Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional It seems we are homeschooling...

So, thanks to the IU getting my son kicked out of his regular preschool (that was actually going well enough for the first time ever) I now find myself with a 5 year old who has no school program.

Since he was 3 he has been in 4 different schools. I have already decided not to try another program after three very different regular preschools and one IU preschool, none of which were a great fit. This last one was the very best preschool in the area, so we could only do worse at this point.

Since my son is either mild ASD or severe ADHD (the experts can't seem to decide), in addition to who knows what else, and probably giftedness, I have to try to build in all of the stuff he needs during our day together. So, I decided to homeschool for 4 hours a day followed by open play at a local place that has bounce houses, climbing stuff, lots of toys, and lots of running space. I figure he can get all the sensory stuff/physical education there in addition to social interaction and at home we can work on transitions, losing games, flexibility, and staying on task/remaining seated for instruction. When it warms up I intend to do a lot of parks and playgrounds.

Well, we are a week in and things are going pretty well. He loves doing school with me and his overall anxiety level has dropped drastically. Problem behaviors at home and in public are down and he is just so much happier and joyful. He is always on time at the table to start homeschool and seems sad when the 4 hours are up!

I started him on a first grade math workbook from the bookstore and he blew threw that like it was nothing. I grabbed a second grade book and so far that is easy for him as well. I picked up a third grade book because I don't expect the second grade book to last long.

For reading I had him read 15-20 minutes a day and I swear his reading has shot up tremendously in just a week. I guess I really hadn't been doing anything with him and just assuming he was practicing some stuff at preschool since they have books there and he could have read them if he wanted to. I'm not sure where his reading level is, but today he sat down and read a book for 3 hours straight and it included words like abundant, entourage, solemn, and marinated.

I would have guessed last week he was around grade 1, maybe 2 for academics. Apparently that might just have been because I hadn't really officially sat down and taught him anything for so long. We have been so worried about behavior and school placements and academics just didn't seem all that important. Plus all of the experts have spent the last few years telling me that teaching him academics was such a huge disservice to him as it only served to widen the social gaps between him and the rest of the children.

Now I'm not sure what to do for K. The district says they are building a new school and will have a perfect IU classroom for him with 12-16 students in the class. The trouble he has in social settings pretty much scales up with the number of kids around him, so I'm not even sure that is a small enough class size. I've honestly never seen him do well with more than about 5-8 kids, and then only in a large, active environment. He usually plays alone and completely avoids the other kids unless it is a very intimate setting with only one or two other children who are very calm and quiet. Basically play dates at home with carefully selected children.

I'm not sure if I should even bother trying another school for K. I know we have a few months until September and a lot can change, but I never wanted to do public school to begin with. I'm also extremely PO'd at the IU right now for getting him kicked out of a quality program where they were willing to actually work with him and where he was already accepted for K next year. Although I have to admit we are all much happier without the stress of school constantly looming over us and while I do love homeschooling so far, I also was very much planning on going back to work this fall.

I'm not sure homeschooling is something I want to do forever. If we move there is a Montessori that goes up to 8th grade in a good area that looks decent, but our first bad school experience was with a Montessori school. I would not want to do the K program because it's not mixed age and limited to K materials and concepts. The elementary program would have a lot of kids older than him, so maybe it would be a good program for when he is 6? Reading the elementary curriculum on the website there is actually some stuff there he doesn't already know, so that's a good sign. OTOH, he wouldn't be able to start there until 6, in a year and a half, so who knows what he will master by then.

So, after all of that... I guess what I am looking for is both opinions on how to continue his education and recommendations for teaching him at home. I want to make sure I'm not skipping important stuff and I want him to have a good understanding of what he is learning. I want to include adequate opportunities to practice social skills.

I also am curious how much time we should be spending on academic learning. Currently our 4 hour schedule includes half an hour each of reading and math.

For reading he reads 15 minutes and I read a chapter of Paddington for the second 15 minutes. For math he does 1 card of Cart Before the Horse, one Perplexors puzzle, and however many pages of his math workbook he can finish in the remaining 20 minutes. Other than that we do a craft or art, play games, do science or geography or practice writing, play with instruments or play on the tablet, build legos or K'nex, and have snack. Am I missing anything? Is that too much academics for a 5 year old? He seems very happy with the schedule and even asked if he can do more hours, so I guess it's all fun for him.

Any advice or experience would be greatly appreciated. This is all new to me and I just want to make sure that I am making the best choices for my son, especially when the experts make me feel like everything I do is so wrong for him.

What is IU?

Intermediate Unit. The division of the school district that supports special needs kids in PA.

My advice is to homeschool and follow your ds's lead, taking it one step at a time. Remember, he's 5 and perhaps this is the least-worst or best fit at the moment. It really depends on how fast he accelerates and what happens over the next couple of months/yrs. Nothing is itched in stone and most decisions are reversible.

By all means, you could use a general curriculum elementary series to make sure the basics are covered. And do NOT be afraid to radically accelerate your child either. He may well be able to do math at 4+ grades ahead. Until he's presented with the material, you may not really know what he's capable of doing. Even then, he might hide his true capabilities and potential.

I don't know how PA is with 2e kids or ones who need radical acceleration. However, based on the fact that your ds has blown through a couple of grades of math, I'd say that's really the issue with the schools. Often times, the anxiety and social/emotional issues will subside once these kids have their cognitive needs met. So if he can easily do 5th grade math, for example, it would be a form of torture for him to be with other 5-yr-olds who are barely adding single digits. IF the schools are not willing or unable to accommodate an advanced learner, then you might be banging your head against a wall.

My ds is now 9 and I'm un/homeschooling, but I was in similar shoes to you when my son was 5 and in pre-k. He, too, had been in three different schools within one year. He flew through the math and the schools didn't know what to do with him. I had to learn to follow my gut instinct and frequently disregard or dismiss with many 'experts' said. Yes, I've had the alphabet soup too.

Personally, I think a 1/2 hr of reading and math per day is plenty. Some days, you'll likely have more; some days you'll likely have less. If your ds wants to do more, let him. That's my two cents.

Thanks so much for your feedback cdfox. Is there any curriculum you would recommend?

All of our math instruction thus far has been pretty informal. My son loves multiplication and he is always counting things to multiply, like the columns and rows on a sticker sheet to find how many there are total through multiplication.

He is able to add up to 3 digit numbers in his head, but I haven't actually taught him the concept of regrouping/working the problems out on paper from the ones place up. Right now he breaks numbers apart like 134 and 128 he says 100 + 100 +30 + 20 + 4 + 8 and he adds from the 100's down. I figure that is great but he will need to know paper math as well. He can subtract, but not as well as adding. I honestly think he is better at mental math than I am, but I'm probably pretty terrible at it myself.

For dividing he only knows how to divide by 2, but I think that some visuals might help with that. He hasn't actually memorized any times tables, he uses skip counting to multiply, so I'm not sure how to teach mental division.

I guess at this point we just do the workbooks and see where he ends up needing work and go from there. I'd love to teach him some geometry as he picks up on that sort of stuff so quickly, but there is almost none in the math books at the bookstore, well, other than really complex stuff for much older kids. Even if he could do that stuff there is no way I can get him to be able to focus with so many small problems written on the paper. I already have tons of issues getting his eyes looking at the right place on a piece of paper with only 10 large print questions. The end of our second grade book has a little bit on perimeter, but that is pretty easy for him. I think he would enjoy angles.

I guess I'll just carry on as I have been and worry more about what I am doing when he is old enough to actually be in school. I guess if we keep homeschooling past that point I'll need to learn about the laws and such. I'm assuming since K is optional I wouldn't have to worry about proving he is learning (or whatever) until first grade? And since I'm pretty sure he's already mastered 100% of first grade material it might be quite a while before I have to concern myself with proof of mastery...

I do wonder if I will ever get back to work though, I really miss my job!

I can heartily recommend Singapore Maths Primary series (available from Amazon) as it builds a very solid foundation. There are also SG Challenging Problems books too which really work those concepts in deeply too (think mental kneading as in bread making).

If you're in PA, other than in Philadelphia (where the age is six), compulsory education begins at age eight, so you have until third grade to homeschool without reporting or complying with any requirements.

http://www.education.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/overview_of_homeschooling/20312

And I would second Singapore Math. If he's already on beginning multiplication and multi-digit addition/subtraction, you might consider using their placement tests (singaporemath.com), as, though clearly he won't need to begin from the beginning, there may be topics that have been covered in a different sequence than the books you've already used. His method of adding from the left, btw, is one of the methods taught by SM. I loved the mental math parts, as well as the problem solving.

Ok, so luckily I'm just outside of Philly That should give me 3.5 years until the September when my son will be 8. The district, IU, and wraparound staff are all going to be very unhappy when I announce my plans to skip out on all of the BS they are trying to force us into. I note that no one here said to give their program a shot, which I was at least willing to do. So far everything we have done has just made things worse but they always guilt me into something.

Right now I am able to go through the whole day with my son, including 4 hours of structured, parent led time with a ton of transitions, with no aggression and with very good compliance. At school there was almost no compliance and daily aggression. So much for that ODD the experts were so worried about. I am convinced he is a nice kid and that it was just too much for him. The aggression spilled over at home as well. Yesterday and today we went to the local place with free play and both days he played beautifully with another girl there and there was no aggression and he was very social with her.

When he got kicked out of his school I took him off of the anxiety med he was on as we were only using it to help him calm down enough not to lash out at others. I find it interesting that anxiety has gone down so much after leaving the school program even though at the same time we titrated him off of Prozac. His wraparound staff is also going to be mad at me when they hear I dropped his med. Oh, well.

So, regarding Singapore Math, there look to be 3 versions. Is one considered the best version? I looked at the placement tests and some of the stuff covered is a little different from our books and probably a little harder. I'm going to print the tests and use them one day at a time for math and see where he ends up. Do the actual workbooks it comes with look a lot like the test items?

I did try to have him do the test while sitting on my lap at my PC, but he kept complaining he couldn't see well enough. I zoomed it in a lot before he seemed to be able to make out the symbols. Looks like I should schedule another vision eval. The last one was over a year ago and they said all looked fine. I had taken him in because he rubs his eyes so much while reading, but they said it's probably a stim or something. They did the standard eye chart test with some sort of kid version instead of letters. He still rubs his eyes the whole time he reads. Can distance vision suddenly drop off? I know he could see better than I could last summer as he read the ads on planes passing over at the shore.

I also dropped his OT and PT. He hated going and didn't cooperate there at all. I didn't see any benefit. Now that he isn't required to throw a ball for therapy, he's actually showing some interest in trying it for fun. Go figure. I'm beginning to wish we had just ignored everything the experts have said over the last 3 years. I had thought that maybe some of it was useful, but I'm changing my mind. Just trying to get back to the way I had originally wanted to parent my son. We are both already so much happier.

My son might not be like all of the other 5 year olds, but he's really starting to figure everything out and I'm starting to feel confident he will grow up to be a nice person. So, ironically I'm pretty darn happy we got kicked out of another school. And I'm also saving a ton of gas

There are actually four versions of SM, three of which are available from the official US distributor, singaporemath.com:

"original" SM: this is the third edition of the actual curriculum used in Singapore in the 90s, complete with British spellings and the metric system. Available mostly from other re-sellers, and used.

SM US edition: a minor revision of the third edition that changes the spellings to US English, and includes units on standard/customary/food-pound measures.

SM Standards edition: a more substantial revision to comply with the most recent pre-Common Core California frameworks, enabling it to be adopted by California public schools (again, pre-Common Core).

SM Common Core edition: a revision which re-arranges the topics to align with Common Core, presumably also to allow for adoption by public school districts. It also only goes up through 5B, at the moment.

The other three editions include 6A/6B, a level which consists predominantly of revision/test prep for the Singapore primary school leaving exam, and some topics in pre-algebra and data analysis.

You can also include in the Singapore family HMH's Math in Focus, a grade 1-5 curriculum with a more conventional US textbook aesthetic, and the ticket price to match.

SingaporeMath.com also has an online/digital subscription version of 1A-5B supposedly coming out this year.

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Your observation that pretty much all of his social-emotional and behavioral symptoms of concern have lessened markedly since leaving his school environment definitely validates your decision to pull him out. If there are true areas of vulnerability that will need remediation or therapy in the future, they will re-emerge on their own. Don't blame yourself for the past three years. You did the best you could given the information and resources you had available to you. (And perhaps there may have been some genuine social skills deficits that needed therapy at the beginning--after all, something brought you to special ed to begin with.) Enjoy the fresh opportunities of today and tomorrow. And find something fun to do with all that gas money!

I'm no vision expert, but am watching a friend's 10-year on his 3rd glasses' prescription in four years, and they tell me this rapid deterioration starting around age 6 is the usual pattern in his father's family. So yes, (based on this n of 4!), vision could suddenly drop off.

Also, do a quick search on this forum on vision therapy. There's been quite a few of us with kids who passed normal vision testing but proved to have serious visual processing issues, which require quite different testing to detect. Just starting down that road ourselves, but others here have much more experience.

It was obviously fine but when stopping prozac type drugs watch out for physical withdrawal symptoms. I thought I was getting a brain tumour.

Thinking about the vision thing reminded me of the trouble my son has recognizing people. I just figured it was an ASD thing. I was really concerned though over the weekend when at a friend's birthday party I helped a boy put on his jacket and my son walked up to me, leaned between us, looked right at me, and said "is that my mommy?" I couldn't believe he was unable to recognize me just because I was doing something he doesn't normally see me doing. I'm used to him asking if every kid with a certain build or hair color/style is one of his friends or insisting a random lady is a friends mom, but this was something new and rather disturbing.

With the other vision concerns I think I will definitely try to find someone who will take me seriously this time. His father and my mother both require serious corrective lenses in the 4+ and 5+ ranges. I also wear glasses, but my vision is no where near that bad.

To Puffin, we actually spent about a month total getting rid of the Prozac. Since he was taking such a minuscule dose to begin with it might not even have been necessary to go as slowly as we did. I felt from the beginning that the med made him less anxious, but also much more hyper. I'm relieved to see that the hyperactivity seems to have settled down in the last few days. I figure that if I'm the only one who has to deal with him and he is generally happy, we have no need of drugs at this point.

I gave him the Singapore Math 1A test today and he got them all right (I had him complete it independently so as not to accidentally help him, but I did have to point out questions he had skipped accidentally). Ever since he took the assessment he has been writing out sheets of math work for me to do and giving me ratings. It's so cute. Tomorrow we will do 1B. I'm still trying to get a hold of someone at the district who can get me his IQ test results. Sending daily emails and getting ignored. Love our district.

PanzerAzelSaturn - my ds9 was born with visual deficits. I've taken him to 6 eye doctors (three ophthalmologists and three behavioral/developmental optometrists) in two different states since we've moved. Ds was born with a left eye injury and some other issues that affected his vision.

Ds9 was in visual therapy between 4-6 yrs old. He also couldn't deal with a lot of visual stimulation or a lot of text or visual instruction when he was 5. I had to be a bit selective with the homeschooling curriculum and limit his screen exposure as well. And that is still somewhat true today.

I didn't use Singapore Math. I know others here have found it to be useful. I bought a fairly inexpensive general curriculum series - Learn at Home - for each elementary year. I supplemented the series with some online series like e-learning for kids or PBS's Cyberchase. I didn't have ds do a lot of worksheets or math drills each day. He didn't need much repetition either. So I tried to work around it.

When ds was in the Montessorish private gifted school, they used xtramath.org and Dreambox. Ds just wasn't fast enough with math facts at that point to move beyond addition and got extremely frustrated. I decided to forgo any math fact drills until he was older. So far, I haven't gone back to doing the math fact drills. At some point in the future, he may have to do the SAT or ACT and then he'll need to have those math facts mastered but until then I'm not overly worried or concerned because ds is far ahead in math.

IF you don't like Singapore, don't be afraid to ditch and try something else. IF you do like Singapore, then that's excellent and one hoop covered so to speak. Also, never be afraid of doing something out of box or many grades ahead.

Drugs. I had a 2e expert ask me if I had thought about medication for ds due to the ADHDish behavior. I then asked her about neurofeedback and any discussion about medication was dropped. Ds has not been on medication. Like you, I agree that I'm only one who has to deal with him and ds is generally happy and cooperative.

I think your ds's idea writing out sheets of math work for you do - is excellent and one I would encourage. Let him feel like he's in control by organizing you. It's a fantastic way for him to learn and be more receptive and cooperative. It's makes your life much easier and go much smoother.