Dyslexia?

[Lillyfee]

Hi

I don't know if some remember me but I homeschooled 4 kids until last year.

Now my two older ones go to school.  My son that I was always so worried about goes to 6th grade now and so far behaves good and only brought home As so far. He tested in all grade at or above grade level. My oldest started 9th grade and I need to admit that public school is a little shock for us and we are not completely happy.

However, I have a question reagarding my 8 year old daughter. She just started 3rd grade and we are still finishing The Good and the Beautiful LA Level 2. We did actually a long summer break and were home in Germany. We still read but no structured school work. Our first language is German but we speak English at school time.

When I compare my youngest (7 years old, started 2nd grade) and my 8 year old, reading just comes so much easier to the younger one. She reads fluently and has so much fun reading books.

My 8 year old loves writing. She still makes a lot of mistakes but I would say that her spelling is ok. The sad thing is that she hates reading. It's so hard for her. She really tries but she is still very slow and needs to sound out a lot. There are some things she does that are so weird:

She always confuses b and d still, like it's impossible for her even with the d - donut picture and the b - belly picture, sometimes even m and w but not often

She gets words like was - saw, that-what, there -  where confused all the time even though I tell her to look closely at the first letter

She sometimes completely mixes up letters in long words.

She reads 3rd grade books  but needs to concentrate so hard and after like 10 minutes she gets tired and starts making more and more mistakes. 

I want to add that her dad is severely dyslexic.

What do you guys think and which strategies can help her?

[Rosie_0801]

Have you checked her for Irlen Syndrome?

 

[Lillyfee]

I did not but I am going to look it up right now.

[EKS]

Has she had a developmental vision exam? 

Other than that, dyslexia can take a while to remediate--like years.  I'd have her read aloud every day from books that are easy for her to read.  Work up to 20-30 minutes at a stretch.  Gradually increase the reading level until she is reading at a level that is on par with her general cognitive ability.  

Another thing that seemed to help my dyslexic son was Audiblox.  It was the most fringe-y thing we did.  We did it back when it was done with physical objects--blocks, flash cards, and so on--but now I think it is all on the computer.  I don't know if the change has also altered the effectiveness.

As for b and d, have you done the picture of a bed using the word bed thing?

[Lillyfee]

No, she has not but that is a great idea.

Maybe the picture of a bed would be easier for her than the d doughnut comes first. I will try that.

Yes, I already took a step back and we read together like she reads one page and I read the next.

The good thing is that she is highly motivated but also gets frustrated and keeps asking me why her younger sister and best friend read better than her. It really bothers her a lot.

Also maybe I need to go to speech therapy with her. My friend asked why she still says some words wrong (like probaly instead of probably, sudlendy instead of suddenly etc). I just started to pay attention and correct her when she says things wrong. I was so used to her to talk like that.

Otherwise she is great with paying attention and her attitude towards learning is very good. She also has no trouble with math and is very social. It kind of hurts me seeing her struggle with reading and she is so aware of it that she struggles. However, she knows what she reads. When she made it through a story she can tell me exactly what she was reading. 

[Rosie_0801]

41 minutes ago, Lillyfee said:

The good thing is that she is highly motivated but also gets frustrated and keeps asking me why her younger sister and best friend read better than her. It really bothers her a lot.

What do you tell her?

 

My dd's dyslexia didn't manifest much in reading, but she couldn't remember how to write letters from one day to the next until I taught her to join. Perhaps joined letter pairs including b's and d's would help yours?

[Lillyfee]

I always tell her that people are just different and everyone has different strengths and talents and also some can read earlier fluently and some later. Her little sister might have an easier time reading but she is more athletic. I also tell her that she just needs to work a little harder but that this is not a bad thing as she will get there, too.

When she writes she does write the d and b correctly. She gets confused when reading stories and especially in longer words. I just feel that reading is hard work for her.

[EKS]

10 hours ago, Lillyfee said:

Also maybe I need to go to speech therapy with her. My friend asked why she still says some words wrong (like probaly instead of probably, sudlendy instead of suddenly etc).

This is very common in dyslexics.  My son still has some odd pronunciations (he's 26).  He actually made up his own language (that I learned) before he started speaking in English.

Have you read The Mislabeled Child by Brock and Fernette Eide?  Another good one is Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz.  Ignore what she says about parents teaching their dyslexic kids to read.  What she really means is that parents should not wing it when teaching their dyslexic kids to read.  Anyway, the Shaywitz book has lists of symptoms at different ages that you may find helpful.

[kbutton]

My younger son was very much like this when he was that age. He has a dyslexia diagnosis, and it's pretty mild for him (other family members have had more symptoms). We used a reading curriculum that taught pretty hardy phonics, but it was not Orton-Gillingham. Part of the reason I stayed with it is that it did work, but mainly it's that I learned to read with that curriculum and vividly remembered my early reading experiences, so I had the big picture of where it was going and whether it was working or not. The familiarity helped me. I did, however, pull in side resources, such as the book from Explode the Code that deals with syllables, a reader from All About Reading when he needed more practice at a certain level, a volume of Plaid Phonics from MCP at a level where he needed some work, Bob books, etc. I also taught him cursive to avoid the look alike letters.

Since I don't really know what TGATB is like for LA, I can't say if there are specific areas I would supplement if I was using it with a dyslexic, but it's really not unusual to have to bring in side resources for weaker areas. I encourage you to do so--it can be an individually chosen book or resource, but it could be something like learning the Spalding method, which I gather is quite flexible when you learn the method. @Ellie can speak to how it works and what is available. 

I would also consider (in addition to a developmental vision exam) an auditory processing screening. Audiologists (and sometimes a psychologist) will usually use the SCAN III as a screener. My son passed it but had some unusual patterns, so he had more testing. Some people are very rigid about pass/fail and won't look into it if a child has some unusual presentations. Part of the test is optional, and I try to go to someone whose standard practice is to run the whole thing if any of the scores on the main part of the test are in the bottom half of what would be considered standard or normal (like below 50th percentile, for instance). Otherwise, kids can get missed. I was fortunate enough to have an audiologist friend who customized some therapy with him. I think of APD (sometimes called CAPD) as being the other side of the coin from dyslexia. There are some processes in the brain to differentiate the two, but there are overlaps in symptoms, and a significant portion of kids with one will have the other. 

[Lillyfee]

Thank you all so much.

I really love TGTB.

We just don't do the TGTB spelling for her. We use All About Spelling instead and are very happy with it.

She does good on the TGTB level 2 readers for school and in her free time she loves  this I Can Read books level 2 (I feel they are too easy but she loves them and always picks them at the library). 

The last time I wanted her to try a Magic Tree House book as it's always mentioned as a good transition to chapter books and it was a disaster. I don't know if it were the words or the small print or the missing pictures but she struggled so hard. So no chapter books without pictures for us for a while now.

Is it ok if she reads easy books or would you try to challenge her more?

[Lillyfee]

We are also about to start cursive writing after she is done with her current handwriting book. 

[Rosie_0801]

I'd tell her she's dyslexic, so she doesn't start thinking her reading problems are a character flaw. "Brains are weird" is commonly used around here.

Easy books are good. Picture books are nice, and many are written at a higher level than those early chapter books, so you may be able to gradually increase the difficulty without her noticing so much.

Teaching the syllabary using the lessons on thephonicspage.org did wonders for mine, taking them slowly.

[Lillyfee]

Yes, I mentioned that she might have the same thing like dad that makes it hard to read. I like  "brains are weird".

Thank you for reminding me of the phonicspage. I did that with my songor a little bit as I did not know why he struggled in LA but it turned out that he did just fine as long as he managed to pay attention. It is a really helpful page.

[Storygirl]

I would go ahead and ask the local public school to evaluate her for a reading disability. They may or may not call it dyslexia. The evaluation may or may not be sufficient, and you might want to get private evaluations at some point, as well. I recommend that you get a paper trail going, so that if she enters the school system at some point, she will already have an IEP in place (or at least a paper trail that can turn into an IEP; sometimes schools will not write an IEP for homeschoolers, even though they are legally required to do learning disability testing).

I homeschooled DD17, who has dyslexia, until she was 10 and in fourth grade. We tried many reading programs, but she needed an intensive remediation. In our case, we hired an Orton-Gillingham tutor for a year, then she attended a private dyslexia school for three years. Others have used Barton or other programs successfully while homeschooling.

I think that you likely need to revamp the way that you are teaching her at home. I think that speech therapy may be helpful, though if she only has problems with random words, it's more likely to be a dyslexia issue than a speech issue. DD17 has always had a couple of pronunciation quirks, and she has difficulty learning new technical terminology (like for science class).

You can think through other ways to accommodate her work at home. Teach her to type, so that she can use spell check and Grammarly and speech-to-text technologies. You can also have her dictate her writing to you, when the object of the lesson is not handwriting but content.

Depending on what kind of difficulties your 9th grader is having, you may think about having him evaluated by the school, as well. High school is not too late to request this.

[Lillyfee]

Thank you for all the suggestions.

That was my plan to evaluate her at a public school. We are moving in October and I wanted to do it in our new state then.

Our high school girl does not have any academic issues. I just feel the school environment is very rough. Like I get messages almost every day about some "threats" but that they are taken care of and later find out for example one student threatened the other with a knife and stuff like that. Also the students and teachers say bad words and I feel academically is it a weird schedule with only two time a week math. We are just a little shocked after our years of sheltered homeschooling and I don't really like it. Our girl on the other hand found some friends and she does not get bullied or anything.

However, we are moving anyways and I hope that the new high school will be a good one.

 

Edited August 31, 2022 by Lillyfee

[PeterPan]

25 minutes ago, Lillyfee said:

We are moving in October and I wanted to do it in our new state then.

The waitlist for private evals right now can be 9+ months. If you have funding for private evals, then I would get the appts made for those *now* so when you get to your new location in 2 months you aren't set back even farther. You have no clue what the thoroughness of the ps evals will be, so having the option for private evals and getting started on that wait now is wise. (You can always cancel.)

Sometimes kids who are confusing and complex take extra work to sort out and aren't going to be *one* thing but several. You're doing the right thing pursuing evals and it sounds like you're getting the recommendation from people who know her to consider multi-factored evals (not just psych but SLP, etc.). This is very wise. The school will do a multi-factored eval and whatever you do privately should be also. I'm going to suggest that you might be able to get some SLP legwork done *now* even before you move, and the reason you should do this is to see if there's reason to do an audiology eval as well. If you get good evals, you can take them to therapists in the new location and get the therapy begun, easy peasy. You don't have to be married to the idea that the person doing the evals is the person doing the therapy. 

https://bartonreading.com/students/#ss  See how she does on the Barton screening. It's NOT a dyslexia test but it will give you some useful information.  And then see what funding you have to make evals like SLP and audiology happen now while you wait. There are SLPs who specialize in literacy who *might* be able to get a thorough eval done from their perspective before you move. Probably pursue the developmental vision question, which is a good one, and OT, after the move.

If you do the SLP eval, especially if you find one specializing in literacy to do it, you're going to sort very quickly through what part is needing reading intervention, what part is articulation, what part is auditory processing, etc. That way you can begin interventions now, before the move, and not be losing a lot of time there. If you clear and you know it's articulation + dyslexia, then you can do teletherapies for both, get them going, and lose no time. 

Edited August 31, 2022 by PeterPan

[Lillyfee]

Yes, I need to look tomorrow and call.

I wished we would already know the school district we belong to.

I am going to do this Barton test with her tomorrow.

[kbutton]

I agree that easy books are good. For leveled readers, it seems like kids can park in Level 2 for quite a while, and they seem to have a lot of quality readers depending on the series (Frog and Toad, Mr. Putter books, etc.). 

On 8/31/2022 at 5:51 PM, Rosie_0801 said:

Easy books are good. Picture books are nice, and many are written at a higher level than those early chapter books, so you may be able to gradually increase the difficulty without her noticing so much.

[*****]

On 8/31/2022 at 10:57 AM, kbutton said:

Otherwise, kids can get missed. I was fortunate enough to have an audiologist friend who customized some therapy with him.

I would be interested to know what types of activities were used with him for this if you can recall.  I work with dyslexic students and often see auditory processing difficulties. I am willing to do some of these activities during their lessons as well as to suggest some to parents for further practice. 

[kbutton]

12 hours ago, ***** said:

I would be interested to know what types of activities were used with him for this if you can recall.  I work with dyslexic students and often see auditory processing difficulties. I am willing to do some of these activities during their lessons as well as to suggest some to parents for further practice. 

Two big umbrellas. One is Capdots (I think it's got funky capitalization). It's a computerized program that adjusts to the student and is evidence-based. It's possible to ask the school to include this in an IEP and potentially use the school/district audiologist as a resource (in our state, they have educational service centers for services like this, and they are at the county level, IIRC). It's a bit of an uphill battle, but it has been done.

The other is Buffalo Model intervention. That is the part that you might be able to implement. They have continuing ed and such to go with it. That part was tightly targeted to my son's issues and his individual responsiveness. Because she did his testing, she was able to pinpoint areas during testing that were weak in addition to blatant errors, and she could see patterns. 

It has some similarities to dyslexia intervention for sure, and I think you could pick up the Buffalo Model strategies. My friend can wax eloquent with evidence-based information about the differences between dyslexia and APD and where they overlap and why it all matters. I cannot. 🙂 

https://www.igaps.org/  This is the organization of professionals who use the Buffalo Model. I don't know if ASHA has stuff about it as well or not. I do not know if they offer their training to only certain kinds of professionals, but it's worth learning more.

[PeterPan]

On 9/6/2022 at 11:32 PM, ***** said:

I would be interested to know what types of activities were used with him for this if you can recall.  I work with dyslexic students and often see auditory processing difficulties. I am willing to do some of these activities during their lessons as well as to suggest some to parents for further practice. 

I did quite a bit from https://www.proedinc.com/Products/31050/differential-processing-training-program-3book-set.aspx  and then hired an SLP who has been using https://www.proedinc.com/Products/37614/the-central-auditory-processing-kit.aspx with my ds. Our current SLP for this has experience in the deaf community, and she is meticulous making sure he can discriminate every frequency in background noise and building it up in a very carefully controlled way. I think the problem is that it's a big umbrella diagnosis that language is not being properly processed but it has so many subsets and aspects. On the plus side, it means anything you did will probably be helpful. 🙂If you can get SLP goals into the IEP, that could be helpful and give more service time also. 

CAPDots was recommended to us by the audiologist but we haven't done it. I think I'd be focusing on what your particular student needs in order to make progress, where dichotic listening would be a subset, a piece. I can tell you my ds has made astonishing real life progress (ability to sing on tune, ability to process the bits of language like morphemes, recognizing homonyms, making jokes using metalinguistics skills, etc.) with the language based work. At the heart what we most care about is language processing (pitch/prosody, phonemes, morphemes, working memory for the processing, processing with background noise, etc.), so as long as that is in the approach you'll probably see progress. 

Fwiw, when I looked at the Buffalo Method it seemed a bit ambitious for my ASD2. He generally 3X as long as other people to get to the same place. So not the perfect program but someone doing it enough that it finally comes together. That's why getting goals for it into the IEP and getting the SLP servicing it as well can be good.

Edited September 8, 2022 by PeterPan

[kbutton]

5 hours ago, PeterPan said:

Fwiw, when I looked at the Buffalo Method it seemed a bit ambitious for my ASD2. He generally 3X as long as other people to get to the same place. So not the perfect program but someone doing it enough that it finally comes together. That's why getting goals for it into the IEP and getting the SLP servicing it as well can be good.

That is a good point. My kids tend to have narrow but deep issues in any area they need remediation, and then they globally apply that remediation pretty easily. Most kids are probably someplace between those two extremes. 

[goldenecho]

This is vague and I appologize for that, but while I've met some homeschoolers with Dyslexia that did alright with 'The Good in the Beautiful" I've also known some who it wasn't helpful for, and I've heard that one of the reasons have to do with the order things are taught in (that's it's somewhat less systematic and has a somewhat less than logical progression of introducing phonemes .

If it seems to be working, take that with as grain of salt, but if you think your son is having problems with it it might be worth looking into something different.

All About Reading, Pinwheels, Logic of English, and of course Barton I've heard is good.

 

Edited September 10, 2022 by goldenecho

[ElizabethB]

You could try abecedarian. They have some good activities for free:

http://www.abcdrp.com/freesupportmaterials

Also, Leigh print is a marked print that has a common alphabet between German and English. I would start with the German and then move to the English, German is much more regular. 

http://thephonicspage.org/On Reading/leighprint.html

English/German book:

https://books.google.com/books?id=qFwBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR20&lpg=PR20&dq=edwin+leigh+pronouncing+orthography&source=bl&ots=nPqkX18L2I&sig=EamrNdiU6ghDuHKotuT2O2kTjnI&hl=en&ei=t9v9SYjcF4jCtwfk_aWjDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10#v=onepage&q=edwin leigh pronouncing orthography&f=false

After a few months of German only reading, using a German beginning reader book and then the Leigh Print, switch to English with Leigh Print, start with the Hillard primer, the books linked on Internet Archive from my Leigh Print page are good quality scans.

You could also try German with a syllabary and then my lessons with a syllabary.

Syllabic phonics:

https://infogalactic.com/info/Syllabic_phonics

My lessons that use syllabic phonics, follow with more 2+ syllable words in Webster, overlearn the syllable tables:

http://thephonicspage.org/On Reading/syllablesspellsu.html

Webster's Speller full PDF:

http://donpotter.net/pdf/websterspellingbookmethod.pdf

Book if you want to order instead:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1496153278/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Edited September 10, 2022 by ElizabethB