My child needs help. I don't know what to do. Please help.

Ditto on everything. I have an 11-year-old with dyslexia and ADHD. What you may need is an advocate. You are obviously doing everything [i]you[/i] can do to help your child. I don’t know if the link below will help, but my suggestion is that you find an organization that provides resources for families that deal with LD. It might take tracking down a phone number and asking if there are advocacy services for parents of children with LD in your state or in NY. In MN we have an organization called PACER that will consult with parents for free. They will help parents understand special ed law, review the child’s IEP, and ultimately go to any meeting with the school. I do hope your state has a resource like this for you.

http://www.spannj.org/

When I read your account I realize that it’s all the same stuff we deal with. I think we have to continue to advocate for our child as tiresome as that can be and continue to look for other people who will advocate for them as well. By the way I can nearly guarantee that the school is not doing enough, especially if you’ve never questioned their expertise. Most schools don’t know the law and don’t understand fully what they [i]have[/i] to provide so they never do it.

Also, the advice to visit a developmental optometrist is a good one. We have gone to one and she was able to help quite a bit.

http://www.childrensvision.com/development.htm

Best of luck to you and your child.

I would recommend that you take a look at these online webinars regarding dyslexia:

www.brightsolutions.us

In addition, you may find some additional information here:

http://www.interdys.org/InsInt.htm

http://www.interdys.org/FAQ.htm

http://www.interdys.org/FactSheets.htm

Best Wishes.

[quote=RickRun]My daughter has just entered 4th grade and she is struggling from the start.
She has dyslexia. She can read, but it is a struggle for her. I suspect she is about 2 years behind.
She has developed a love for books, but she hates reading, and this has only made her feel more frustrated. I saw some progress with her last year, but progress seems to have stopped
I’m sure many of you reading this have felt the same way. If you know anything, have any good advice, or you know anyone who can help me, please post. It will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Rickrun
[Modified by: RickRun on September 23, 2009 11:45 AM][/quote]

Any child who is struggling to learn to read should, in my opinion, be taken to a developmental optometrist to rule out the possibility of a vision skills deficit causing the reading problem.

There’s a lot more on this on my website

Rod Everson
[url=http://ontrackreading.com/the-vision-piece]OnTrack Reading[/url]
[Modified by: Rod Everson on October 11, 2009 10:55 PM]

I feel for you, I really do, feel for your daughter too. Because i know all about life with dyslexia.

You need to make her practice but if she isn’t enjoying it, it is a pointless exercise. Forcing her to do additional “work” to what is standard is a bad method. Because everything she does at school for her is already more work than it is for everyone else. The best method is to do smaller chunks of reading and to make sure it is fun. More than just a story she likes.

For example, go to a museum. Look at the egyptian exhibit. Have her read the short caption a bit…. See if you can do some homework on what you will see that may interest her while you are there to get her interested in reading. She has to *want* to read to get the kind of practice she is going to need. Another fun trick… My dad was a violent moron but my mum, though not home much was a genius. She used to write with my food. On my plate. Silly little messages she would spell them out creatively with my food. Little things to make me feel better about how hard i had to work and stuff.

Bring home some foreign movies. To watch with subtitles and just let her stop it as often as she needs to understand what is going on.

Check out the Orton Gullingham method also. It was the only thing that worked for me.

Have her read a book she doesn’t like have her read a few of them. Talk to her about them. See why she didn’t like them. Then help her start writing her own story. Not necesarily about her. About anything a story she will actually like. That is as painfully hard for a dyslexiic as it is for anyone else. But, it is fun…. One of the things that got me through it.

You are also going to have to understand and accept certain realities about dyslexia. We will always read probably a little bit slower than others. The reason why is because we generally have to think in sounds rather than meorizing the shape of the word on the page and knowing what it says. As a result we have to process every soubnd or every letter. Sometimes that means we have to processes it more than once because english often ascribes several sounds to a single letter or letter combination. With practice though, we can be just fine and most people eventually don’t realize we are even dyslexic as with practice it gets alot faster but it takes some serious serious time and practice. So even once she reads as well as yyou do, she will still take a little longer. It takes me about 6 seconds longer than it takes my mom or husband to read a page. Not long really but, i have been practicing for so many years and years. My spelling can still get quite weird though. My computer can underline something to indicate i am not spelling it right, and i can truly sit there till i turn blue in the face staring at it trying to find the error and never find it if the phonetics are sound…. Even if the spelling isn’t.

Good luck and be patient. And take the work out of it and just let her be a kid a bit and inc0orporate reading in fun ways rather than as extra school work every day.

I live in a house full of dyslexics and each of them is very different. Unfortunately dyslexia is a fairly broad term. There can be a couple of different forms of dyslexia and there can be other visual issues that can make it worse.

My son benefitted from visual therapy. He knew the “how” of reading but couldn’t see the words well enough to apply it. His dylsexia is complicated by double vision from his face to 3 feet away. Once we were able to get his vision improved his reading took off.

My husband never got help and his reading continues to be slow and painful although he can read at a high level. Reading is not something he really enjoys for long periods of time.

My daughter has 2 forms of dyslexia - diseidetic and disphonetic. Diseidetic is the well known form where letters in a word are mixed up or switched. Disphonetic is an auditory form of dyslexia which effects how she hears words when they are sounded out. To complicated her dyslexia even further she also has Irlen Syndrome which causes words on a page to blur and her eyes focus on the white areas between the words. Add visual tracking issues on top of all that and reading was very, very painful. (She now successfully reads at grade level.)

There was no 1 expert for my daughter. It took 4 experts to unravel all the issues and then I had to come up with programs/therapies that worked for her. She went from a 2.4 grade reading level at the end of 6th grade to reading at grade level by the end of her 9th grade year.

Some of the things we did:
Accommodations for the Irlen Syndrome (can be found at http://www.irlen.com)

Text-To-Speech program for reading and tracking (There are free e-text libraries that can be accessed for books)

Earobics and The Listening Program for auditory issues

Found a “high interest” book series that she WANTED to read on her own

9th grade English provided Read180 by Scholastic (highly recommend this program!)

There is always time to learn things. Some people learn them faster, others more slowly. Don’t give up the search for what will work for your child.

[url]http://www.acnb.org/[/url]
[url]http://www.functionalrestoration.com/chiropractic_neurology.htm[/url]

MDs will rip you off. Check out the above links.

Hi Rick. I was wondering why you have not approached the school again. Did they identify your daughter with dyslexia first? Has the school tried to help her?
If you meet with her teacher and discuss this with them and tell them how the situation is going it might get the ball rolling. I feel that school is the best place to start because that is where she spends most of her days. You have to advocate for her at school first and see what happens. Adding more work outside of school maybe overwhelming for her. Working with the school resources and reinforing it at home is a great help to her. Also the school maybe able to provide you with the name of someone outside of school that may help her.

There is a very good chapter of the International Dyslexia Association in New York.

Also contact the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators for certified practitioners.

And until she is better at reading herself, she may need to use Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic to “read” her textbooks. Also, Kurweil has text-to-speech software which can be used with any book and a scanner. (Cambium Learning/Sopris West)

Oooh… My folks made some rather nice ripe errors with me. Ofcourse most of the errors were unintentional. But they made one really smart decision.

I remember us all talking about getting recordings of everything when i was a kid. In the end, they didn’t do it. I think, it was the best decision they ever made. You can get a great many things as a recording. But you can’t live on recordings. A good degree of literacy is required for real survival in this world. They forced my hand. They denied me the easy route around the matter, which would have been a recording and the result would be i would not be typing this now. Recordings are fine for those that can not see letters. It is really not fine though at any time for those that can see and even with great difficulty can interpret them. As a dyslexic, the easy route around is such a seductive thing and it destroys all drive to learn and practice reading as it alleviates the need. After all, need is the mother of invention. So with time, and lots iof practice she will get there but if you give her this alternative route… She may always lean on a crutch as she no longer has an actual need as a recording gets her through what she needs to get through without learning to do the hard thing adequately. That may get her through school. As a parent though, I think you have a larger duty. You have to prepare her for life. She will not have a life if she learns to lean on a crutch now.

Seriously, it was the wisest decision my parents ever made. The result of their choice opened doors for me all over the world. I speak and read and write in enough languages to get a job as a UN translator if i want. And i am so sevedrely dyslexic i could not spell my own first name till i was almost 10.

I realize it is really hard to watch your child suffer and try so hard and have such difficulty it breaks your heart. But this isn’t about you. It is about her. And as a parent, your duty is not just to get her through school. It is to prepare her for life which is really not possible being so dependent upon a crutch she doesn’t even need, if she works hard enough and practices enough in time it will work itself out.

Your thinking is up to mark, a sincere and hard worker is required to fully emphasis on the learning issues.
Best of luck