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Stephanie_Q
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| Posted: March 25 2010 at 11:20am | IP Logged
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This is long, but I wanted to 'introduce' myself and 'meet' all of you who have dyslexic children.
I read about dyslexia when my oldest was struggling in pre-school. I read more (particularly from the Barton / Bright Solutions sites) when we were trying to decide between homeschool and Catholic School. I didn't think my dd had 'enough' of the warning signs severely enough to warrant testing and thought I was being a 'nervous nellie'. I have PAGES bookmarked on phonemic awareness - the first step in Barton's program w/out buying the Barton program for something we weren't sure about. We worked on that but DH wasn't on board with homeschooling b/c we'd made such little progress in pre-school so we sent her to Kindergarten. The teacher said 'developmental delay' 'she's really smart' 'if she's still struggling next year she can be tested / get remedial help with Sister (they use Sonlight)' In the meantime we didn't like dds behavior changes so we decided to use Seton (accountability and counseling) 1st grade for dd1 / K for dd2. This year has been SO HARD.
I got the ball rolling to have her 'tested' for a LD through the public schools, suspecting dyslexia. My dh is mildly dyslexic, according to symptoms - he always joked about being dyslexic but never knew that he was!
I'm back on the Bright Solutions site and am in tears. DD really didn't have a lot of the warning signs and we really didn't know about dyslexia in the family tree until I made dh sit down and go over this last night. The symptoms he didn't have - he is sure his dad did. When I get down to the section on "Reading and Spelling difficulties" EVERY SINGLE BULLET is my daughter.
I have thought her difficulties were stubbornness - refusing to try - even messing with me because there are 'good days' when she gets it and the next day she "can't". I've gotten so angry and frustrated with her and have been a terrible-horrible-no good-very bad mother. The last few days I've looked at her through different eyes, though. I've adjusted my expectations of what she can do - not making her 'sound it out' but helping her read the words and letting her jump up and act them out - and we have had the BEST two days of school EVER! She was joyful! I haven't seen her so happy in a LONG time.
I know that this is going to be a struggle for me - that chances are she will not be the only dyslexic child I have - and I am going to be here reading through the archives and asking lots of questions. Thanks for reading this far and I look forward to learning more from all of you.
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Stephanie dh 6.01
dd 6.02, dd 8.03, ds 3.05, ds 12.06 at Catholic school.
dd 12.09 at home.
Baby boy due 10.13
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lapazfarm
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| Posted: March 25 2010 at 1:05pm | IP Logged
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I do! My dd (8yo) is dyslexic. Though I'm afraid I won't be much help to you because I am in about the same spot as you with a new diagnosis and just learning the ropes myself. After 15 years of home schooling I thought I had this education thing down, but life has a way of throwing us curve balls and I find myself once again in uncharted territory!
I am so glad we have this place where we can learn from one another.
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Theresa
us-schooling in beautiful Fairbanks, Alaska.
LaPaz Home Learning
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JuliaT
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| Posted: March 25 2010 at 9:04pm | IP Logged
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I have 3 children who have dyslexia. A year ago, I was a mess. I didn't know how in the world I was going to teach 3 kids with learning differences. I felt paralyzed. I prayed and prayed that God would just lead me to the first step and then the next, etc. Of course, He did!
We are using Bartons with my two oldest. It has been such a success. A year ago at this time my ds(9) had difficulties with Level 1 readers, today he is reading chapter books. I had him read a Henry Huggins book to see if he could handle it and he can!  I am so happy for him!
I think I will have a slower journey with my youngest. We have started LiPS with her as she is not ready for Bartons. We are going very, very slowly. The frustration has been crippling at times but I just give it to the Lord and He encourages me along the way.
I know this may seem so overwhelming right now but it is do-able.
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Blessings,
Julia
mom of 3(14,13 & 11 yrs.old)
MusingsofaPrairieGirl
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lkselby
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| Posted: March 26 2010 at 11:12am | IP Logged
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My 11 yo dd is dyslexic. She has received tutoring twice a week from an orton-gillingham trained reading specialist for almost 2 years now. She will need tutoring for at least another year. We were blessed to know this reading specialist who is a Christian and homeschooled her own children. She also directs me in what to do/teach between sessions.
It took me awhile to accept that there is no quick fix. It takes time and patience with a dash of perserverance -- there are times I don't have any of these.
Even though these children have trouble reading, they are typically very bright and creative. It has been on my heart lately that I need to encourage my daughter more in the areas she is strong. I would love to get her into some art classes, but I might just have to spend more time on it at home. We never seem to get to art anymore. (The classes I have seen are expensive and we are already paying for the tutoring, dance and piano).
Sorry this is getting long. I can recommend some books on the subject, but I will need to dig up the titles.
One last thing, Thank God for Homeschooling! I think it really is the best thing for my daughter. She gets the one on one help she needs, I am able to do the reading in other subjects so she can keep learning and she doesn't "feel bad" about her dyslexia (no teasing or being made to feel dumb).
God Bless you on your journey.
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Kristie 4
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| Posted: March 26 2010 at 1:28pm | IP Logged
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I 'think' I have one. I have yet to get testing- actually I am confused about the whole thing. I have looked lots at the Bright Solutions website but also read The Gift of Dylsexia and they seem to take such a different tack.
I have found a local tester who is specifically trained by the Bright Minds folks but it has a $1000 price tag and we just don't have it right now.
How did you folks all discover your child's dyslexia? My dd fits so many of the 'signs'- super creative, very bright, but the spelling and reading don't match the brightness! I have waited lots, thinking I just had someone who needed more time, but since she is almost 13 I need to do more I think.
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Kristie in Canada
Mom to 3 boys and one spunky princess!!
A Walk in the Woods
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4 lads mom
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| Posted: April 07 2010 at 8:55am | IP Logged
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I DO!!! I don’t have the time to post my who story right now with my son....but take heart, Stephanie, my now almost 12 yo son was at a first grade reading level a few years ago....and is now about fourth-fifth grade....after 18 mos of tutoring. I’ll get back here later and expound....but I would say now, look up to see if there is a non-profit agency in your area that does tutoring using the Orton-Gillingham method. Our local agency, ( we are in a very small Midwest town, and there are three in our area, so I bet no matter where you are, there is something to turn to...) They charge on a sliding scale.....worth EVERY SINGLE PENNY.
More later...
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Mom of four brave lads and one sweet lassie
Scenes From This and That
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ElizLeone
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| Posted: April 07 2010 at 9:34am | IP Logged
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I have a "severely dyslexic" nine-year-old son who struggles immensely. He also has issues with attention, and he struggles with math concepts and memory. (In fact, math is even a bigger challenge right now than reading, and that's saying something. He's in a 1st grade math book, and age-wise, he should be a third grader.)
We were told by therapists when he was six that "this child may never read." He has proven them wrong. He IS reading. His reading is slow, it's tedious, and it's at a very basic first grade level -- very simple readers -- but he is reading.
He has been going to an Orton-Gillingham tutor for two years (varying from 1-3 times a week, depending on the season). She is also a former homeschooling parent (her children are now grown), and she very much supports our decison to homeschool him and his siblings, so that is nice. I firmly believe that Orton-Gillingham (systematic, explicit phonics) is the way to go for dyslexic kids. But even so, and even with the professional tutoring (plus our daily homeschool lessons in reading), it's been very slow-going for our son. Having said that, he's already reached milestones at age 9 that the professionals seemed to think he'd never make. We were told that he has the "most severe level of dyslexia" that the educational psychologist who tested him has ever seen. He was oxygen-deprived during a hospitalization in which he coded when he was a month old. Some of his struggles may stem from (or be exacerbated by) the oxygen deprivation from that illness. It's hard knowing.
I say all this to encourage those of you with dyslexic children. If my son, so severely dyslexic, has made strides, then any dyslexic child can!
We use the Preventing Academic Failure (PAF) program at home. I've looked into Barton, but I'm pretty convinced that PAF is a good and much less expensive alternative. I'd love to hear any other viewpoints on that, however! :)
It can be very hard at times for me to be the patient mom that I need to be when he struggles. Sometimes, it really does feel like he is just not trying. And he's all nine-year-old boy, so maybe there is something to that once in a while. But mostly, I think it's just such a struggle for him, and I have to remember to take it a day at a time, and love him and help him along this bumpy path. He is starting to lose some self-esteem because of his learning disabilities, and it just kills me. (His six-year-old brother has passed him up in both math and reading.)
One thing that has helped me... I mentally let go of grade delineations in my mind this year. I have six kids. My dyslexic son is our third child. For our oldest two daughters, I was very schedule and grade-level driven. To some degree, I guess I still am with them. But with my son, I've stopped trying to think of him as a third grader (which is what he "should" be age-wise). All that did was frustrate me and underscore for me how behind he is. We're doing first grade work, and I've started, in my own head, thinking of him more as a first grader. Somehow that just helps me to be less frustrated. Sort of just a mental shift for me. (We don't really talk about grade-level at all with him.)
One book that is very good is Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz.
To step slightly off-topic, we have a daughter who has been having ongoing gut problems -- sort of like extreme irritable bowel syndrome with uncontrolled weight loss. She's recently been tested for a variety of things including Chrohn's and colitis and celiac disease -- all negative thus far. But in my search to find relief for her, I found some information on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet and the GAPS diet. They are very extreme diets, but they (or at least the GAPS diet) are billed as diets that can also be very helpful for dyslexics (as well as kids with autism, ADHD, and gut problems). I'm seriously thinking about giving it a try for both our kids -- for ds with dyslexia and dd with IBS-type issues. Does anyone have any experience with dietary changes making a difference for a dyslexic?
And speaking of food (and drink), here's one other thing... We had read that caffeine actually helps kids with dyslexia and ADD/ADHD. Sounds counter-intuitive, I know! While caffeine makes me jittery, apparently it can work to make a dyslexic (or an ADHD child) more focused. Google caffeine and ADHD or caffeine and dyslexia. There is so much info out there on the topic. We've been experimenting, and it does seem to help! On the days when we have our son drink Water Joe (caffeinated water, available in the grocery store) in the morning, he seems better focused. Even his tutor noticed! Just thought I'd pass that along in case it's helpful for anyone...
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Elizabeth in Wisconsin
7 kids, 1 little saint
Munchkins on the Path
Our Adoption
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4 lads mom
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| Posted: April 07 2010 at 4:47pm | IP Logged
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Elizabeth, you and I are leading parallel lives...I could have written every word....verbatim. I am still swamped today, but this is so important to me, I need to talk some more and listen even more than talk!  All of us moms out there with kiddos with dyslexia need this conversation to continue.....back later...probably MUCH later. (where is that exhausted emotion??)
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Mom of four brave lads and one sweet lassie
Scenes From This and That
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Stephanie_Q
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| Posted: April 07 2010 at 6:34pm | IP Logged
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ElizLeone wrote:
We use the Preventing Academic Failure (PAF) program at home. I've looked into Barton, but I'm pretty convinced that PAF is a good and much less expensive alternative. I'd love to hear any other viewpoints on that, however! :)
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I was looking at PAF. Glad to see that EVERYONE doesn't use Barton, because I've been feeling sick to my stomach about making that investment... The Barton site has PAF listed as one of the 10 well-known OG systems and doesn't seem to have anything bad to say about any of them... PAF also seems like something I could use for all my kids regardless of whether or not they are dyslexic...
I am a little concerned that ds7's 5yo brother may pass her up and don't want her getting any more discouraged about reading than she already is (her sister who is 14months younger than her already reads pretty well...) How do you all handle this?
Oh yes - that was an interesting tip on caffeine...I've heard that before - perhaps in conjunction with ADHD - but put it out of my mind b/c my kids were 'normal'.  I knew my husband was diagnosed ADHD but found out from my MIL that he was diagnosed with an "auditory processing disorder" as well.
I'd love to hear more from all of you - and anyone else who has been off the boards for Lent. Hope you're all having a Happy Easter!
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Stephaniedh 6.01
dd 6.02, dd 8.03, ds 3.05, ds 12.06 at Catholic school.
dd 12.09 at home.
Baby boy due 10.13
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rose gardens
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| Posted: April 14 2010 at 9:59am | IP Logged
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Kristie 4 wrote:
I have looked lots at the Bright Solutions website but also read The Gift of Dylsexia and they seem to take such a different tack. ...
How did you folks all discover your child's dyslexia? My dd fits so many of the 'signs'- super creative, very bright, but the spelling and reading don't match the brightness! I have waited lots, thinking I just had someone who needed more time, but since she is almost 13 I need to do more I think.
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I like the book "The Gift of Dyslexia" by Ron Davis but he does not address all the underlying causes that can contribute to reading problems. I have read lots about dyslexia. One simple definition of dyslexia is "problems with reading". There are different causes for problems with reading. (The book "Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It" covers the various underlying problems that cause reading problems to occur.)
My son has many of the visual-spacial abilities described in "The Gift of Dyslexia", along with confussion about letters of the alphabet and confussion about the meaning of little words that can't be easily visualized that Davis also describes. I spoke to someone trained in the Davis method of dyslexia correction when my son was 6 1/2 and after that conversation decided to wait on testing and tutoring. We spent much time when he was 7 building letters in clay and doing some of other activities at home that the book suggests, along with a variety of other things. I also decided to stop pushing him to read at that point while we worked on other things.
Around the time when I first noticed his reading problems, I took him for evaluations with a speech therapist, an audiologist and a optometrist. The speech therapist caught that he had some auditory processing problems, but the audiologist f/u didn't show any problems with that. Fast forward a year and I turned to Bartons. But he couldn't pass the Barton's pre-screening! It turned out the pediatric audiologist only tested my son's ability to hear whole words, not the sounds within words. My son couldn't distinguish several similar sounds from one another. As Barton's suggested, we went through the LiPS program. What a difference!
Looking back, the work we did with alphabet letters in clay and all the various other things I tried probably helped him, but his underlying auditory processing/confussion of sounds, seriously got in the way of his reading. Other issues may have contributed to his reading problems, but there are plenty of visual-spacial learners who learn to read without all the difficulties my son had. It wasn't simply as Davis describes that my son had gifts in the visual-spacial area--it was that he also lacked some very essential auditory processing skills.
Once we did the LiPS program, he began to make some good progress. It's still slow progress, but his reading is greatly improved.
I knew early-on that something wasn't right with my son, but trying to pin-point what the exact problem(s) was(were) and how to fix it wasn't easy. There can be numerous underlying causes for problems reading, and some children may have more than one issue going on.
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rose gardens
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| Posted: April 14 2010 at 10:33am | IP Logged
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Stephanie_Q wrote:
...
I am a little concerned that ds7's 5yo brother may pass her up and don't want her getting any more discouraged about reading than she already is (her sister who is 14months younger than her already reads pretty well...) How do you all handle this?
...I knew my husband was diagnosed ADHD but found out from my MIL that he was diagnosed with an "auditory processing disorder" as well.
I'd love to hear more from all of you - and anyone else who has been off the boards for Lent. Hope you're all having a Happy Easter! |
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Happy Easter season to you too! Two more points, in addition to the very long post I just wrote above. Gosh, I'm writing a lot this morning.
From what I've read, auditory processing problems can run in families. If your husband had it and your child is having reading problems, I would suggest you look at that further. Lindamood's LiPS program is wonderful at helping by-pass the auditory system by feeling how the sounds are made with the mouth, tongue, nose, and throat. My son learned to hear the difference in sounds after he learned to feel the difference in how they are made. While there are LiPS tutors available, they are expensive. I did it with my son at home after I bought the materials at ganderpublishing.com (click on LiPS) I can't say enough good about that program!!!
Also, I postponed teaching my five year old to read for a year until she was six, even though she asked me to teach her and showed signs of readiness. A big reasons was, I didn't want her to quickly pass my son who struggled with reading. I didn't know if his ego would handle that well. The other reason was I didn't feel up to teaching her reading when I was such a miserable failure at teaching my son to read. I didn't know if MY ego could handle another struggling reader.
She is learning to read just fine now at six. She might have learned to read at five or even earlier, but there's only so much time and energy in a day to devote to reading and I was focussing on my son's reading at that point. It didn't hurt her at all to wait. She learned letters, phonograms and other reading basics by listening when I tried to teach those things to her brother. I let her play with the clay and sand paper letters too. She was very ready to read by the time I got around to teaching her. She has fun reading and makes fast progrees without much effort for her or me. (What a relief!) She might pass up her older brother some time soon, but he's now on the road to making good progress in his reading too.
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Kristie 4
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| Posted: April 14 2010 at 12:20pm | IP Logged
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Thank you for your thoughtful posts- lots to mull over...
Kristie
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Kristie in Canada
Mom to 3 boys and one spunky princess!!
A Walk in the Woods
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Karen T
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| Posted: April 15 2010 at 9:24pm | IP Logged
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Hmm, I wrote a long post 2 days ago and thought I posted it but it's not here! must have been a glitch.
Anyway, my 10 yo ds is dyslexic. I put off having him tested for reading trouble until he was 8 b/c I'd heard all the things about boys maturing later, etc. but I should have been looking for problems sooner. he'd had severe speech delays and some motor delays as well, but by the time he was 5 he'd "caught up" and his therapists and evaluators never warned me to look for more trouble later on!
I use Barton and am very happy with it. I resisted b/c of the cost in the beginning but I buy one level at a time, resell it when I'm done with it for about 80-90% of the new price and then buy the next, either new or used. There is a yahoo group called Heart of Reading which is for all types of reading disabilities and both Barton and Wilson (another OG program, less $ but not quite as hand-holding) and others are discussed frequently. That's where I've found used levels and buyers for mine too.
At 8 ds was reading "below kindergarten level" even though he'd memorized hundreds of words as sight words. This was one thing that fooled me for awhile but when the tester showed him nonsense words that were phonetic, he had no clue on any of them. Broke my heart 
Now after about 1.5 yrs of Barton (we're in level 5) he is reading on a 3rd to 4th grade level and most importantly he no longer feels "stupid." His sister is just 20 mos younger than him, and was surpassing him easily which really hurt his self-esteem. Now, even though she does still read better than him, he's closing the gap and has much more confidence.
There were no tutors within 2 hours of us when we began this and even if there had been someone close enough, the cost would be far more than what I've spent on Barton. But if it's truly prohibitive, please read the files and archives at Heart of Reading to compare other programs; it's not the only one.
There are several excellent videos on the Barton site that address the signs of dyslexia and also detail how Susan searched for years to find a program to teach her nephew to read, and ultimately put this together.
Karen T in Md
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Stephanie_Q
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| Posted: Aug 24 2010 at 3:30pm | IP Logged
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Just stopping by to let you all know that we've decided to enroll the oldest 3 kids in school. It's just me and the little ones at home.
I just got off the phone with Sister Loretta who is going to be starting my oldest at the beginning of the Sonday System, which is Orton-Gillingham based, in place of the regular 2nd grade reading and spelling.
I'm so happy that she is getting the help she needs from the ONLY religious at the Catholic elementary school. They'll be working together about an hour a day. If you're interested in yet another program, it's here.
God bless your school year!
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Stephaniedh 6.01
dd 6.02, dd 8.03, ds 3.05, ds 12.06 at Catholic school.
dd 12.09 at home.
Baby boy due 10.13
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4Real Forums : Special Blessings
Topic: who has dyslexic kids?
