Help me with my son!

It would help a lot if you let us now what he has problems with in terms of auditory and visual information, what testing showed….and what your assessment of what is going on with his homework is.

One of mine has severe auditory ad visual processing problems, answer these questions an I will try to help.
1. what grade is your son in,
2.what subjects is he haveing trouble with
3. what are the things in those subjects your trying to teach him right now ( ex, 4th grade level math-multiplication, or 5thgrade math- addition of fractions)

Does the teacher know how much time you’re spending on homework? Tell him or her! My son was finally tested by the school in 5th grade because I went in to talk to his teacher and told them how much time homework was taking. I knew that his friends were spending less than an hour, while my son was spending over 3 hours. He was finally identified with a learning disability in written expression (after testing that took 3 months) and received some help from the resource teacher. However, the thing that helped him the most was arranging for a private tutor who works specifically with LD kids. She was able to help with the writing skills (both simple handwriting and also composition), spelling skills, and organizational skills that he needs to be successful in school. For one summer he went to the tutor twice a week (an hour each time), and for the past 2 years he’s gone to her twice a month. We’re almost to the point where we can wean him from the extra help, and possibly the IEP, as he’s getting B’s in regular ed classed with no accomodations.

Anyway, in spite of having a college and graduate school education, neither my husband nor I were able to help my son adapt to his specific learning challenges. We had to enlist the help of an expert, and we did not find that expert within the local school system. If your son is in 4-6th grade and spending 3-5 hours per night on homework, middle school or junior high is going to be hell, as the homework load seemed to at least double. The school wasn’t able to help much, but we found an individual who had been a teacher and had personally struggled with the same sorts of learning disabilities my son has. She was able to show him ways she had adapted to fit into the expected school learning mode. If you can get private help, I’d highly recommend it!

Take care,

KayR

What kinds of things did she teach your son? If you’d be willing to share, it might help a lot of us!!!

Beth

I would back up a bit and ask if you have attempted to reduce his auditory and visual deficits. My daughter had severe developmental vision delays and, if we had not done vision therapy and PACE (Processing and Cognitive Enhancement) to develop her visual processing and sequencing skills, we would be having serious problems in 5th grade. As it is, I do most of her schooling one on one (she goes to a public charter school mornings and I homeschool academics in the afternoon), as this is a much more efficient way for her to learn.

Even if my daughter were in public school full-time, I would not allow her to struggle with homework for 3 or more hours per night. A rule of thumb for appropriate homework levels is 10 minutes per grade level. Does your son have an IEP? Whether he does or not, you should be able to arrange with his teachers for a reduced homework load for him. Parents often have a great deal of power in this respect, which they seldom utilize.

The biggest single trick I have found is to make the learning process as efficient as possible for my daughter. To this end, I hand-pick curriculum materials to suit her needs (for example, we do a lot of oral work, because she is dysgraphic and worksheets eat up her time like crazy) and work with her one-on-one (always a more efficient way for a child to learn). The problem with schools is that everything is designed to make teaching efficient. This is an entirely different perspective from making learning efficient!

If you would post more information about the specific auditory and visual problems your son has, I would be glad to post websites with information about therapies that might help reduce the underlying deficits.

Mary

Ohio,if you wouldn’t mind,I wonder if you would email me. I have a question to ask.

They worked on handwriting skills to start off with. This included things like how to hold a pencil/pen, how to relax the hand so the writing flows naturally. They then moved on to basic phonics (the stuff he should have learned in primary grades, but he was going to a school that believed in the whole language approach, which doesn’t work well for someone who’s moderately dyslexic and severly dysgraphic.) They worked on organizational skills, extremely important once the kids start having 6 or 7 teachers a day. She also helped him learn how to write a book report, by picking out a grade level book and walking him through it. She had him initially record an essay, and then listen to the recording and transcribe it. The reason for that is his verbal abilities are far above his typical written abilities. She worked a lot on visual crutches for spelling irregular words. She had him keep a small notebook with him that included words he always misspelled, so that he could look them up when doing homework. She had him get an electronic dictionary (Franklin) and taught him how to use it to figure out how to spell words he was uncertain about. Without this kind of one-on-one help, I’m sure he would still be floundering.

KayR