History for Dyslexic Child

[1shortmomto4]

I read some wise advice here just recently (I think it was an older post because I was doing a search on high school and dyslexia) and they said if they had it to do over again they would do American history first (9th/10th) and then the Ancients - because the topics, books, etc. are just more challenging - I totally agree which has caused me to stop and think as I move forward with my one ds (entering 7th) who struggles with dyslexia (his is letter reversals, low working memory - teach/reteach/teach) but he's great with watching visual things and listening (hates writing because he's got dysgraphia). At any rate, this year we are using the Living History Book (Vol 2) from Queens and we just might be able to stick with this for the long haul to get him through high school but was wondering - have you found anything that is history-related that you've had great success with your dyslexic kiddos. (science, too)? I'm a reader so it has been hard trying to approach subjects from a different angle (I would have loved Sonlight) and really would love some guidance and options to look into.

[Heathermomster]

Veritas Press has an online history course. You can hop over there and view a sample.

 

Next year, we are going to try HO Lev 2 Ancients. DS has always used history text books supplemented with videos, lit books (some audio), map-work, travel, museums, and history pockets. Have you ever met a family that was heavily musical or deep into sports? My family is heavily history and science orientated.

Edited April 8, 2012 by Heathermomster

[TippyCanoe]

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[PeterPan]

Sorry but I missed it. Is this dc going to be 7th in the fall and you're planning next year? I can tell you that my dd (not officially dyslexic) has loved the online self-paced history from VP. I think Shari that you're referring to is planning to use it with her similar issues boy for 7th or was it 7th and 8th? Anyways, check it out.

 

Have you seen DA (Dyslexic Advantage by the Eides) yet? It was the book that really opened my eyes to *why* my dd enjoys history so much. I don't think it's as helpful to create some perfect paradigm and implement it as it is to find out what strengths or interests the dc might be bringing to the table. You have an awful lot of latitude to chose, even within the realm of keeping a traditional schedule and bent, kwim? So for instance as I read DA I realized WHY my dd was so fascinated by narrative and WHY she enjoyed the rabbit trails and connections so much. The VP online self-paced lessons happen to have a lot of that. And they bolster up the area she's weak on (memorizing specifics). And their catalog has recommendations of books, etc. to go with all the cards, making it easy to pull together materials at your ds' level that will work with what he's covering.

 

Well I'm side-tracked. The point is, when I realized *why* my dd would find something engaging, then I knew what to look for.

 

I think the issue with the ancients is one of when you hit reading certain of the classics. But you know that really just depends on whether your kid enjoys them, whether you're willing to make time for them on audio, whether he has maturity issues going along with the dyslexia, etc. It's not a pat answer, kwim?

 

I've never seen that history book from Queens. I've gotten other stuff from them over the years. Maybe they'll be at the convention so I can check it out! :)

[Greta Lea]

He'll be using A History of US by Hakim for 9th and 10th grade history. I've got an old SL Core 7 IG that I will use for the discussion questions and some of the SL notes. He's read some of book 1 and *really* likes it. It's nice to have him excited about history for the next two years. He'll do books 1-5 next year and 6-10 in 10th grade.

 

For science, we are gonna try a series that is recommended for struggling readers. It's Science Workshop series. I have a couple of local friends who use this series. Their kids do well it.

 

http://www.wiesereducational.com/products/i_science/33-i_chemistry/science-workshop-series.htm

[Love_to_Read]

We've been doing Sonlight Core D with my dd (age 10, so that's their elementary American History, but I'm posting in case the high school core might be similar)...and I'm finding that most of the classic literature is available on audiobook. Some of it might be appropriate for high school...The Witch of Blackbird Pond, for example...if you had age-appropriate questions to dig a littel deeper than an elementary student would. Anyway, I'd take a look at the booklists for Sonlight, Tapestry of Grace, Winter's Promise, etc., and see if you can cobble together a decent timeline from the ones that are available in audio, then count them as literature as well. Combined with a history textbook like Hakim's, that should do it.

 

I do require that my dd follow along with the written text when listening to audio...that would be too much for some, so you'd have to see how it goes, but I think it's very valuable if possible.

Edited April 8, 2012 by Love_to_Read

[Tokyomarie]

I'm the one who mentioned saving Ancients for later. The main point I really wanted to make is about not feeling rushed to have a teen start rhetoric level work in 9th grade. Likewise for younger children- if their reading & writing skills are lagging, it's perfectly fine to keep them in grammar stage work a little longer. It is a bit hard with bright dyslexics to know where to place them. I wish I had placed my son closer to his comfortable or true instructional writing level to give him a greater feeling of success in output. With reading, in 9th grade, I would have given him plenty of logic stage books for independent reading and stretched his reading skills with the occasional rhetoric level book for reading (using audio to supplement).

 

I am a Sonlight kind of gal at heart- I have used all the cores in one form or another, for one child or another, except for British Lit. Because of my Sonlight bent, I was already reading aloud to my children for far longer than many parents do in their homeschools. I had at least two books going at all times for my son through 8th grade. Then I fell off the wagon. I got amped up because of feeling pressure in the high school forum and not feeling sure how to manage ds's overall cognitive processing level together with his reading and writing levels. I tried to move him to rhetoric stage work and it was a flop!

 

As others have suggested, I have used a lot of documentary, movie, and (at high school level) Teaching Company lectures to supplement assigned reading.

 

The good news about our homeschooling: my son is feeling a definite lack in assigned reading at his school. He commented that he reads far less than he used to because so little reading is assigned. He said all his friends who were homeschooled until coming into the program he is in have said the same thing. I'm really starting to wish I could bring him back home for another year or two until he graduates. But given his age and the original reasons I enrolled him in school, I won't do it unless he begs on his hands and knees!

[EKS]

I ended up not doing WTM style history/literature with my dyslexic son. I used the most engaging textbooks I could find and read them aloud as a spine and I had my son write chapter summaries each week. I added some additional books that were either assigned reading or I read them aloud. As for literature, we did American literature with American history in 9th and British and world fiction in 10th. I used a standard high school literature text as a source for short stories and poems and then I assigned novels for him to read and I also read some of the novels aloud. We watched plays rather than reading them. We worked on writing literary essays. That sort of thing. I gave a lot of support (that I'm still trying to wean him off of, even though he is in a b&m school).

 

Basically, I just read a lot aloud and realized that my son needed to be taught--no independent learning here. Other than that, I tried to find resources that he would find engaging but nothing else special.

[onaclairadeluna]

I ended up not doing WTM style history/literature with my dyslexic son.

 

I think this was critical for my son too. My dyslexic son is actually a pretty good reader. But retrieving the info and writing it down would have absolutely killed his love of history. And he really loves history.

 

Things DS has enjoyed for history include

 

Cartoon History of the World

Horrible Histories

and Teaching Company Lectures.

 

He has watched/ listened to probably 10 of these over the years

History of Ancient Greece

History of Ancient Rome

History of Egypt

From Yao to Mao

and just about every lecture from Kenneth Harl.

 

More recently (he's 14) I found a pretty good text and he's read through it and I would just ask him to write something. I didn't grade or evaluate it I just wanted him to get in the habit of writing about what he's learning. Meanwhile we worked on writing away from the text.

 

Next year I plan to more formally evaluate these writing assignments. He's ready to really write across all subjects but it took a very long time to get here.

 

As far as the history sequence I am actually taking 2 years for ancients. DS really loves Ancient History and there are so many books to read. He started this year in the 8th grade with Ancient Greek literature. He is a very good reader though. If he wasn't, I'd have had him listen to audio books. But his reading is very good. It's the writing that is tough and slows him down.

 

I would not hesitate to tweak the sequence to fit your child. If teaching American History first works for your child...then do it. It's all about cultivating a love of learning, by any means necessary.

 

I find it interesting how many different ways we have come up with to modify the curriculum to each of our kids.

 

Oh and do get Dyslexic Advantage.

[1shortmomto4]

Oh my, thank you all for taking the time to respond to my question. My ds will be entering 7th this fall and I found myself tentatively mapping out the next few years since high school will be here before I know (this has happened twice to me already ;-) ). My ds is making great progress in reading but when he sees or hears just about anything he retains it all. At the moment he is big into WW2 - gets up at 6:00 am to watch the history channel each morning and can tell me all about the generals, tank battles, battle strategy - you name it, he knows it. I did find some books at the bookstore that he could handle to keep the interest flowing and I'm contemplating doing the Homeschool in the woods WW2 study through the summer (because if we don't do a little something all the progress is gone!) or definitely very planned adventure reading. I just haven't been able to get a grasp on what way to take his homeschooling; his style versus my style. If I were to have been homeschooled SL would have been my perfect learning style fit - but I can't quite see that as being a good fit for him when this is the biggest area of struggle - it takes a lot of brain power for him and I want to keep him progressing. This new interest in WW2 (finally, something he wanted to pursue on his own) has been the greatest achievement for the year. I will have to get the Dyslexic Advantage book - this is not one that I've read just yet but definitely sounds like I need to. It is reassuring to know that he's normal for normal's sake and kiddos with dyslexic can succeed - they just might take a different route to get there.

[PeterPan]

The step DA is going to help you take is, not just whether he can survive and succeed, but that his dyslexia involves brain structures that actually make him GOOD at certain things. That's AWESOME that you're starting to see this! Yes, this is the age when they bloom. And you're exactly right that you want to go with the flow with this. No one is saying lose your head or fail to cover necessary skills, but it means there's an awful lot of flexibility. Have you been to a convention where SWB speaks? You're in VA and she's in VA. Does she speak at the VA convention? She's coming to Cincinnati at the end of the month for our convention. It's a pretty big shindig.

 

Anyways, she has a talk, not sure that she's giving it this year, using her WEM (Well-Educated Mind) book as a basis. You can probably buy it as as download on the PHP website. She basically explains the process and how it applies to adults. If you go to the hs board and read, you'll find that many people toss the SL/TOG/whatever route and go WEM. And I'm including people with SN/quirky kids (NaninMass, etc.) not just the nt ones. Now think with me. With WEM her thesis is you can pick *any* genre, any topic, follow it through time, and get a perspective on history, people, culture, etc. So you can work WITH your ds's interests, do it in an orderly way, hit the skills (as WEM describes) and not violate his interests or bent, kwim? You don't have to make his education look like everyone else's. The *skills* are much more important than the particular facts. Writing, that's important. Reading non-fiction is important. Being able to write and discuss what you've been reading, that's important. But the specifics, lots of flex there.

 

My dd LOVES history, but she loves the family relationships, the mother-child things, the whys, how people turned out as a result of the choices they made, the roles of women. These are things that interest her. Her reading lists are NOT going to look like someone else's. The *skills* are important, but the content we can totally flex.

 

BTW, have you read Debra Bell's book on teaching high school yet? You ought to. She has a fabulous chapter on junior high and using it well to prepare for high school. Some of her stuff will apply and some won't, but she had some really good thought processes there. One of them was to start pulling the student in and having them set their goals. This year (7th) my dd has made some progress on that. We've spent time getting realistic about what majors will work for her, where she might go, and what preparation she needs for that. It has just been on and off during the year, nothing serious. At this point though she actually has some tentative goals for courses she wants to take her senior year to get stuff out of the way (freshman requirements). We're not sending her to the cc, and she's not going to graduate early or be one of those with a zillion AP whatevers. She's just not intense like that. If *I* had told her to do this stuff, she'd have bucked and groaned. Now it's *her* plan and her goals and she knows her reasons for having them as goals. So I think Debra Bell was really right in her advice on that whole junior high thing and how to talk through it and plan high school. Definitely recommend the book. :)

Edited April 9, 2012 by OhElizabeth

[TippyCanoe]

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[PeterPan]

Ok, I'm missing something. What is WTM's stance against image-based education? I don't even know what that means, lol.

 

Guess it never occurred to me someone here would pick up WEM and feel it was an absolute. It's just a concept, a starting point, and that's all I referred to it as. We've ALWAYS detached writing from content, doing content the way we enjoy and getting our writing other ways. It's vital for us, and in fact it was SWB (in person, over lunch) who gave me the shove that way.

 

I'll also observe that kids with dyslexia can have an ADHD component. If that's the case, they can have issues with initiation, organizing projects, etc. They may need *structure* for those projects to happen. It's such a fine line, wanting to provide that room for creativity and going with their flow but making sure there's enough structure and organization that it actually happens. I know my dd, now turning 13, is radically different from what she was at 10-11. That's a huge difference in her ability to sit down and organize a project and successfully make it happen.

 

So the creativity is happening in the context of that home. They've just got to find a routine that works for them. That's why I'm all for concepts. Once I got the concept that my dd's brain works well with narratives and relationships, I could apply that concept to history, science, anything. She loves the Chem 101 videos now, because they use just that.

 

But whatever, I'm rambling. Just because I mentioned WEM or WTM doesn't mean I'm saying to do everything in it, letter for letter. I never ever say that. I totally separate skills and content and use the skills as a sequence, a little checklist in the back of my mind to know whether we're on track or have some holes to fill. It lets me know ways to guide her projects. I definitely don't endorse torture. Learning stops when the brain is under that kind of stress.

[TippyCanoe]

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[PeterPan]

The insistence that classical education is word-based (textual) in direct opposite to image-based (visual) is foundational to WTM and WEM.

 

You may see both books as jumping-off points, but I just thought it was interesting that your idea of "flexibility" in content, as with SWB, doesn't include what form that content comes in: that is, you still keep mentioning non-fiction books, what books the kid could read that bring in his interests. I'm just asking why necessarily books, in all subjects, including this one, for a child who is clearly a visual learner and who, his mom says, remembers everything he sees?

 

And I'm a bit confused -- maybe because it's getting late -- if you separate content from skills, why are you talking about "hitting the skills" while reading books that incorporate his particular historical interests? I'm not trying to argue, and perhaps this is getting away from what the OP was interested in discussing. But I find it perplexing that what you're doing is in essence recommending a WTM-type history program -- reading and writing based -- while talking about building on this child's strengths. Are those strengths, in your mind, defined as content interests? I was talking about strengths in terms of learning effectively and enthusiastically through visual and/or auditory material, no matter what particular angle of history the documentaries or lectures or whatever involved -- this is how his mom described him.

 

Aw come on, you're roasting me NEEDLESSLY. I never said that, and you know it. I said MATERIALS in my original post. Go look it up. And I mentioned high school reading lists. Well duh, I'm guessing every dc on here is going to read SOMETHING during high school in some fashion. I am not SWB, have never been SWB, do not channel SWB, and my dd doesn't even LIKE SWB. I only mean exactly what I say, nothing more, and I think anyone who's read my (10K? whew!) posts knows that. I specifically said how fabulous the VP online VIDEO lessons are for us because we can use them as a STARTING POINT and pull in MATERIALS to go with it.

 

My kid didn't test as dyslexic and can read. Her CTOPP scores were below her reading comprehension quite a bit, considering how many years she did of OG-based instruction and how MANY programs we did, but we won't even talk about that. We'll just grant that my kid CAN read and can do reading. But she's doing a fully video-driven, interactive course right now (which everyone here knows) and I gently nudge her to read things she selects from the piles I bring into the house. We all know that at SOME point our kids ARE going to have to do certain skills. I picked some that were good steps for my dd and gently nudge her toward them. I *like* the WTM for a way of seeing how skills build. It doesn't bug me one bit that SWB/WTM is totally stuck in one paradigm. It just doesn't bug me. She has no degree in education, has only taught in a top-down, front-face setting (university), and that's not going to translate to my individual student. I've eaten with her, talked with her, and know for myself that she is wrangling just like the rest of us with how you adapt *concepts* to the reality in front of you. She didn't know that when she wrote WTM years ago, and it doesn't bug me. I don't ask anyone to take responsibility for my homeschooling, and it doesn't shock me that books are incomplete.

 

Wow that got long-winded. :lol:

[Paisley Hedgehog]

nm

[PeterPan]

Shari, last week my dd was writing from an article on *fainting goats*. :)

 

Seriously, I think Doodler is pointing out the sanity there, that it's ok to disconnect stuff, find other forms of output, and think about what your goals are. Like if your goal is for him to *synthesize* the history or think critically about it or see how it connects, there are other ways to do that (projects, discussion). Then you can pick your battles with the writing separately. Just because SWB connects them doesn't mean *we* have to.

 

Billions of people on the planet are living just fine without ever writing response papers or doing a GB study. Life goes on.

[TippyCanoe]

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