Thank you everyone. Super helpful. Thanks for reminding me about the Gander Pub materials. They look just right as far as curriculum goes. She had school testing (pretty comprehensive I suppose, took about 2 hrs) 2 yrs ago. The bottom line was that she didn't have any learning disorders so didn't qualify for services. 😞 She had a SLP "interview" after the testing; the SLP was so enthusiastically positive that this dd didn't have any issues that wouldn't work themselves out. Lowest areas were (percentiles): Picture vocab 9th processing speed 15th phoneme isolation 5th visual working mem'y, 23rd/27th comprehension 22nd spelling 2nd, sentence writing 7th .... However I suppose these low scores were balanced out w/stronger areas so overall she did not qualify. Would private testing be more comprehensive than school testing? I suppose it would. That's a good point about CM methods. Another issue is that I have 2 girls in the same grade. The struggling one is 11 and the other one is 10. The 10yo is right on target if not a little advanced verbally. They've always done the same schoolwork. Not sure how I would have them do different things, although if they did totally different materialss that would be better than "big sister has to do less work". Thanks again for pointing me in the direction of "narrative language" and giving me your ideas.

I know "reading comprehension" is a broad topic. My 11yo dyslexic daughter has improved a ton in fluency, and spelling is getting better slowly, but as she gets older some things aren't improving as quickly. * Still has very weak phonemic awareness; breaking down/reading large words is still difficult (we work on it) * She has a tough time with recalling/remembering proper nouns, names of people/places. * She often misses the big picture, details of a reading. She enjoys reading fiction/chapter books. She doesn't ask for help, she tells me she understands them, however she does prefer to re-read (as in dozens of times) her favorites rather than read news books. All 28 Elsie Dinsmore; the Avatar graphic novels; Beverly Cleary series; and currently the 100 Cupboards series. School reading is difficult. Mainly history. We're in the Civil War right now which has tons of proper nouns. It's all a big jumble I'm afraid in her mind. (Not a big deal because she's only 5th grade, but still.) We school with a pretty strict Charlotte Mason approach. Readings (she reads them silently) and narration. Her narrations are often quite jumbled, not in story order, and details are mixed up. You can imagine she doesn't enjoy narrating, and she has decided she doesn't like history. I'm willing to try another approach if I knew it would help her grow, not just be an easier method. I guess any ideas on how to work on comprehension (without resorting to comprehension workbooks) would be helpful. And, I wonder if it's helpful to just "let her read" what she likes without worrying about her understanding of it? She never asks for help.

The human odyssey book sounds great. Is there any lesson guide or curriculum that goes with it or uses it!

I need suggestions for 1877 & forward for a 9th grader. I saw Memoria Press has a US history that covers this period. What else is out there that would cover world history? I am not a Tapestry fan, I think I need something simpler. Thanks for ideas!

Thanks everyone, these are all very helpful! I've been doing CM style for so long I forgot about workbooks. 🙂 Now to figure out which is the best fit. I like the idea of Hake as it has grammar and writing. The sample looked intimidating though, for where my girls are.... a lot of big words. 🙂 and not friendly like TT. It sounds like Easy Grammar has grammar, usage and mechanics and really we need all of those. @OKBud or anyone else, are Evan Moore workbooks thorough or more supplementary? LLATL would be great if it didn't have a teacher component, I'd really like them to be independent.

My 5th graders are doing great w/TT for math. They use the paper books. I'd like a similar format for Grammar/LA. * Each day's work is clear-cut and the same format each day * Spiral review * Uncluttered pages & sticks to basics Any suggestions? Thanks!

@alexandramarie I am also in the middle of our 2nd yr of Alveary and thinking of switching to Rainbow curriculum, that's so funny. We did LCC years ago too. Our first year of Alveary was perfect, but this year has been crazy... my head is spinning every day. Some subjects for us became much more teacher intensive this year. BUT I also don't feel up to totally switching gears either. I will probably end up keeping just some of our Alveary subjects and dropping a bunch of others, then maybe next year it'll look more like Rainbow. Years ago we also did Robinson curriculum, which was great for my oldest kids. My current batch though does need more help from me, plus some CM practices I do want to keep.

challenging games for science type: My mathy son & his wife really like Hanabi. We like Splendor, Pandemic, and Bohnanza. Fun for two people: Farkle Flip and Monopoly Deal are two card games that are fun for two or a crowd. Of course there's Exploding Kittens.

I can really relate. I follow a CM approach too. I have a 4th grade, 10yo in level 5. I also hated the goofy, forced vocabulary like in your example. And yes, lots of words my dd did not know the meaning of. However, it's gotten better esp in level 5. Words are not so weird. We don't do much Barton. Minutes per week, we spend a lot more time w/living books. Last year (at your dd's level) we did 15 min 3x/wk of Barton. So, it's forced and not living, but it's not much, and I don't feel like it is bringing down the quality of the living books we do read. And it really works. That's the reason I keep doing it. At that early level (level 4), there just aren't that many words you can make w/the limited rules and phonics they've learned. It's temporary, and it will get better. Every time you start a new program, whether phonics, math, etc, you have to backtrack and you lose ground; personally I'd rather just keep going than switch.

We did Barton fluency drills for a solid 2 yrs before fluency was gained. Hang in there. Just a little every day. Have you looked into rapid naming exercises? We did a lot of those at Scottish Rite.

The m&ms is a good idea! Reminding her that it's only one syllable has helped. In general it is still fuzzy in her mind though. Maybe working on some of that pattern every day will help. I'm always looking for a little catchy phrase for a hint/to aid in guided discovery.

This is super helpful, Storygirl. Thanks. I was thinking about future accommodations when I requested the IEP meeting/testing. I see your point about going to the NP, in the teen years. Really, I have not thought she would be interested in college, but she is an excellent gymnast and a college scholarship could be very likely. She is definitely dyslexic, I was hoping the testing would show me underlying reasons why, so I could give her extra support. You're right, the Barton and the hs'ing is working and I need to be encouraged by that even if the school doesn't thinks she needs extra support.

EG, I would love any phonemic awareness ideas you have, esp. as would be appropriate for a 10yo who can read, just needs to keep working on it. I would love a book of those word ladders, actually, but haven't found one. Thank you for the names of the computer programs. I think she would really enjoy a computer game that helped. That is what I've been wondering about the remediation. I want to help as much as I can. But how much does it really help. For as hard as reading, writing and spelling are for her, she seems to enjoy life pretty well, and I could see her as an adult, not great at academics, not loving reading, but figuring out how to get by and being fine with that. Is that bad?? Back story: This child went to Scottish Rite for dyslexia tutoring/therapy for the last 2+ years, we've been working on reading skills for a long time. Using Barton since late-1st grade. I have known since pre-K that she has learning issues: very poor phonological awareness, auditory memory, comprehension, vocab, remembering names & places.... For a long time, I thought she had an auditory processing disorder. Now, it turns out her visual processing/memory is actually worse. I don't think I realized it, because she couldn't read until just a few months ago.

10yodd had testing thru the public school (she's hs'ed), but no IEP was determined to be needed. That was fine w/me, as I mainly wanted testing. She did better than I thought she would in many areas. The main areas of weakness were: Phoneme isolation (5th %ile, CTOPP) Rapid Letter Naming (25th %ile, CTOPP) Processing speed (18th %ile, WISC-V)--did worse on visual proc. Visual Spatial Processing--block puzzles (23th %ile, WISC-V) Working Memory (27th %ile, WISC-V)-- did worse on visual working mem. What could I do to help her w/the visual weaknesses? The phoneme isolation is a huge one too that needs to be shored up.... We do Barton. She does read fluently but slowly, and enjoys silent reading when she's found books she likes. The Ramona books are right at her level. I have Seeing Stars, and I have Think Talk Laugh. I haven't started either one. Would either of those be helpful? Thanks for any ideas.

Wow, what a challenge! My tiny bit of input: i would play a lot of games. The Right Start games book is a terrific resource.

Hi. My 9yodd is going thru Barton (just finishing level 4, yay!!!) and she has a hard time spelling/sounding vowel-L. Like "sail". She'll say "SAY-UHL", and gets all confused. Or, the syllable "pro" (today was "proclaim"), she'll get confused about the R sound and think it's ER, so today she wanted to write PERO. I reminded her it's only one syllable. I guess that would work for "sail" too. Anyone have any handy tips for these?? She's pretty weak in phonemic awareness, we're definitely working on that.

Speaking of: I'm looking for phonemic awareness/isolation exercises that aren't babyish. My dd is in 4th grade. She's in Barton level 4 but she needs more phonemic awareness than is in Barton... maybe in a more creative way, than Barton. Like games or something. Or worksheets.

OP, your experience sounds a lot like my dd's. She started reading pretty fluently at the end of 3rd grade. And we were only at level 4! Somehow she got the idea, even before being formally taught silent E's, vowel teams, etc. Re: hand signs, etc. sometimes kids don't like things because they're HARD for them... which means they need them. So hang in there. I do not insist on mastery. I'm finding that exposure has been more valuable than mastery. She needs to hear things soooo many times, and I can't get frustrated about that. Insisting on mastery seems to make it worse. Better to tell her the answer (or use "guided discovery" to the best of my ability), and move on. We do a lot of extra practice. Barton doesn't have enough for her. But as long as she's about 80-85% accurate, we move on.

We played the Grocery Cart game: "I went to the story and I bought apples." The next person says, "I went to the store and I bought apples and bread." And so forth, each person adding an item.

If she's moving slowly, and maybe "mildly dyslexic" (is there such thing?) it would not at all be overkill to use Barton. It has been so so good for my very dyslexic dd and also my not-dyslexic daughter who has needed extra support.

Sure, this is a good plan. There is no need to jump in. A charter school is always attached to a local school district but they can offer their services county-wide, and to any county that touches theirs. So they can cover large regions but some are big and some are small. There's a new one in our area (norCal), that I think must be run by the same people that runs a big one in soCal. But they are separate schools. I think a lot, but not all, charters are run by nonprofit corporations, which can operate several different charter schools. Not sure if I'm using all the terms properly, but I hope you get the idea.

For my dd the issue is a lack of phonemic awareness... being aware of individual sounds in words, and then linking them with a symbol, I mean that is so abstract when you think about it.... so, putting all the steps together was just slow for a long time. Fluency required a lot of practice. As an analogy, you might be able to watch someone hit a golf ball and re-create it perfectly, but I might need it broken down into little bits, and practice each part a lot more before it's natural. This was the key part for me to understand my child though: Back to the golf swing, for me to master it, I would probably require a ton of practice, not more explanations. Just keep trying. Keep attempting. Failure after failure. And that's what my child has needed. Lots of practice. Then the fluency came (for the easy words). Still working at the hard words. But it's progress, no matter how slow. Your child's wpm rate sounds like my dd's... took about a year of that before it got easier. Rapid naming did help too. Hope that helps.

I think it varies a lot from charter to charter, and then from one supervising teacher to another. My teacher is a personal friend, so she lets me have a lot of leeway. Our school does not have any requirement to be "at grade level" w/testing. They do want to see some progress from year to year, but that's it. My school also allows me to check Barton out of their special ed resource room even though my daughter is not in special ed. But other schools don't allow my friends to purchase Barton w/their funds unless the student is in special ed. So it varies. You could probably find the charters local to the area where you'd live and look up reviews on them. Try even looking in the WTM forums. Almost all my friends are in charters, and I'd say that if you are a strong but positive advocate for your child, you will be fine. When you're calling around/talking to schools, tell them about your son up front and ask them what they would have you/him do. In general it is no big deal to pull out of a charter and switch to private homeschooling. I did it once in fact, only stayed in for 6 weeks. But this charter I've been with for 4.5 years and it's been very positive.

There are ladies here who know lots more than I do, but just for some perspective, my dyslexic DD is 9 and only does 15 minutes of reading/spelling per day, 4x/wk. That's all we've done since she began school. That includes reading practice. It's been enough to maintain slow but steady progress and not lose the gains she's made, and not stress her out or make her hate it. Rapid naming drills, reading lists of words, helped a lot with fluency. But we only did those for 2 min/day (as was part of our 15 minutes) and it took months of that to see improvement. So, keep on with your small amounts of reading and don't be discouraged!

Thanks so much! Lots of new titles I haven't seen before. I look forward to exploring with dd! Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk