Thank you AND New Question

Just a quick note regarding reading remediation. Yes, there are certainly some children who have their reading remediated and they go on and do not need further remediation. Not every child is severely dyslexic. And certainly not every child has multiple processing deficits. Many just need the systematic intensive instruction to “get it”.

Going back to age four, I’d do exactly the same thing. I had my child evaluated for speech/language and she began receiving S/L therapy at that time. I think that’s the first line of attack for a child who exhibits language delays. At six, we had an APD evaluation. Hopefully, with good, early intervention, she will never be classified LD.

Poll: Perhaps you could have said to the mother, “I noticed your son was having a little difficulty reading his homeowork. I happen to be a reading specialist and I wondered if you would like any information about reading? Perhaps I could direct you to a wonderful web-site! (Give her this site where the reading articles are!!!)”. Then write down your number in case she has further questions. If she gets angry, oh well, you’ve lost nothing.

Janis

I can answer this because I have a 4 year old. I am using pg with him and he can read three letter words. I also do gymnastics with him and he will learn to ice skate starting in Jan.

I also have him draw all the shapes on a big white easel board. He started by drawing them very big by tracing the dots. Now he can draw them smaller. I also have the book, “Helping children overcome learning difficulties,” by Jerome Rosner. The book as very specific milestones kids should reach in language, auditory perception and visual perception. I make sure he is reaching all those milestones.

Also reading to him is super important for comprehension. I always did this with my older son but I never did gymnastics or some of the other things with him and I regret it.

Like Janis, my daughter started Speech/Language therapy for word retrieval and articulation at the age of 4. I would do nothing differently. I followed my maternal instincts and persevered many difficlulties with the Child Study Team. Through much effort, now at the age of 6 1/2 she is in first grade and is receiving pure O-G tutoring twice a week in addition to Orton based programs in the Resource Room at school. She is doing well. Fortunately, we have an appropriate program at the correct time. No time has been lost for her. (I should say that she is dyslexic). My best advice to give a parent of a child at the age of 4: follow your instincts. Early Intervention is the best you can give your child who learns differently.

Their just simple is no cure for learning disabilty and the sooner you except this the better off you child will be. I’m severe dylexic myself with audiotory processing (diagnosed age 160) issues and was at one time needed three year of remediation, which I didn’t receive until I was 12. Though I managed to make it back a regular school setting. Academically I may have caught up, but learning new material is a struggle for me, but I manage to do fairly well. I finished off my first year of college on honors. Of course early intervention helps drastically, I wish I had more of it myself. Everything they originally tried failed. It took people around me and outside specialist to understand the exact help that I needed, but they can only do so much. However, a child who didn’t receive life’s insn’t hopeless. I’ll have these disorders the rest of my life, I just have to work with them, not against. I can’t let it control my life like it has in the past.

I almost jumped into a woman’s lap on the bus the other day. She was angry with her 7ish looking son who clearly couldn’t read at all. He was guessing and when he guessed wrong she was so exasperated. I wanted to tell her to back off, get him checked out if need be, and by Reading Reflex. But this being NYC I kept my mouth shut. I still feel badly.

My son, now 8.5, has received speech or OT or social skills help since age 4. But my one regret is we listened to his school and didn’t supplement their reading instruction sooner. If we had hired a good tutor in 1st grade instead of spring of 2nd maybe we wouldn’t be looking at special schools right now.

Part of the reason we are looking at special ed. though is because we feel intensive good remediation may head off the need for constant tutoring for the rest of his academic life. Ask me in about 8 years if I was right. LOL

If I had to do it over again, at age 4 when she couldn’t sing at the same speed as the rest of the preschool choir, I would have taken her then to see if something was wrong. Everyone else thought it was “cute” and “she’ll grow out of it”. Her choir teacher thought she was being obstinate (! - labeled already, though not accurately - BTW, this same choir teacher is also a Kindergarten teacher). When she couldn’t rhyme, I would have taken her. When she went to preschool at 3 and when she left at 5 and still only knew 2 letters I WOULDN’T have listened to the preschool teacher who said “Don’t worry, playing is learning at this stage”. (All she did was play with animals while everyone else sat on the map and was taught phonics). The clincher in Kindergarten was the word “developmentally delayed”. I was the one “in the face” of the K-5 teacher all year, who, after much coercion, had someone give her a 1 page test and told me “she was just fine”.

She when to 1st grade and got by on her personality and being “cute” (I remembed them at the child study team meeting that “cute” wasn’t going to get her a high school diploma!! She had to be tutored in reading, but did make passing marks. (She was in the 37% for reading at the end of 1st grade, which they thought was perfectly acceptable) I looked into private evaluation at the end of 1st grade b/c I was exhausted b/c of the time it took to even get 1 sheet of homework done.

What would I do over? I would go with my gut instinct early on and she would have spent time at 4, 5and 6 doing remediation unstead of waiting till school started. I MIGHT have even, knowing what I know now and how to write effective letters, have gotten her the correct remediation paid for by the school instead of spending thousands and thousands of dollars of our money teaching my child to read.

The lady in the library, I would have nonchalantly walked over and said, Oh, boy, homework - we spend alot of time at that at our house…” and pulled her into a conversation. Many parents are just plain unaware of what’s out there.

Sorry for the long post. It just “rings my bell” when I see the time I wasted overlooked glaring problems. Of course, I didn’t know what dyslexia was, I read b4 school started (never remember learning) so I had NO IDEA of what I was facing.

Gosh, our children and experience really were similar. That thing about the animals struck a chord. He was always praised for being creative and then hit a wall in kindergarten. I am kind of annoyed at the preschool that gave me that play to learn line. I let him play and play until his hearts content. He ran around making up stories being cute and clever with praise from all sides.

I never sat him down to learn letters. I too kept hearing, oh that will come. It didn’t.

We can’t make ourselves crazy tho. If I had drilled letters it wouldn’t change the fact that ds has a learning disability. Actually in Kindergarten he knew the alphabet, could spell his friends names and had very decent handwriting (thanks to OT I think) I didn’t know about phonemic awareness back then. The other kids literally thought he was the smartest kid in the class b/c he knew about so many things. It hit the fan in 1st grade when he had trouble learning to read, started writing in reverse and backwards, and started getting very anxious.

Karen,

I kind of disagree here. I have a very good friend who grew up LD. She was hypervigilant with her child. He got speech therapy at 3 and has him do many sports. She has him assessed for any possible problem.

He still has some sensory integration issues and if you met him you would believe that there was a possibility of LD. I think her hypervigilance saved him although we will never know for sure. He had all the signs early on, very poor speech, behavioral issues etc.

Same with my nephew. He got speech very early on and his parents were constantly pitching the ball to him and his mom always “taught” him things even at an early age. I thought she was nuts for focusing on all that. My son could say all his letters and count to 20 before he was 2 so I didn’t follow her lead. I looked at her like, “Poor dear, her child has a problem, wonder what that is like.”

Another friend luckily found herself in England when her child was in preschool. She said she nearly fell off her chair when the teacher asked, “Was your child premature.” She had no idea there was a problem. This kid got vision therapy, OT etc, in preschool while my son was playing with the animal figures. (Ps. Her son is alot like our boys) So now I am the hypervigilant one. I have friends who I see saying the same things I used to say. “Why do so many people have their kids in all these activities so young.”

I really do believe that with early intervention you can bypass this. I think everyone has slight difficulties when it comes to learning or social skills or motor ability. I really think it isn’t about having LD or not but moving the kid closer to the normal end of the spectrum so the deficits never affect them enough to cause a major problem.

I agree with you! I’m know our early intervention has helped in many ways including some we don’t even realize. My train of thought was more that some problems aren’t evident early on, and some can’t be avoided and we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves for the things we didn’ t do when they were little. In our case we attacked each deficit as it arose, but we didn’t know there would be a reading problem. In fact you would have thougth otherwise given my son’s early vocabulary and the fact that there was no obvious delay with learning letters etc. (guess that was the NLD side showing thru - lucky him he’s got aspects of that and dyslexia!) I’m a big advocate of early intervention and I wish we had started him with PG or OG sooner but I’m working on accepting the idea that we can’t fix everything at once. We thought in Kindergarten, with speech and OT behind us, that we were done. Ha-ha. Now I know that his disability, no matter how well remediated now, may cause him to need support in the future. Like there may be organizational skills he needs to be explicitly taught in high school . But I also assume that the more we do therapies that get at the root of his issues (timing, attention) the less obvious those weaknesses may be . Like with your friends child.

Well, our letters came, but not until end of K-5 and reading didn’t come until we spent a whole bunch of money!

She wants to be a veterinarian and a zookeeper. I tell her she better make some big $$ so she can afford tutoring for those 3 kids she wants!

Karen,

My friends child is a model for me of what can happen. He was in sped for kindergarten, removed in first and is getting straight As and reading Harry Potter by himself (mom has to say put the book down already) in second grade. He still has some dysgrahia but that is being dealt with. He had visual tracking issues that were remediated when he was 4 and 5.

One thing about this, I think the fact that he was in England and has a visual deficit made all the difference. In England they knew the signs and picked it up immediately. He was in preschool here before that and no one said a word. In the U.S. they are good about picking up auditory deficits if they show up in delayed speech but as is clearly demonstrated on another thread visual/motor deficits are just not taken as seriously and early educators are not trained to watch for the signs; signs that were clearly evident in my son. I agree that we can’t blame ourselves. How could we have known? We are both super involved and didn’t pick it up.

I still think what we are doing is early intervention and that we can see the results that the others I mentioned achieved.

Well, we got our child evaluated at age 3, at the advice of his daycare teacher who had an LD child. He qualified for speech therapy, one on one, through the school district. He was still classified going into K and ended up severely LD.

What I would have done differently was enrolled him in gymnastics as a preschooler. I also didn’t get seriously involved really with academics until the end of first grade. I would have done it a year earlier. Our older daughter did not learn to read in K so I guess I was just holding out for things to fall together on their own. At some level, I was still in denial. Then we moved and I was overwhelmed frankly. We basically lost that first grade year and have been playing catch up ever since.

Beth

to say that I’ve come to consider many of the mom’s posting here as my friends and certainly my support group. You all are honestly the best mom’s I’ve met and although we all have regrets in hindsight we should not lose sight of what has been achieved so far.

I started reading these bulletin boards 2 1/2 years ago. The people here, although many have changed, have been a life line to me. I have not only learned valuable information but also emotional support. Most of the people I know simply have no clue what it means to have a child with LD—the heart breaking struggles, the meaning of small victories, and the stress it takes to deal with it day after day.

I consider myself fortunate to be raising my children during a time that the internet makes the world very small. I also consider myself fortunate to have “met” so many wonderful smart moms (mostly) who, like me, will leave no stone unturned in the quest to help their child.

Beth

–—So hypothetically is there any advice you’d give to yourself if you could go back in time to when your child was 4.

I would need to have had smarter advisors to have made things much different. My oldest came home at the age of 2 years 8 months with frank kwashiorkor, and so I was vigilant. By the time she was four I KNEW something was wrong. I mean, she knew the PLOT of every nursery rhyme in the world, and couldn’t recite a single one. Tubes in her ears to correct her chronic ear infections helped some, but she couldn’t seem to understand us unless we used visual props; she couldn’t draw worth beans; and she didn’t seem to be able to sequence at all. So I took her to the Big John (the Johns Hopkins University Kennedy Krieger Institute for Children in Baltimore, MD) where they did a zillion tests on her (but not a decent vision, small motor, or auditory screen), and assured me that she was normal, and had average Kindergarten readiness. So I sent her into parochial Kindergarten early. Big mistake; horrible year. By the end of Kindergarten we had our first helpful diagnosis from our third audiologist (auditory processing disorder), but she was too young to do Fast Forward at the Lab School in D.C. (only provider in area at that time.) Riggs Method at home got her decoding with extraordinary difficulty, over that summer, but First Grade was another horrible experience, and her principal advised us to send her to a “special school” because she was mentally retarded. We sent her to public school instead. We saw Dr. Martha Denckla of the Big John mid-year, who ran a bunch more tests, picked up her language disorder, warned us against Fast Forword, and got us a really good speech and language therapist. Speech and language therapy helped a LOT, and Fast Forword over the next summer helped more. She ended the year reading at a first grade level, but she fatigued really easily when reading. We didn’t pick up the vision disorder until mid-third grade, and vision therapy and fluency drills helped her stamina a great deal. Gymnastics and karate helped with the sequencing disorder and the ADHD, and the ADHD really improved when her sleep apnea was fixed by orthodontics and tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy. Interactive Metronome fixed the sequencing issues making math an area of strength, and allowed her to get off the Adderall. Repeating third grade allowed her to consolidate her skills, and after that, things got normal. They got a little hectic last year (fifth grade) when we sent her to preparatory school, but this year (sixth grade, age 12), she is handling her homework independently, doing math at the prealgebra level, and having no difficulty with the heavy reading and writing load. She is considered gifted in Spanish and visual art. Her spelling and grammar are now quite normal for age; and her teachers do not know she ever had any problems. She is off all meds, on no home or office based tuition, and is on no therapies besides orthodontics. Her 5th grade Project Citizen team won the State championship last year, beating out 6th, 7th, and 8th graders across the state, and her Speech Team this year leads in the regionals. We are back to the normal vissitudes of rearing preteens, i.e. the neverending debate on appropriate dress, phone and internet use, appropriate movies, and the shuttle back and forth to basketball and karate. Life is sweet again.

I also have a five year old. She had some of the same issues as my older child, but this time I knew what to do. When she came home at 7 months with head control, a social smile and no more, I was doing early intervention immediately. She got her tubes by the time she was 11 months (and didn’t babble until then). She spoke her first words late (15 months), and although she had average verbal ability by four, she had very poor phonemic awareness and rhyming ability. Earobics was too difficult for her so, I made her do Fast Forward and afterwards did Phonographics with her, and she reads and writes quite nicely now, and enjoys reading and writing. She’s very shy, and she doesn’t have much stamina, and she can be whiny, but hey! I’m not worried about Kindergarten.

–—P.S. when I was at the library trying to research I saw a Mom helping an 8-9 yr old boy trying to read his homework. God I felt for both of them. Informal poll: Should I butt in and say something- and if so what should one say in that situation….

I always butt in. I explain what I see and explain how the mother can figure out what kind of help her kid needs. Usually they are grateful. No one has yet been offended.

Ditto,

Today listening to my son read and watching him write I have wondered if I shouldn’t cancel the Vision therapy eval. He said, “Reading really can be fun.”

We are not out of the woods yet, because as you have all experienced it is two steps forward and one step back. Still waiting for one step back, like so many times before.
He couldn’t have done this without all of you. The best mom’s in the world. In some small way you are all his mom because you all helped in ways only a mom could.

Do the evaluation unless its a real hassle time/money wise. You don’t have to do the therapy, but then that way you’ll know if your theories are right about where he stands. ( I bet you are, and I bet your interventions have already remediated him!) I have a bunch of evaluations planned for therapies we can’t possibly do right now , but I learn something every time, and it will help prioritize.

So you attribute IM to getting your child off Adderall? To be honest, I don’t even know what it is. I have heard moms discuss it, but we go to a SI OT and she has done wonders for visual processing, hand writing, etc., though my daughter doesn’t LOVE to read, her reading comprehension is extremely high.

Anyway, just wanted to see what you thought was the connection between the IM and Adderall.

n/t

I think you are right. I am now leaning toward neurofeedback again. I think I will just have him evaluated for both.

I honestly think PACE would be good to do right before the dreaded middle school.

He got a new math book and complained it is just too easy. He did his math homework in about 10 minutes. I really credit IM for the math gains.

–-Anyway, just wanted to see what you thought was the connection between the IM and Adderall.

Adderall is a medication used in the treatment of attention deficit disorder, which my kiddo had/has? (hard to tell at this point, as she does not meet criteria at this time.) At that time she was still in vision therapy, and I used to evaluate her ability to focus by having her do Circle E exercises on a daily basis, and found that her error rate diminished from a consistent 5-6 off meds to a consistent 0-1 on Adderall, and so I somewhat reluctantly placed her on it, with benefit academically. Before IM (six months after initiation of vision therapy), her error rate was still a consistent 5-6 off meds (this was summer), whereas three weeks later, after IM her error rate was a consistent 0-1 (still off meds), and it stayed there for the rest of the summer so I didn’t put her back on the Adderall, and the academic improvement previously seen with meds continued. A brief (one month) trial of Adderall showed no further benefit with either focus or academics, so we canned it. That was about two years ago. We did do PACE summer before last, but I don’t know if it did much for reading, although it helped her memory quite a bit. Last summer we didn’t do any intervention. Actually, I think there may still be some component of ADD, but not severe enough to warrant medication or further rounds of IM. I base this on my observation that when my kiddo reads silently, her comprehension of LONGER texts is weaker than when she reads aloud. She has no difficulty sustaining reading comprehension with silent reading for short spurts, and of course her silent reading is a lot faster than her reading aloud. Except for things like worksheets and math, she reads quickly, but just under her breath, and I think she does that to keep herself on task. She doesn’t enjoy reading anything longer than magazine articles either, although she can read unassisted at this point, and does so without complaint or apparent difficulty. I am therefore toying with the notion of EEG biofeedback while reading for this coming summer, as she will need to begin speed reading on a regular basis by the time she is 14.

Leah,

Type Interactive Metronome into Goggle and they talk about studies with ADHD kids. I don’t know if any of them went off medication, like Shirin’s daughter, but def. improvements in attention.

I know we were planning a trial of medication this fall, following diagnosis of ADD-inattentive by neurologist this summer. I had teachers fill out ADD forms this fall to get a baseline and eventually abandoned idea of medication. It could not be justified. His resource teacher who he had both years told me that she kept waiting for “the old Nathan to come back”. It is possible though that IM and the Neuronet that we did following it worked on some other types of processing issues that mimiced ADD. With a child with as many deficits as mine, it is hard to know for sure. Shirin’s case is certainly cleaner because she had her daughter already on medication and then didn’t need it afterwords.

Beth

Read the case study I posted to Laura on the reading board. It was an interesting case study involving a child that seems to have had similar issues who underwent neurofeedback.

Do you think your daughter still has binocular vision issues? If so may want to read the work done by Dr Stein at Oxford. He used monocular occlusion with some success. I am doing it with my son while he does his circle ‘e’s.

Just an FYI. I met a speech therapist through this board who does IM. She said she has had kids go off their meds. My son’s therapist did not have this experience but she also never asked. She did have one child for whom meds were being considered who didn’t need meds after IM.

Poll: I wouldn’t butt in. I know the advice would be well-meant, but you just don’t know how it would be received. You don’t have the slightest idea what is going on in these people’s lives. And if the child was nearby, I definitely wouldn’t say a thing. You don’t know the impact that might have on his self-esteem.

Yesterday, I started reading a book called the “The Sound of a Miracle.” It was shocking how many people said insensitive remarks to this struggling mother, and even well-meaning remarks were made at sensitive times in their lives. Without knowing them personally, you just can’t make assumptions about whether your remarks would be helpful or arrive at an insensitive time.

As for doing it all over again: Now I would recognize that my child needed help for a Speech/Language delay and get the appropriate evaluations done before reaching school age. Unfortunately, I didn’t know it wasn’t typical. Also, when I finally did wake up, it took me two years to get the school to do anything about it. I just assumed they knew what they were doing and I didn’t realize they had a vested interest in trying to reduce the number of stutdents who get evaluated and get services. So, I would have to say that I should have educated myself sooner, both about learning disabilities and FAPE education.

..

Me too. I guess my next step is a neurofeedback evaluation and an VT evaluation - then I’ll pick the one that fits our schedule best for the summer. We could also do more IM this summer. Alot depends on whether he’s going to the LD school or not. If not we’ll need to do LMB over the summer, but if he is I’d be more interested in working on the root causes.

My favorites:

“Dyslexic, but he’s so bright!..” as if one thing had anything to do with the other.

” I’m so proud, my child is in the smart reading group” as if the weaker readers are dumb!

My favorite:

“You’re babying him. Leave him alone and make him do his homework on his own just like everybody else.”

Yeah, right. I have a dyslexic, dysgraphic, disorganized ADHD child who functions below grade level but gets GT homework. So the solution is to expect him to function at the same level as everybody else without help? What are people thinking when they say something like that?

I know this discussion is about your kids but I wanted to jump in here and mention a few of my all time favorites that adults with LD receive:

“Everybody has a disability”
“Everybody has a learning disability”

PT

I read the research. In fact, that is what we do with kids who have severe wall-eye, although I don’t know that it works well for lesser problems. But at this point, I don’t think she still has binocular vision problems. She didn’t have any at her last checkup in October, six months after discontinuing therapy, and she has another checkup scheduled for next spring. It isn’t a matter of ocular fatigue any more, its a matter of maintaining focus with longer books, where the child is expected to read several chapters a day in multiple books.

There are a few of us that are a few steps behind you carefully trying to stay in your tracks.

Karen, I know you were speaking at face value, but dyslexia is often used as a blanket term for school problems, and many children with school problems may have below average intelligence(not that anyone should make remarks of any kind!); in public school the clases have a range of kids and many of the slower readers may be slower cognitvely…despite what we read on these boards, LD is not the most common developmental disability…it just seems that way because of how kids are classified for services in public school. Those comments are as insensitive as those about race and ethnic origin and should be ignored.

Well, even if a slower reader is slow because of lower intelligence it still isn’t nice to say that to a parent!

M point was that a learning disability is independent of the person’s intellectual potential - certainly there are people with gifted, average, and below average intelligence that are LD. But it seems like most people I know equate learning disability with diminished intelligence so I’m on a mission to educate everyone I know.

The one that got to me:
Our family has a lot of people who can most politely be described as independent minds and original thinkers. To be more direct, pig-headed is far too mild a word. I myself am definitely in this category, and my daughter inherited more than my hair colour. So I had to be more than firm when trying to change my daughter’s direction.
Then people come up to me out of the blue and say “Don’t be so hard on her! She’s such a sweet child!” Every now and then I answered back “Maybe that’s WHY she’s such a sweet child, because I actually work hard to teach her how to behave.”

I did find an answer to the people who come up and give unsolicited child-rearing lessons: I offered to rent her out for twenty-four hours. You know, none of these experts ever took me up on it.

Alas, I did try to help my sister-in-law with her kids, even sent her sets of good books. But she bought into the school’s whole-language philosophy and baked gingerbread for the PTA until too late. Also neither she nor the school could bear conflict and the pig-headedness gene was not redirected, something that makes the whole-language disaster even worse.. Now we have the first drop-out in generations and another vocational-track graduate, from kids who started Grade 1 as gifted and had all the advantages. So do try to offer help, but be aware it won’t always be accepted.