My 10 year old son was just diagnosed with an auditory LD. He struggled this past year and his school said he was fine because he was on ‘grade-level’. Reading is a struggle and he dislikes it as a result. He also struggles with Math especially in a timed format. I asked the teacher to have him tested but was told he wasn’t a candidate for LD testing…….so I made the decision to get the testing myself…..because struggling to be average is not acceptable. Anyhow, here we are in the middle of July with recommendations for very expensive private schooling (approx. $12,000 tuition) and probably no hope of getting in….returning to our public school isn’t at the top of my list….so I’m looking for any advice or recommendations for homeschooling with this type of LD. Thanks, in advance, for any response!
Re: Auditory LD
I have an 8 year old daughter with an auditory-verbal learning diability coupled with visual perception difficulties. She has had visual perception training for the past year which has begun to help her organize her thinking. I am pulling her out of the public school this year and plan to homeschool her even though the school district has tested her and she qualifies for learning support and an IEP. Could you suggest curriculum that would be helpful given her learning disabilities.
Re: Auditory LD
Are you asking only for academic curriculums? The best approach is likely to be a mix of therapies and academics.
In our case, we found that the key to academics was to follow up vision therapy with PACE (Processing and Cognitive Enhancement, http://www.learninginfo.com). PACE is a cognitive training program that works on developing multiple cognitive skills in both auditory and visual processing. Our dd did not have auditory processing problems, but did have severe developmental vision delays (probably the result of severe congenital astigmatism). Vision therapy developed her visual efficiency skills, and then PACE went on to develop her visual processing skills.
Beth has a son with a similar profile to your dd’s. For the auditory piece (and vestibular development), she has found NeuroNet (http://www.neuroacoustics.com) to be extremely helpful prior to PACE. She trained to become a provider and also had her son do FastForWord at home — another program that helped his auditory processing a lot. (http://www.scilearn.com)
In terms of providing a reading curriculum, many of us have found Phono-Graphix (http://www.readamerica.net) to be invaluable.
Singapore Math (http://singaporemath.com) is probably the best math program I have seen, and it’s easy to homeschool. It dovetails very nicely with Miquon math, which is a “discovery” approach to concept development.
I found that therapies plus math and reading were plenty for an 8yo. Hope our experience helps some!
Mary
Re: Auditory LD
I’m the Beth Mary referred to with a child with a similar profile as yours. I totally agree with her in terms of teaming therapy and academics. We partially homeschooled this year (I would have done it full time, if our situation would have permitted it) and we spent as much time on therapy as academics.
The audiologist I have taken my son to with Neuronet made an interesting comment to me last week. She distinguished between “can’t do, can learn” and “can’t do, can’t learn”. We found with my son’s combination of problems he often just couldn’t learn. Now after Fast forward, vision therapy, seven months of Neuro net and five weeks of PACE, he is learning more easily, although he still isn’t there.
The schools are very bad at dealing with kids like ours with multiple problems. You will get much further with therapy combined with homeschooling.
I also think vision therapy combined with PACE is a very good combination for visual perceptual problems. We have finished five weeks of PACe and my son suddenly started putting Knex together—sorta like he always could!!! He scored unbelievably low on the object assembly part of an IQ test last fall and invariably would get very angry every time he attempted to build a Knex model. His 10 year old sister (he is 8) would usually finish them. Now he is making them for his 4 year old brother!!
I would also try and get a good handle on exactly what your child’s problems are in the auditory area, if you don’t already know. For children who just never automatically learned to blend and segment, PG may be enough. Others, like my son, have far more severe problems and need more intensive therapy at the sensory-motor level in addition to a good reading program.
Also, children who have visual and auditory issues often have problems with the vestibular system. This is a type of sensory integration problem. We had our son tested by an OT specializing in sensory integration but eventually elected to do Neuronet instead of OT. It has been a good decision, and we have seen major improvements in auditory processing as well as in his vestibular functioning.
We had an IEP also. We eventually pulled him out of language arts and homeschooled him for those subjects because everything they were doing was so ineffective.
Beth
Auditory LDs are the most common so the good news is there are good materials available to teach with. I’m a teacher of kids with LDs, and I’ve taught at public schools and a 14,000/year private school. At the latter I learned just what kind of progress a kid could make if taught *right* — so if it were my kid and the choice were public school or homeschooling, I’d be looking *hard* at homeschooling, at least to get the skills up so the kid can begin to learn at his potential level. The public schools tend to just lower expectations to about zero and hope the parent is grateful that the kid is getting “smaller classes and i ndividual help” … but you probably know that already :(
A good first stop would be the “links” section of my site at http://www.resourceroom.net . There’s a bunch of sites called “homeschooling 101.” I’ll be putting up a short & sweet “thinking about homeschooling?” article soon, and there are gobs of lessons and the like on my site, too. It’s mostly stuff I used in teaching and if it means somebody doesn’t have to re-invent the wheel and can actually get the lawn mowed, an extra hour’s sleep or that book finished, great :) And right now I’m between projects so if you’ve got specific questions about figuring out a curriculum, fire me an e-mail.