A family friend noticed (after taking it for a month) that her cholesterol medication dose was doubled. At her scheduled appt with the doctor, she said, "I saw you increased my dose." The Dr said, "No I didn't!" It was a pharmacy mistake. My friend was very, very sick for 6 months and her liver almost failed. Sorry to derail the thread, but scoutingmom's post made me think of this very scary experience! It's important to know what dose you're supposed to take, and always check the bottle.

Hooray!!

Hurrah! So glad ModMath was a good fit. I think they are working on (or already have?) a ModMath Pro, which you need to buy.

Regarding explicit teaching - many kids just pick things up from their environment, but most kids with learning disabilities do not. The idea of explicit teaching may seem suffocating... or uncreative... or "teacher-centered," but in reality it's the ultimate in kid-centered because you're doing exactly what the kid needs. In my M.A. program we read a great book, and I'm pretty sure the title was just "Explicit Teaching" by Anita Archer. She recommends following these steps in each lesson: 1. Review a. Review homework and relevant previous learning. b. Review prerequisite skills and knowledge. 2. Presentation a. State lesson goals. b. Present new material in small steps. c. Model procedures. d. Provide examples and non-examples. e. Use clear language. f. Avoid digressions. 3. Guided practice a. Require high frequency of responses. b. Ensure high rates of success. c. Provide timely feedback, clues, and prompts. d. Have students continue practice until they are fluent. 4. Corrections and feedback a. Reteach when necessary. 5. Independent practice a. Monitor initial practice attempts. b. Have students continue practice until skills are automatic. 6. Weekly and monthly reviews This seems long, but each step may only be 5-10 minutes. I really like the cycle of: 1) Teacher models skill 2) Guided practice with teacher and student 3) Independent practice. I think this is probably the cycle most of us follow instinctively, but sometimes I forget a step unless I've made a deliberate plan for the lesson. Since your son likes worksheets, I'd capitalize on that - do a couple minutes of modeling, a couple minutes of guided practice, and then let him work on his own for a couple minutes. Worksheets are nice because "the end is in sight!" Your son may be explosive because things are difficult for him. I'd err on the side of too easy until you find what's just right for him :001_smile:

Geodob reminds me of my time at Lindamood-Bell doing Seeing Stars. A big part of each session was air-writing. You hold up a card, kid looks for a few seconds (1 sec per letter), then you put the card down. Kid writes word in air, saying each letter out loud, then reads the word aloud (as if reading on invisible chalkboard). If there's a mistake, you can say, "What letter do you see second?" (or wherever the mistake was made). Kid will say what she thinks she saw, then you hold up the card. "Oh, it was supposed to be a "T"! kid will say. Hold up the card, and repeat until correct. The visualizing, writing, and correcting is supposed to build visualization skills, especially for sight words. It would be interesting to see if your daughter could do that with a short word she frequently messes up, like "girl."

I just used Co:Writer to write an email in Gmail. It was awesome! After I typed a punctuation mark, it automatically read the sentence aloud. When I hovered over a word in the little box, it read that aloud to me, too, and if I clicked on it, it inserted it into my sentence. I LOVE IT! Super easy, too! It loaded in about two seconds, and it's just this simple, unobtrusive box with like 5 word choices. LOVE!

I'm taking a course on assistive technology for my special ed master's program, and we just learned about something called Co:Writer. It sounds similar to Read & Write, but possibly easier to use! It looks really awesome. You can watch a short video about it here: It's $5/month for a student/parent subscription. You can use it for anything - Word, Docs, filling in online forms, etc. You could even scan in worksheets and fill those out!

Oh my goodness, this sounds incredibly frustrating. Of COURSE he deserves to be challenged with academics, rather than put in a lower level class because he struggles to write things down. I have not used it, but ModMath is a program designed by two parents of a dysgraphic child. Here is the link to the app (FREE!): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/modmath/id821892964?ls=1&mt=8 And here is the link to a story about the family: https://www.understood.org/en/community-events/blogs/making-a-difference/2016/04/19/husband-and-wife-team-create-free-math-app-for-kids-with-writing-issues If you use it, please report back! I'm so curious to see what an actual kid thinks of it. It looks VERY cool... I should just start using it myself!

At our school we use Read & Write Gold. It's about $150 for an annual subscription... so, bummer, you have to subscribe each year. There's a free add-on for Chrome if you want to use Google Docs for writing, but I don't know how many of the features are included in the free version. My favorite part of the full-on program is a word predictor box, so as a kid is typing the box displays a list of possible words they can choose from. They hover over the words with their mouse and the computer reads the words aloud. This is REALLY helpful for kids who can't tell when words are misspelled. In my experience, Read & Write is very kid-friendly - I'd say it's totally worth the money, especially if your daughter is going to use it for high school, college, and in her professional life. There's a free trial if you want to try it!

Yup, we have an OT - I should ask her about some things I could do. I'm glad it's not "Too Woo For School," which sounds like a book title!

The reason I ask is because I think a lot of midline exercises could be done at school.... just standing up and doing the exercises while doing something else, like math facts or letter sounds or whatever. Working on retained reflexes would not be possible but I could have kids up and moving! A couple of my most dyslexic students also have extreme trouble touching the right hand to the left knee, for example. It's not true for all of them, but for some. Just wondering if that sort of stuff is too woo for the classroom.

We're big fans of Go Noodle as well :thumbup1:

I'm sorry you're in this tough situation. I have to say, though... I busted out laughing when you said you birthed Amelia Bedelia :laugh: I can only imagine your frustration. I work with some difficult kids - well, more like sweet, clueless kids - and I dearly love them - BUT after an hour, I'm more than happy to have them move along to their next class. I think the 10-to-1 positive to negative interaction mentioned above is very important. You could make it a point to compliment her, hug her, high-five her, whatever, a LOT. It will feel very strange at first, but it will get easier. Once you get in the habit of more praise, your brain might even adjust to see more positive things about your DD, even though you "trained" yourself to see them. A teacher I work with made a blank list with checkboxes, and then laminated it. She writes daily (or hourly...) tasks on it, and it helps her students get things done. I thought the kids wouldn't care about a list, but WOO BOY. A laminated list that you can write on with dry-erase? Pink dry-erase, even? Wowie. The kids went nuts! They were so excited to do things just so they could cross them off :lol: You could make a list for everything... hang one in the bathroom, hang one in the kitchen, etc. You could involve her in choosing the paper, a cute graphic, going to Staples to get it laminated and pick out markers... Hang in there! I have times when I dislike kids that I otherwise love... and I feel terrible about it. I am fully aware that they are doing their best. Each moment is a clean slate, though, so keep pressing on. It will be OK.

I also like the idea of heavy work... I wonder how to do that at school. I do notice that when kids have tasks that are genuinely helpful - like sorting through a drawer of rubber bands, pencils + sharpies - they focus well and get a lot out of it. I'll have to think more about real jobs that kids can do that would truly take the workload off a teacher!

Keep 'em comin'! I would love to convince my principal to add two extra breaks (morning + afternoon) in addition to the 30 min recess. Even if she says no, I'd like to just do it on my own, with any kids I have at the time. (We're flexible, so that wouldn't be an issue - but a school-wide initiative would be good for everyone!)

Feel free to ignore if this derails, but what about crossing the midline? Is that woo? Everyone talks about it and it seems reasonable enough... but do people research it?

I've been reading a lot of research about kids' attention spans and how exercise helps focus and learning. Some schools are increasing recess time, but some are not. It seems like the pro-recess schools get as good or better results than the non-recess schools. For those of you with kids in school, how much recess/movement do your kids get? Or... how much do you wish they would get? For some reason I'm picturing 30-45 minutes of inside time followed by 15 minutes of recess, rinse, repeat. At my school they get one 30 min recess, with short movement breaks during classes, but there isn't any real serious outdoor time except for the one recess in the middle of the day.

I'm reading your story with interest because we have a few kids with very difficult behaviors (outbursts, yelling, hitting furniture, hiding under furniture, putting head down and refusing to move, etc.) at the private school where I work. They are very challenging and emotionally exhausting, and I get to leave at the end of the day...and leave them to their parents. I love these kids, but there's no denying it's hard. Does she act out when you give her non-school requests? Also, if you do the "one-warning-then-consequence" thing, are you able to follow through? (I'm not saying that to be mean, I'm just wondering if consequences bother her or if she complies with a non-school request eventually.)

I agree, the more the better with LiPS! If he's not solid with hearing and feeling the differences between the sounds, then anything you try to do with Barton will just be like trying to build on sand. It bugs me sometimes that people tout Orton-Gillingham based programs as being the only fix that's necessary for reading problems. So many kids need more than an OG program (lots of kids need LiPS!), but it feels like OG should be enough.... and when it's not, it can be really scary and frustrating.

I watched a pretty good video with a behavior---> consequences method. Basically you say calmly, "This is your one warning. You are doing X. If you continue, X will happen." You then say, "I'm going to go (check my email, change the laundry) and I'll be back in two minutes. By that time I expect you to have made your decision." The two minute wait time is to give the kid a chance to actually make a choice - when we're in their faces demanding instant compliance, they tend to get more upset and are more likely to make a bad choice. You also want to drive home the point that behavior is IS a choice. (To be completely honest, I'm in the "kids to well if they can" camp, so I'm not saying the behavior necessarily IS a choice - perhaps he genuinely cannot do what you want - yet. You may need to do a lot of scaffolding and teaching how to behave... or if it's a brain chemistry thing and he needs medication, that's another thing altogether... but if you think he can control his behavior, you could try this method.) I tried this twice yesterday. Once it worked like a charm. There was some grumbling ("She's so mean!") but then compliance. The second time the kid was yelling too much to let me give him the two minute wait time. Ugh. In general, though, I think it would work well with a kid that is NOT so worked up as to be yelling. The other key to this method is to always have a way to "up the ante" - so rather than jumping straight to "no TV for a week!" you start small - like no watching one show tonight. Then if the child is still defiant, go a bit more strict... and a bit more... always giving them the chance to make a good choice. Forgive me if this is common knowledge! In theory I know I should do this, but in practice I often give too many chances before I enforce a consequence, or I issue orders with an annoyed (NOT calm!) voice.

OMG. This sounds incredibly frustrating!!

Hi everyone, I'm using Fry phrases with my students. They LOVE them! We track how long it takes to read a set and graph it, and they're always psyched to beat their scores. What I'm wondering is - do they really work? I'm on board with practicing the most common words - that seems like a no-brainer - but do the phrases themselves help? There's a lot of research showing that repeated reading helps with fluency, but I can't find anything 'official' about the phrases. I don't want to spend time each day on something that probably isn't helping since I could just do fluency passages instead. What do you think? Have you seen an improvement with Fry phrases?

:grouphug: I hope you're feeling better after reading this forum. Everyone here has been through/is going through challenging times! You might want to go minimalist for the rest of the year while you figure out what works best for your daughter. Shorter periods of work, shorter, more simple assignments, etc. You could even include chores/morning routine as part of school, and praise the heck out of her for doing them. I would go back and find out what she can do easily, and then work from there. You could tell her that you and she need to find her "comfort zone" so you can give her work that's just right for her. She could even rate assignments as easy, medium, and hard after she completes them. If it were me, I'd also think about what someone truly needs to know. For example, does she really need to be able to identify a preposition at age 10, or would consistently capitalizing the first letter of a sentence, and using punctuation at the end, be the most important thing right now? I'm sure there are lots of adults who forget what a preposition is, but they get along just fine. I'm not saying she'll never be able to handle English grammar, just that it might not be the most important fight right now. You want her to feel GOOD, smart, empowered. She won't be willing to work hard until she feels like she is in control. I just read an article that included a hierarchy of writing skills. The first one was accurate copying, the next was something like writing a sentence based on a picture, then writing a sentence about a topic without a picture, etc. I'll try to figure out how to share it with everyone... it's made me realize that I was asking too much of a particular student. I was asking her to read a short book for homework and write down three things that happened in it. To me, it was an easy assignment. Just write three things - anything! Her work was always a horrible mess, and even though we talked about it every day, it didn't improve. Last week I started putting 3 sticky notes on pictures in the book, and telling her to write a sentence about each picture. Her worked improved immensely. I think that reading, trying to think of what happened, then trying to spell and punctuate and all the rest was just too much for her at this point. Anyway - I'll try to upload the list in hopes that it will help someone else! Also, I second the suggestion to frame the re-boot as a teaching issue, not a student issue, even though it is NOT your fault either! She just needs to believe that she's doing fine and it's all about mom, just for self-confidence :) p.s. Easier work feeling babyish is hard. High Noon Books has high interest, low readability books that are amazingly awesome. They are actually interesting, too! They have lots for both kids and teens. There is sure to be something on their website that would interest your daughter.

Well, that's confusing!

Also... he could always do a year or two at a different school and then transfer as a junior perhaps :)