I'm just afterschooling; my younger dd goes to an excellent public high school, but I have been thinking much like you. DD is thinking about epidemiology as a career, and is a sophomore, currently in AP Biology, (did regular biology in 8th grade with an Advanced on the Arkansas EOC exam), and she got a 50 on the CLEP chemistry test last year after taking preAP Chemistry in 9th grade and a high school level conceptual chemistry course during the summer between 8th and 9th grade. She is currently in Precalculus, so I expect her to take the College Algebra CLEP this summer. She also did AP Human Geography last year, and is in AP World History this year. I want her well prepared but I expect her to repeat the stuff in her major, and to get out of the core curriculum while still in high school. I expect her to take four years, including a semester of immersion spanish. AP exams are more widely accepted by colleges than are CLEPs, but this doesn't apply to Texas schools, which accepts both unusually well due to state mandate. CLEPS are a LOT easier than AP exams; because the folks who take them are mostly military and have powerful organizations to defend their interests. The score needed to pass on a CLEP (usually 50-60) is relatively easier to attain than a passing score (usually 4s and 5s) needed on an AP.) However the material learned for a CLEP examination will not prepare you at all for upper level college courses. This is why it is best to CLEP out of useless courses which are not going to be in your major, rather than to CLEP out of courses in your presumptive major. In addition, when I look at colleges for her, among the criteria I use are (1) cost - I want her to graduate with no debt (2) graduation rate and (3) ACT score 25th and 75th percentiles. TAMU's 4 year graduation rate is only 49%, but its 6 year graduation rate is 80% which is very good for a STEM school. TAMU's 25th and 75th percentiles on the ACT for entering freshmen are ACT Composite: 24 / 30 respectively, ACT English: 23 / 30, ACT Math: 24 / 30. From my perspective, that means that while my dd (currently ACT score of 24 composite but still only a sophomore) would "fit" into the range of students at TAMU, if she went there, she would NOT shine, would not be chosen by research professors to be their pet golden girl cum lab monkey, and most likely would not have an exemplary transcript, because she would only be on the bottom 25th percentile for accepted students, and her professors would be chatting up the folks on 90th percentile and above. Those unpaid, but useful positions would go to the equally hardworking and personable folks in the top 10% of admitted students not to my dd. She would do even worse at UT Dallas, whose 4 year graduation rate is 45%, 6 year graduation rate 64%, and ACT Composite: 26 / 31; ACT English: 24 / 31; and ACT Math: 26 / 32. In that school, she would definitely be amoung the folk who failed to graduate. in four years and might be among those who failed to graduate in six years. I recommend you stop in at Barnes and Nobles and peruse a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants" It discusses what can happen to the 90% of promising students who can't be in the top ten percent of students in their Ivy League colleges. \http://www.amazon.com/David-Goliath-Underdogs-Misfits-Battling/dp/0316204366

Well, getting an evaluation by a developmental audiologist would be useful, but the other way of handling it is to assume that the problem exists and begin with a multisensory program to build phonemic awareness. Try Read Write and Type. https://www.talkingfingers.com/online-demo/ It was a program I did not have to bribe or threaten my kids to use; the first 8 lessons of the demo are at the URL above, and you can see how it works for him. If he can't handle that I would try Earobics first. http://www.amazon.com/Earobics-Step-Home-Version-Foundations-Windows/dp/0669524115

I would pull him too. First, I think that early childhood bilingual education is overrated, and YES, I tried it too. We were having her watch the Muzzy tapes videos, and so on. But it was confusing my eldest even though her first language was Spanish, and it seemed to be keeping her from learning English. I was afraid she was going to end up illiterate in two languages, and so we cut back to just using dual languages songs and games, and left off formal instruction until she was 11. She did immersion during and after college, and is fluent in Spanish at the high intermediate level now; able to handle ordinary conversations with non English speaking people, and to write essays and articles in Spanish without difficulty, but not able to read or write at the professional level fluently. She has a lot of first and second generation Hispanic friends, and she thinks that the ones born in the US who kept their Spanish at home, ended up with it interfering with their English. They have serious difficulty understanding professional level English conversation, even though their routine English conversation is entirely fluent.

I don't think there is any particular age at which it is inappropriate to address auditary issues, it getting it paid for. (A real problem if you are depending on insurance, which in our case paid nothing.) My eldest kid got Fast Forword at age 6 a year after the articles in Science and Nature came out, and as soon as it was out of the experimental phase. (My sister was a neurologist, and I sent her to get the training, so she could supervise the program; it wasn't available otherwise where we were.) It was really tough, and the kid fought it all the way, and we had to sit next to her the entire time to redirect her when her attention flagged because of her ADD. We had this whole slew of graded positive and negative reinforcements, and a sticker chart so she could tell when she was due for prizes, and whether they were going to be small or big ones. We broke the 2 hours a day up into a bunch of 20 minute sections with breaks in between and it was still a surefire fight every day for 12 weeks. However, IT WAS ABSOLUTELY WORTH IT, and I would 100% do it over if I had to do so. It is WONDERFUL when your 7 year old, suddenly starts learning without direct instruction, like normal kids, and starts asking abstract questions like "Why is the sky blue?" My younger child (also adopted out of central america) also had glue ears from untreated ear infections, and had only head control and a social smile when she came home at 7 months. She couldn't roll over or sit up; didn't babble until she got her tubes, and was a late speaker. When she was 1 year old, her only word was "Mickey Mouse", spoken once, and then nothing until 18 months. We were doing lots of at home Floor Time exercises http://www.stanleygreenspan.com/. However, she got her tubes at 9 months, not at 3 years like my eldest. My second dd also had some mild issues with fine motor control, so we had to do computer mouse training games with her beginning at age 3 to get her ready for Earobics which she did at age 4. We followed that with Fast Forword and Read Write and Type. All of it was a lot easier for her because she hadn't yet experienced failure, and so she was willing to work for m & m's; no elaborate rewards and penalties needed. (We still had to sit next to her however.) She went into Kindergarten reading and writing and doing math at the end first grade level, and able to touch type at 15 words a minute, and so unlike her poor sister, her teachers all loved her and petted her like a puppy. She got oodles of positive reinforcement and loved school.

My rising HS junior will be doing 3 credit Expository Writing through Taylor University online to prepare her for AP English Literature and AP American History next year. She'll also do a week of ACT prep and go through a few ACT test prep books, and we'll go to the beach at Pensacola for ten days, and see the Blue Angels. My eldest is working as a CNA, but I'm hoping she will start an LPN program this summer. She graduated a year and a half ago with her history BA, and then had a year of intensive Spanish immersion and Teaching English as a Second Language in Costa Rica so she is bilingual, but there really aren't any jobs here for history majors.

Also, if the problems are visual tracking, have you tried visual processing exercises? E.g. scattering pictures of 5 animals holding different numbers on the wall, and then having her shine a flashlight on the correct number on command at increasing speed, competing against prior numbers. Then increasing the number of numbers to a max of 20. After that, the pendulum swing thing where the kid lies on the floor, and you have her try to follow a swinging pendulum with her eyes. Developmental optometrists are helpful here. They helped a lot with my eldest.

At that age, and with dysgraphia teaching her to type would be the easiest way of getting her to write. I used Read Write and Type with both my kids https://www.talkingfingers.com/online-demo/ for this because it combines phonics and spelling with typing instruction. As to the state reports, when I was teaching my eldest (who was the one who had all the hits) , I set up a feltboard with symbols for state flag, bird, flower (paragraph 2) , capital and major cities (paragraph 3), products and economy (paragraph 4), to help organize it, demanded a minimum of three sentences per paragraph on each of them, which could be obtained by using Google, and taught her how to write an introduction using the topic sentences from each of the middle paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph using the same process. Getting information from textbooks is a lot harder than getting information from Google especially for a reluctant reader.

I have posted kind of a long essay on this thread, but first, if your kid seemed smart to begin with, it may be the meds. None of the pediatric psych meds have been tested on kids for more than 18 months max. The long term effects are basically unknown, but a lot of them make kids spacey or aggressive. ("Vitamin A") Adderal at age 9 made my kid much smarter and more focused, but gave her headaches; Topamax for her headaches made her dumber than a rock. After a few months, I decided to do without meds, and just dealt with it. Adolescence was a nightmare, but we have a decent relationship at this point (age 23.) She is still a bit scatterbrained but is basically average at this point, has finished college, is working, lives in her own place, and plans to marry in October. I'm still paying for her health insurance, invite her on vacations, and pick up repairs on her car, but I don't pay for anything else (except of course for the wedding.) It sounds like your kid may have a sequencing problem, and may have some motor coordination issues. What are you doing besides Singapore Math? Please look up the thread to my other post and see if you recognize your kid.

I actually have a lot of experience here. My eldest is now 23, graduated from a regular college in 2012 as a history major, and is fluent in Spanish and English (post college immersion.) She was adopted out of a central american country, and came home at nearly age 3, under the third percentile for height, and with frank evidence of protein calorie malnutrition, anatomically evident sexual molestation, chronic untreated ear infections, not yet toilet trained etc etc. We put her into good commercial daycare for socialization purposes, and by the time she was about 3 and a half she was in the the normal range physically (not counting short stature), and was average socially. We did an awful lot of play physical and language therapy, zoos, museums, and stuff, and sent her into an Episcopalian church school kindergarten at age 5 knowing and able to write her letters and numbers, able to count to ten, read and write her name and a few words, and knowing her colors,days of the week, seasons, common dinosaurs, common farm and zoo animals etc. etc. But even then, she couldn't learn the simplest nursery rhyme, bedtime prayer or mealtime grace despite any amount of repetition. We quickly got into the habit of never talking to her for anything more complex than "Would you like a popsicle?" without visual aids, either pointing at things, or using puppets, picture books etc. She learned all her common fairy tales plots through videos, puppet shows, children's theater, and playing Little Red Riding Hood with her toys. We also used Cuisinaire rods, dominoes, legos on food scales, and card games and number tiles etc. to teach her to count and to understand quantity, volume, weight and so on. Kindergarten was a disaster! She was already WAY behind the other kids - who were not particularly gifted children - and despite working like a dog with us for hours every day, was at the bottom of her class and knew it. We got her extensively tested, audiometry, IQ, vision, audiometry, the works, and it came back pervasive developmental delay (aka mental retardation.) No formal diagnosis was actually made because I stopped the IQ testing part way through because I could see that it would be somewhere in the 70s at best. So did the testers. I am a physician, and looking at the subscores, it became clear that she had a central audiotory processing disorder (phonics doesn't work if you don't have phonemic awareness, difficulty with visual processing (sight words don't work if you cant recognize word shapes), a sequencing issue (hello, if you want to count, you need to be able to sequence), ADD, and a language disorder. The only useful suggestions offered was to do Orton Gilligham and get language therapy. We got the Writing Road to Reading http://www.spalding.org/index.php?tname=program book and cards, worked hard all summer and it did help, as did the language therapy which we did with both paid speech therapists and home therapy using Lindamood Bell's excellent series of books and workbooks (available on amazon.com.) We trained a tutor in the Writing Road to Reading to work with her while we were at work, and she was, I thought exellent. We got the headphones and shirt mike for people with trouble with background noise. By this time it was the beginning of first grade, and we went to her school (did I mention we were also members of the church) to explain the findings (not including the IQ test), and asking that her tutor be allowed to work with her in the aftercare using the Writing Road to Reading, and that her teacher use the shirt mike, and let her wear the headphones she she could better comprehend what was being said. They refused on both, but offered their own (Friend of Principal) uncertified tutor using her own method, (which basically was reading crappy looking xeroxes of brief first grade level paragraphs, and not even reading the d*mn thing through so the kid might have an idea of what it was about), at the same cost, which was 20 dollars an hour 2 hours a day 5 days a week. This worked about as poorly as might be expected, and after a month we rebelled, and demanded that we be allowed to have our own tutor, who had previously worked with her. They doubled down, and said that she needed to be pulled out of all her classes, except recess and PE and to work with Friend of Principal all the rest of the time. (Of course we would still be expected to pay tuition as well as for Friend of Principal's tutoring.) We left the church and its school and enrolled her in the local public school (which was clean and safe but academically not as good.) This was very helpful. The teacher was willing to wear the shirt mike, and she fitted into the bottom of the lowest of their three regular reading groups and so she didn't feel so completely out of it. The sight words they expected her to learn were helpful, and writing them daily helped her learn them (her visual processing was still poor.) She was able to work with her tutor in the aftercare, and we started working down the problem list: (1) Auditory Processing and Language The single BEST intervention for this, IMHO is Fast Forward http://www.scilearn.com/products/ Two hours per day of auditory training exercises x 12 weeks during the summer before second grade and her auditory processing disorder retired from the lists defeated. She went from not being able to hear the difference between "A bat was in the hat" and "The cat sat on the mat" (unable to differentiate between sounds < 450 ms long) to NORMAL (able to differentiate between sounds < 10 ms in length.) She developed an auditory memory, and began singing around the house. (She couldn't remember songs, before either.) Suddenly she had phonemic awareness, and could understand phonics, and furthermore, benefited a great deal more from her language therapy not to mention her in school instruction. We donated the headphones/shirt mike thingy to the school, and she graduated from language therapy. Other useful but less pricy interventions which we also used for her auditory processing issue (and for her reading) were Earobics http://www.boundlessat.com/Learning/Earobics and Read Write and Type program http://www.talkingfingers.com/product_tour/ . They were both great, and Read Write and Type is also good as a reading/writing program/typing program. 2) Visual processing and Reading Once we no longer needed to invest her time in langauge therapy, we worked on visual processing. Most of this was with a developmental optometrist, but there are some useful activities at http://www.eyecanlearn.com/ . We also did a lot of fluency drills. Your local public school knows all about that - and btw, most public school systems do offer special education support to homeschoolers - and levelled fluency drills are also available on the internet. Google it. We were still doing Writing Road to Reading, which is also good for reading. Writing was a weak spot, but by this time, even there, she had gone from basement level to low average by the time she finished third grade. We took advantage of a move to repeat her in third grade, and she felt more confident her second time round, and actually began to find books she could enjoy. 4) Sequencing and math: Done concurrently with auditory processing at age 6 . We put up a big chart of the numbers from 1-100 in a 10 x 10 array, (printed off on my computer), and several times a day we would have her point to each in sequence and count first from 1 to 10, then from 1-20, etc until she was able to reliably count to 100 with the visual chart right there in front of her. Then we did it backwards until that smoothed out. Then we did skip counting by 2s, by 5s, and by 10s, and started her on an adaptive computer math programs including Quarter Mile Math (which is good but boring), and another one whose name I have forgotten but was one in which you blasted asteroids with correct answers to math problems, and which adapted to you, as does Quarter Mile Math, but was NOT boring. Eventually this nailed the sequencing issue. We did Keys to Math before doing Singapore Math and followed it with Saxon math once she hit Algebra. 4) Motor control and balance Swimming and gymnastics seemed to work best for this. She learned to doggie paddle with a progressive swim trainer, not now available but similar to the Power Swimr Swim Float, looked forward to having one of the 12 pads removed from the vest every week, and could doggie paddle without aids by the end of one summer. After she could doggie paddle the length of an olympic size pool (age 5) she had formal swim lessons at the Y and started gymnastics. She learned to bike by progressing through the stages of big wheel, tricycle, scooter (which lets you learn how to balance before having to put it all together) before she got a big bike, but since we hit the decks running, she was still the youngest in her neighborhood to ride a real bike (at 6) without training wheels. We taught her to write after she got her large muscle skills down, using the white board and markers technique, plus Draw Write Now materials http://www.amazon.com/Draw-Write-Book-Critters-Storybook-Draw-Write-Now (since she was drawing people who looked like squashed bugs well into age 6). Motor skills were normal/superior by the time she was 6. Drawing skills were above average by age 12, after which she just had ordinary art lessons.