My son and his school troubles sorry so long

My advice is to take him to a developmental optometrist for an evaluation. Medical insurance will usually pay for all or part of this exam. You can find a qualified developmental optometrist in your area at http://www.covd.orgThe reason I recommend this is because your son sounds exactly like my daughter when she was 8-1/2 — many reversals, difficulty learning sight words, slow and messy writing, good comprehension of math. She had severe developmental vision delays and needed vision therapy for 6 months. We followed up the vision therapy with PACE, a cognitive training program that developed her fine visual processing skills. Now, at 10-1/2, she reads at a fluent 5th grade level.Regular vision exams do not catch developmental vision delays, and regular optometrists and opthalmologists are not trained in this area. That’s why I recommend finding a qualified professional at http://www.covd.org. If finances are an issue, be sure to ask if the doctor will design a primarily home-based vision therapy program if it is necessary, to keep costs down.Mary: My 81/2 year old son is in 2nd grade.He has trouble reading mainly
: sounding out words.He has 6 vocabulary words a weeks he needs to
: know by sight and out of the 120 words so far this year he only
: knows 40 of them and sometimes not that many.We work on his
: flashcards everynight and on weekends.They work on them in school
: too everyday.He comphrens his work once he has it read to him.His
: writing is very inconsistant and messy too.He revereses alot of
: letters too like b,d, p,q,e,s,r,f and many others as well as
: numbers too.He has been evaluated by the school and we are waiting
: on the results however this past week he started workinh one on
: one with a LD teacher on spelling,phonics,and cursive writing and
: some corrdination skills for a hour every morning.He already went
: to title 1 reading every afternoon and still does along with
: speech therapy 2 times a week.I dont know when we will have a
: meeting on his test scores but my impression is that he does have
: a LD since they started working with him already with not having
: all the test results finished yet. His teacher wanted this testing
: for next year because she thinks he will get to overwelmed and
: fall behind.He right now takes longer tham most kids in hisclass
: to finish written work.He is great in math as long as there is no
: word problems.

: My advice is to take him to a developmental optometrist for an
: evaluation. Medical insurance will usually pay for all or part of
: this exam. You can find a qualified developmental optometrist in
: your area at http://www.covd.org: The reason I recommend this is because your son sounds exactly like
: my daughter when she was 8-1/2 — many reversals, difficulty
: learning sight words, slow and messy writing, good comprehension
: of math. She had severe developmental vision delays and needed
: vision therapy for 6 months. We followed up the vision therapy
: with PACE, a cognitive training program that developed her fine
: visual processing skills. Now, at 10-1/2, she reads at a fluent
: 5th grade level.: Regular vision exams do not catch developmental vision delays, and
: regular optometrists and opthalmologists are not trained in this
: area. That’s why I recommend finding a qualified professional at
: http://www.covd.org. If finances are an issue, be sure to ask if
: the doctor will design a primarily home-based vision therapy
: program if it is necessary, to keep costs down.: Maryhe has seen a eye doctor that gave him exercises to do last year and we took him to him 2 times a month for therapy.It did not seem to work the doctor said it is a processing problem.He went to these sessions last March though this past October.We paid for all of this ourselves and it did not help much.He does wear glasses all the time and most likly will for his life.

: Clearly you’re working on a comprehensive plan for your son and that’s important. In the meantime, a suggestion to help him with his vocab words might be this. On the flashcards, also have a picture of what the read is. If he has trouble sounding out the word, he’s left only to memorize the word’s letters and clearly he’s having trouble with that.It can help some children to also have a picture that they easily recognize next to the word. After a while, the picture is taken away but sometimes it can help to embed the word.Good luck.My 81/2 year old son is in 2nd grade.He has trouble reading mainly
: sounding out words.He has 6 vocabulary words a weeks he needs to
: know by sight and out of the 120 words so far this year he only
: knows 40 of them and sometimes not that many.We work on his
: flashcards everynight and on weekends.They work on them in school
: too everyday.He comphrens his work once he has it read to him.His
: writing is very inconsistant and messy too.He revereses alot of
: letters too like b,d, p,q,e,s,r,f and many others as well as
: numbers too.He has been evaluated by the school and we are waiting
: on the results however this past week he started workinh one on
: one with a LD teacher on spelling,phonics,and cursive writing and
: some corrdination skills for a hour every morning.He already went
: to title 1 reading every afternoon and still does along with
: speech therapy 2 times a week.I dont know when we will have a
: meeting on his test scores but my impression is that he does have
: a LD since they started working with him already with not having
: all the test results finished yet. His teacher wanted this testing
: for next year because she thinks he will get to overwelmed and
: fall behind.He right now takes longer tham most kids in hisclass
: to finish written work.He is great in math as long as there is no
: word problems.

There are two components of developmental vision delay — visual efficiency and visual processing. Vision therapy helps visual efficiency, but doesn’t do a whole lot for visual processing. Your next step is a cognitive training program that works on developing visual processing skills.The two programs to check out are Audiblox (http://www.audiblox2000.com) and PACE (Processing and Cognitive Enhancement, http://www.learninginfo.com). Both work on visual processing skills.Audiblox is a home program you can get started in for about $80 — book, video, and starter kit of materials. You work on it for 1/2 hour or an hour 5 days a week. A few children start to show improvement within a couple of weeks, but generally you have to give it 2-3 months before seeing significant improvement — some children need more.PACE is the program we put our daughter through after vision therapy. It is more intense and comprehensive than Audiblox, and requires 3 one-hour sessions a week with a trained tutor, plus 3 hours of homework a week. We saw significant improvement in reading at the end of the 5th week, and dd continued to make gains throughout the rest of the 12-week program. This program is much more expensive than Audiblox (usually in excess of $2,000) because of all the one-on-one time with a trained tutor.These are very good programs that train visual processing skills as well as other cognitive skills fundamental to academic learning. I hope you check them out.Dd also wears glasses (for severe congenital astigmatism) and probably always will.Mary:he has seen a eye doctor that gave him exercises to do last year and
: we took him to him 2 times a month for therapy.It did not seem to
: work the doctor said it is a processing problem.He went to these
: sessions last March though this past October.We paid for all of
: this ourselves and it did not help much.He does wear glasses all
: the time and most likly will for his life.

My son had the same problem in second and third grade. He reversed the almost the same letters as your son, and had to have almost everything read to him to understand, but he is a math whiz. He had missed a basic part of phonics and was concentrating so much on each sound that he could not string the word or words together and get the meaning. When he was tested, he was found to have both dyslexia and dysgraphia.I play matching games with his flash cards, matching word to word and word to picture and sound (if possible), and have him write each word five time each every night. He’s one of those kids that if he can touch or manipulate it is some way, he learns it better. I also read his stories and other homework to him. I just had him read easier, shorter stories with me to build up his reading ability. He has improved greatly with this.The sloppy, inconsistant handwriting you talked of sounds like my son also. His brain is just moving too quickly for his hands to keep up. I was told by the doctors that cursive writing may be easier for him because you’re not constantly lifting the pencil to start each new letter. But I was also told not to worry if he doesn’t take to cursive writing well, some dysgraphic people don’t. If you have access to a computer, you may want to try letting him do his homework on it instead. My son has started using mine, and he does really well on it because he isn’t having to think about writing each letter. And the word processor lets us know where he has messed up with both spelling and grammar. It also makes it easier for the teacher to read. Now she doesn’t have to guess what he was trying to say as much.Good luck!: My 81/2 year old son is in 2nd grade.He has trouble reading mainly
: sounding out words.He has 6 vocabulary words a weeks he needs to
: know by sight and out of the 120 words so far this year he only
: knows 40 of them and sometimes not that many.We work on his
: flashcards everynight and on weekends.They work on them in school
: too everyday.He comphrens his work once he has it read to him.His
: writing is very inconsistant and messy too.He revereses alot of
: letters too like b,d, p,q,e,s,r,f and many others as well as
: numbers too.He has been evaluated by the school and we are waiting
: on the results however this past week he started workinh one on
: one with a LD teacher on spelling,phonics,and cursive writing and
: some corrdination skills for a hour every morning.He already went
: to title 1 reading every afternoon and still does along with
: speech therapy 2 times a week.I dont know when we will have a
: meeting on his test scores but my impression is that he does have
: a LD since they started working with him already with not having
: all the test results finished yet. His teacher wanted this testing
: for next year because she thinks he will get to overwelmed and
: fall behind.He right now takes longer tham most kids in hisclass
: to finish written work.He is great in math as long as there is no
: word problems.