that it's very common to redshirt even NT boys with summer birthdays. My ds has a fall b-day, and I don't feel at all bad that he's turning 6 as he starts K5. He has no developmental delays either. I would free yourself to grade adjust and even call him K4 this year if that suits him better. If you did that, he'd basically just be *1* grade behind, not the *2* that it feels. Seriously. I'm not saying you should, just that you should free yourself to teach him exactly where he's at.

     

    Does he enjoy read alouds or content? Hands-on? Have you read the book on Rapid Prompting? It's a teaching method for working with non-verbal dc, and I think the site has videos too. It's AMAZING. Someone recently posted a video they found showing someone's progress over the years teaching in this way. To the extent that he *is* ready for stuff, definitely free yourself to work together in non-verbal ways as needed. (touching the correct response, etc.) I'm going to try to take our reading that direction, because saying the sounds in isolation messed up his speech motor control, ugh. But everyone is where they're at. That's just us.

     

    I'm using Ronit Bird with my ds, but I think he has dyscalculia and dyslexia. Today he could tell me how many fingers he has, but that's the first time I've ever gotten it from him. There was no click before. We tried RS A (I used RS with my dd), and he just had this total blank look. It was too many leaps too fast. RB takes nothing for granted and builds everything very, very slowly, spending a week on what RS might do in a day. That's what my ds needs, but that doesn't mean all kids with apraxia do. In fact EKS just posted a link to some MRI results on the Eides' blog showing results indicating that autism and dyslexia *ought* to be mutually exclusive. You just get too many paths for these kids to get autism, get apraxia, and then they're all lumped together as if their homogenous. Your dc might not struggle with what mine does, and I think it's because of these different ways of getting into the apraxia, etc., kwim?

     

    So that's why I'm saying just feel the waters and see what you've got. Try the Barton pretest and see how his phonemic awareness is coming along. Try some math and see if anything clicks. Hopefully it will be fine! If it's not, you'll back up and find stuff. I'll tell you though that what they do now is NO indicator of where they will be in a few years. We're just going to take our time and make sure everything we try to do we do WELL and with understanding, no freaking out about grade levels. And when he's 20 he'll be exactly who he was meant to be. That's what I'm telling myself. It doesn't help to compare. All I can do is build that foundation as thoroughly and accurately as I can with stuff that connects with him.

     

    Btw, does your ds have a thing he's really into that you'll be harnessing while you teach him? With my ds it's weapons, so everything goes back to that. We play Whack-a-vowel for reading, pirates for vision therapy work, have visiting Egyptian figures threaten to kill us if we don't spell the word they want, etc. Lots of weapons, hehe. He enjoys history, because it goes back to weapons and war. I read him CHOW and got a bunch of activity books to work through. The VMPAC shows him dominantly kinesthetic. My theory is to give him all the content via read alouds and audiobooks, nature walks, field guides, that kind of thing that I can, and just slowly, diligently work on the rest. MP has wonderful enrichment books with nice reading lists themed through the year. You might consider them. We've been using them and enjoy the diversity. Again, don't get all freaky about ages and levels. Just go with what connects with him.

     

    That's a lot of ideas, and probably half don't apply, sorry.

    Thanks for your post. No, I haven't done the Barton pre screening but I will. I worry that he will really struggle with reading. He still struggles with many aspects of language and speech. For example, he often mixes up related words (tells me he is done "watching" his cd instead of "listening", or tells me to "rewind" a movie when he means "fast forward". He refers to every pronoun in the masculine form (refers to both men and women as he, him, etc. ). He still struggles with a lot of speech sounds (can't say all the late sounds like l, r, and all blends). He knows most of his letter sounds but mixes up w and r because he says r as w. He often has to restart a sentence many times while he works out the mechanics for how to say what he wants to say.

     

    He has no interest in learning to read which concerns me too. He barely tolerates audio books but I have him routinely listening to one or two each morning now. He is still very much interested in early picture books so the CDs are only 5 minutes each which is about his max.

     

    I don't know what lips or eararobics is?

     

    I was hoping to use AAR with him because I have it but I wonder if we will end up needing Barton (really hoping not because of the price).

     

    I will definitely try the RB books. Is there a particular order I should get them in after the first one you recommended?

     

    Thank you so much for your thoughts on all of this.

     

    Oh, his hook is definitely Angry Birds!! If I could incorporate that into all of our work he would LOVE it!

  13. Hi, my youngest ds has ASD, apraxia of speech, global delays etc. He is turning 6 soon and would have typically started k this year but we spent the year concentrating on his Autism therapy (we had someone come to our home everyday for 4 hours) so will be treating next year (we start in the fall) as his official K year.

     

    I need some help picking resources for this little guy. The things I used for his two older brothers may not suite him well. He still has some speech issues (articulation mostly) and I see them hampering his ability learning to read.

     

    So far I have planned to use AAR 1 and 2 with him (I already have these plus OPGTR) but am not sure what to do for math. I have Miquon Orange and MM 1 but I think it will quickly get too advanced for him. I have read about Ronit Bird books I might try. I'm really not sure. I know whatever curriculum I use it needs to go slow, and stay interesting. Thoughts ?

     

    Also, what about other reading resources? He actually has no interest in learning to read which worries me. I would appreciate any suggestions you have. Thanks!

  14. My ds 10 got very similar results this year. He had an I.Q. that they wouldn't quantify because his visual and perceptual scores were 99% tile but his processing speed was a lot lower. My ds was also diagnosed with dyslexia (did poorly on the decoding of unfamiliar words and comprehension when reading to himself) and a disability of written expression due to how poorly he did in forming letters, grammar, and worst of all - spelling!

     

    They also did the Ados with my son who just barely made the cut off so they used the term "Aspergers" with us as well. He was also diagnosed with moderate to severe ADHD - combined

     

    I found it really helpful over all because it really taught me that my son can take in, and process, lots of information quickly if he is hearing it. It is much harder for him to process things by reading them. He also can not be overwhelmed with a lot of information at once or he shuts down. Small - very small- steps for everything. Writing is painful and I'm not sure how to get around that completely because he seems to hate typing and get frustrated with voice technology.

     

    We haven't done meds yet. We are trying to finish out the school year and take some time to decide. I just wanted to let you know you were not alone.

  15. My ds 10 is dyslexic, dysgraphic, gifted, ADHD, and mildly on these spectrum. How he struggles with these gifts and challenges changes day to day. He struggles immensely with writing, spelling and still a little bit with reading. He talks constantly but struggles with starting his thoughts in a similar way to your dd. He has extreme trouble focusing and bounces around, or wanders around constantly. He is very rigid, adverse to changes, and has some sensory issues. He has an incredible memory and amazes me with his ability to understand very complex situations. He is very impulsive, loud, and can be see an bossy. He is also very sweet and loving.

  16. Hi, I have a ds with ASD who is pretty athletic. He doesn't do well with anything fine motor, but his gross mother skills are pretty good. He is highly focused/obsessive about things he likes and so basketball consumes him. He watches games on t.v., reads stats about players constantly, but also practices all the time in the driveway. He plays in a few city leagues and does really well with it. He is high functioning (would be labelled Aspergers with old labels), gifted, etc. but also struggles with dyslexia and dysgraphia. One complex little dude :)

    I definitely think ASD and some athletic ability can happen in the same kid.

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