Discouraged with progress

These are my hypotheses, assuming normal intelligence.

1. The tutoring is not being done correctly or with enough intensity. The programs you mention are well respected.

2. Your son’s problems are too severe for the programs. I know some people have success with Lindamood Bell because it is more basic than Wilson.

3. Your son’s problems make even good academic remediation difficult. This is related to two. By this, I mean that he has underlying deficits, perhaps multiple, that make traditional academic remediation difficult. My son is in this category. He has CAPD, visual processing deficits, word retreival, and sensory integration problems. He also has short term memory deficits. My read of literature is he is the kind of kid traditional academic remediation isn’t successful with.

The approach we are taking is to try to reduce these deficits while continuing to work with respected reading programs. We have done all of this privately—it is not the approach the school will take. It has cost $ but less than private school.
He is doing better but still not there.

We have done Fast Forward for CAPD, vision therapy for visual efficiency issues, and are doing Neuronet for auditory processing, word retreival, and sensory integration problems. We will do PACE this summer for visual processing problems. He also has done a phonographix intensive.

Thank you Beth for your clear and intelligent grasp of the issues. Many believe that average to above average scores on IQ test should = average or better ability to learn to read. The two issues are not really the same. I like to think of intelligence as multifaceted. A “mentally handicapped” child must show delays across the board, in pretty much all areas (for most part) to be assumed to be, what was once popularly called, mentally retarded. An LD youngster has a number of highs that are average to above average and some lows. Depending upon how many lows you may have a mild-moderate-severe LD. LDs are cognitive processing deficits, current research does suggest there are neurological differences, but they may effect certain regions in brain and not whole brain.

A teacher cannot automatically use good teaching and get the child up to grade level. Sometimes there are multiple deficits and several years of good teaching will often result in steady progress, but not a cure, so to speak.

Naturally, we parents want only the best for our children, we do not want to settle for anything less than a child who can do whatever he or she wants to do. It is very hard emotionally to have a child who has bright spots, who can abstract ideas, think, but who has multiple processing deficits that negatively impact activities like reading and writing words. Successful remediation in such cases will often require a strong desire on the part of the child (you know how some people can perservere in the face of great difficulties and other folks fold as soon as the going gets tough) and daily dedication, in addition to good instruction.

From my teacher point of view, sometimes there are just not enough hours to do everything you want to do and we do need to consider the child needs a life, too.

Lots of tough decisions.

I pulled my dyslexic daughter out of school at age 9 and homeschooled her for 3rd grade. We did vision therapy (http://www.covd.org), PACE (http://www.learninginfo.com), and a Phono-Graphix intensive (http://www.readamerica.net). We used Math-U-See for math instruction (http://www.mathusee.com) and Handwriting Without Tears for cursive (http://www.hwtears.com).

My daughter has above-average intelligence, but she couldn’t read at all at age 8-1/2, her printing was illegible, and she couldn’t remember that 2+2=4. (I mean this literally!)

This year she tests at 80th and 90th percentile for 4th grade reading and vocabulary. She is still behind in math and spelling, but catching up steadily. She is back in school part-time (a different school), but I homeschool all the important academic subjects. We figure she’ll be at grade level in all subjects by the beginning of 5th grade, and after that we’ll work on moving her ahead of grade level.

My philosophy has evolved into “discard what doesn’t work and try something else”, “research everything myself on the internet”, and “trust yourself”. Channeling my time and energy into directly addressing dd’s needs was the right move for us. Personally, I could not have dealt with the meetings and discussions and bureacracy of trying to work through a school. Also, I have found that many of the best therapies and educational approaches are quite new (6 years old or less), and schools tend to be about 20 years behind current research. Not everything we have done worked (we did FastForWord but, because dd does not have auditory processing problems, it didn’t accomplish much) but most of the things we have done have helped — some dramatically.

Anyway, I agree with everything Beth posted. Every child and every family is different, but in general I think the best move is to take matters into your own hands. These boards are a great place to start gathering information.

Mary

Thanks Anitya. Most of what I know I have learned from these bulletin boards.

Karen,
I understand how hard it can be to deal with all the decisions when it comes to having learning disabilities. I, myself have dyslexia and other LD’s. My parents and I have stuggled with these same questions. Hopefully I can give some guidence but this is only an opinion of the “child”. I have had problems in school since I was very young. I was not dx’ed until my freshman year of High School. I found out that I have the reading level of a third grader (out loud reading) and fifth grade level (reading to myself). This has always been VERY hard for me, and now being in college it is worst. I don’t know about your son but I was a very social child and would have never survived homeschool. I feel it was very important for me to find something I was good at. My parents tried all of the “help programs” and some did work (sort of). The most important thing for me was still feeling normal. My teachers did the best they could by 1. Reading my assignment to me 2. Giving me oral tests 3. letting me take test verbally. I found that I was really smart but I just couldn’t get my “smarts” on to paper or tests. Specialized programs can be very good but I think your son would rather just know that he CAN do things. I was a lot like your son and I still hanging in there and am in my Soph. year of privite college. Don’t get me wrong it has been very hard on both me and my parents but it can be done. The best things my parents ever did for me was to show me love by helping every night with my school work and have patience with me and helped me to find things outside of school that I was good at to make me feel good.
I hope I have given you a little encouragement and help.
Good luck and God Bless,
Wendy (student with LDs and ADD)

One thing I found out from a person who use to work for Scottish Rite is there are organizations which have books on tapes (which include text books) they lend to people with LD’s. The only requriement is you must have a dx of the LD.

I know I organization is reading for the blind. My understanding is there are many more. I will try to get the other organization I heard about for you. This may aid in reading assigments for history and things like that. I found reading the text to my daughter for her home work she retains/comprehends signifanctly more.

Margaret

Hi Karen…
The advice of others here is great. I think what I notice most in my research for my child is that similar problems with academics can stem from very different causes — the varied advice in the replies to your post bears this out, I think. Beth and Mary may have very different opinions — but since they are talking about different children who have on the surface similar problems, they are both quite right and offer good advice.

You need to find out exactly where you see your child fitting — is it children like Beth’s or like Mary’s or like ______???

My child is doing very well with remediation for phonics plus methods we found in the book “Dyslexia: The Gift” by Ron Davis with Eldon Braun. You can also find information on the Davis website, www.dyslexia.com. Davis Dyslexia correction methods are having great results, especially for severe dyslexics who do not respond well to remediation. Just one more stop on your quest — I wish all success for you and your child, whatever happens.

Hi,
I work as a Special Support Assistant (you may call it an Aide, or Learning Assistant) at a mainstream school in Wales UK which has a Resource Centre for children with dyslexia. I provide in-class support-reading, writing work as dictated, reading and scribing for tests for pupils aged 11-14. In the past year all the pupils we have there improved at least 6 months in their assessments for reading /spelling /comprehension. I am not familiar with the programs you use in the USA but we use a variety of multi-sensory programs which we find works best with dyslexia, including a lot of I.T. and the use of a word-processor and an in-class laptop which helps the ones with added handwriting problems, which may not be relevant to your son at his age. I don’t know if this facility is available in the US either, but it helps enormously, especially with independance and self-esteem, to say nothing of street cred!
We provide pre-printed multiplication tables for them to take to maths classes
as tables are something that pupils with dyslexia sometimes never master. As regards your son’s test results, these can vary if he has not been tested again by the same person, or perhaps the programs he is on do not suit his way of learning. Is he a visual(remembers in pictures, like a photographic memory), auditory (hears words, learns phonetically)or kinesthetic(has to do to remember) learner? Hope this helps. Aly.

for all of the replies. One of the problems, as mentioned in these replies is that it is hard to really know what is possible. I guess as many of you said, in that case the parent just has to “go with their gut.” I am very concerned about teh social aspects of removing a child from school, but hadn’t considered part-day in school. Tha might work.
Thank all of you again. Your answers were very, very helpful.
Karen