PhD made progress with the school for us

[JustMe]

Regardless of what you do, the some of the best advice I ever received was - put your time and energy into helping your child, not into trying to change the school, because it's really hard and takes forever. If you wait to try to get the school to do something about her reading, you'll lose more precious time that she could be learning. I'm not saying don't keep advocating at school - but just don't put what she needs on hold until you can make them do it. All of these reading programs are best when administered individually. I would start getting used to the fact that you're most likely going to have to do it yourself.

Yes, I can see this. One of the issues is, though, that I am not sure what she needs in reading. She really does not fit into any of the categories people mention as to why she is not doing well, and it is confusing..probably b/c this, although I am talking about reading in this thread, it is not only reading where her struggles lie. I do work with her in math, as it is easier to see how to help her. I have had independent assessments, but they have not been helpful in telling me what specifically she needs reading-wise.

[inmypjs]

I would start investigating various reading programs asap. Regardless of her diagnosis, that is pretty much where you need to go IMO. A lot of people have had success with the following with auditory processing issues and reading:

FastForword
Lips (Lindamood Bell)
Earrobics

Others to look into would be the ones I mentioned before: Barton, Wilson, AabeCedarian (has its own Yahoo group for support), Davis.

One thing you can do at home for very little cost is to get the book Reading Reflex and use their phonological awareness test. That will also tell you a great deal.

The biggest thing IMO with reading is that you don't want to keep doing what doesn't work. So if the school has been working with her all this time, has not gotten her to progress and has not even acknowledged lack of progress, it's time to do something different. The hardest thing is sorting through what.

There is definitely a hierarchy of therapy that I think works best, depending on her evals and what you've already tried. Sometimes other things have to be worked on first, before the academics can improve. I would also be happy to chat and talk details if you want to pm. Good luck, it is really hard sometimes to figure out what is best for your child when there is so much out there. I have also felt the burden of having to figure it out myself, when experts and school can't say what to do.

[niccig]

I replied to your PM.

The reason I'm on a phonological awareness soapbox is that it's necessary to learn phonics and many people confuse the two. They are 2 different skills sets:

Phonological awareness is analyzing sounds in the language. You don't use written words. It's oral. DS's therapy was rhyming, breaking words into syllables, breaking words into sounds, taking sounds and blending them into a word, changing the first and last sound.

Phonics is mapping the written letters to the speech sounds. Difficult to do this if you haven't mastered the speech sounds, that is you have a deficit with phonological awareness. So you need a certain level of phonological awareness to learn phonics.

Now reading is very, very complex. I had to learn the theoretical models for reading for a class on acquired brain injuries, and I'm amazed we can read and write. Several functional systems have to interact, and there's several steps where there can be a problem. Phonological awareness is just one step and not everyone who has difficulties with reading has difficulties with phonological awareness. And not everyone learns to read by learning phonics. Some people are sight readers - I was. I learned phonics when teaching DS how to read! So phonological awareness/phonics isn't always the right approach for everyone.

Turns out, phonological awareness was where DS was having difficulties. He got help at the SLP clinic at my college, and I worked with him on a phonics program that taught blending of sounds (his greatest difficulty was with blending). Beginning of grade 2 he was reading simple phonics readers. Now at end of grade 2 he's reading Magic Treehouse. His spelling also improved. He can now sound out a word and because he's reading much more, he's seeing more words and remembering the spelling.

You'll figure out what your DD needs. I know it. It's just frustrating and difficult trying to work out where the issue lies.

1)Phonological awareness--I am not sure, as I see some conflicting things here. First off, one of the things I insisted upon at the very last meeting is that they sit down with her and see how she reads and answers the accompanying questions on tests. They finally agreed to do this. The PhD told me that the spec ed teacher told him that she "had just done something with dd that made her realize her basic phonics skills were much worse than she had thought based on her test scores". I don't know about that--what I do know is--she can sound out shorter words okay, but has trouble with longer words, has terrible and weird spelling (will spell "your" as "ore" and "dear" as "dera", and one of her diagnoses is Central Auditory Processing Disorder. The audiologist found that she did well on all areas tested except she could not understand muffled words and could not "fill in the blanks" if part of a laword was missing. All other speech skills are fine. She is in 4th grade, btw.

2)lawyer-You know, I have strongly considered this. Money is definitely an issue, but I called one earlier this school year as I figured it wouldn't hurt to make an inquiry. She was the only one who came up locally to me on a google search. I didn't keep notes and don't remember some of my impressions, but I do remember she said to call her if they threatened to take dd's IEP away (which was something that has been mentioned). She also said that it could be a problem for me if dd's test scores were not in the spec. ed range (which was one of my concerns), but with this latest round they definitely are.

3) I am pming you. Thanks!