My deep gratitude to all of you for your time (overdue), and a whole new set of questions (too soon!). It’s been a busy week, and your thoughts and questions have been with me throughout. The chaos has included the school meeting, receipt of draft IEP (no content, no surprise), phone discussions with both private LDs schools as well as the public English one, several kinds of dyslexia reading specialists/ tutors, the producer of/ trainer in a French OG-type program, gazoodles more research, and goodness knows what else. Huge brain dump of my week follows for your suggestions - apologies for volume!!
I have been trying to evaluate three basic options. We can stay put, add in as much support as we can, and keep assessing to see if we have good progress or need bigger change. Or we can assume right off the bat that that isn’t going to be enough, and jump ship immediately, either into the local English school (easy) or a private LD school (hard but not impossible). Pemberly, we seem to have the opposite situation to you here - we may need the private to get enough remediation for her to be able to function in public, where there is little support.
DH heavily favours the first approach, with all fingers and toes crossed that she is more asynchronous/ delayed than truly dyslexic. He thinks we should give status-quo-plus-supports a fair try to see if it’s working before leaping hysterically off into radical change. At least a couple of months; ideally until the end of the school year and then re-assess. He figures it will be quite clear whether her reading is improving - he thinks it already is (and has rather too much faith in my do-it-yourself intervention). But I do see his point about not assuming the worst without evidence, and jumping into a panicked decision. On the other hand, I think he’s a little too fond of the notion that she might just be delayed, and will hop up to grade level by the end of the year, and then chug merrily along for ever after.
She’s already old for starting dyslexia intervention, and if she needs more, I don’t want to wait.
So what does option 1 look like? DD’s teacher is lovely, flexible and is already working hard on the accommodations, particularly with AT (text-prediction and text-to-voice). DD seems to work more happily on a whiteboard, so she does so whenever she wants and her teacher takes pictures and adds them to her folder. While DD is pretty unhappy in school, she does really like her teachers, who are a perfect match temperamentally for DD, and bring out the best in her (and that’s not easy to achieve). We’re happy to drop the French if that’s what she needs. But she speaks it like a native (her teacher thought she was), so it’s actually the one thing she can do really well in school right now…. and just because of practice, her reading and writing is currently much better in French than English. As noted, main teacher is inexperienced but very willing to work with us to support DD and learn more. She is not, however, getting useful advice from the Learning Support with respect to to what are appropriate expectations (like realms of written output in math). DD is getting small group reading (standard approaches) with the Learning Support twice a week, and one-on-one writing support from her teacher twice a week. No OG-type remediation, in either language. And I’m concerned that the school really doesn’t see the difference. 500 kids, and they tell me they’ve never dealt with dyslexia before….
Option 1 therefore requires all remediation to occur outside of school - and outside of school hours. While this is far from ideal, so far it’s no as bad as it sounds, since we’ve mostly dumped all other homework, plus piano, and replaced with reading remediation. So we haven’t increased homework time, and we’ve replaced two frustrating things she was hating and struggling with, with one frustrating (repetitious) thing she can succeed at. There are also some advantages to at-home remediation, including flexibility to choose her most receptive times, and being able to let her turn it into a game, which takes a lot of time but keeps her more willing. She has even asked several times if she can read to me from her books that come with the program - this is a small miracle!
But Pemberly asks the key question - “do you feel qualified to do this intervention yourself?” Darn good question. Can I deliver the AAR program? Sure, it’s designed to be self-explanatory. But is this intervention enough? Doubt it. Thus my original post, trying to figure out how much more, of what, she probably needs. And is extracurricular sufficient, or does she need her whole day in an LD-friendly environment?
It would be great to have daily at-home remediation work supported by regular professional advice and direction. And don’t worry, Bluemagic - I wasn’t trying to say - “hey I’m going to do what Bluemagic told me!” Just that what you described was similar to the approach I had been thinking about. I’m finding it difficult to identify professional supports though - someone who might be the equivalent to your education therapist. Searching the term gives me psychologists who do assessments and psychotherapy, but not anyone focused on reading and language interventions. Alternatively, I can find a couple dyslexia specialists who provide Barton tutoring - but little that seems to occupy the space in between that you are describing.
However, one of the dyslexia tutors seems to have broader experience (does teacher training and helps schools design reading programs, as well as one-on-one support for kids in reading and writing at all ages). She thinks she may be able to give us a better picture of what kinds of deficits are really there (for example, she says there are types of errors quite specific to dyslexia, and other kinds of errors that tend to have other causes. While the remediation approach is similar, trajectories may not be.) So I’ve set up four sessions with her and DD over the next two weeks, so she can get a feeling where DD is at and give us some advice about moving forward (by Skype, ugh - she’s not local. But she claims to work by Skype all the time. I guess we’ll see). She sounded a bit horrified by my at-home remediation program, though, so I don’t know how open she might be to a mixed home/ professional approach. But I can certainly appreciate how an expert can feel about the damage that can be cause by well-meaning bumbling amateurs - given that’s how I feel about DD’s school.
The tutor is bilingual and does OG-type remediation in both English and French - but like others, her first advice was to drop the French. I hope that in a couple of weeks we will have a more detailed functional assessment of where things are at, and some external evidence that will help DH determine whether he is being cautiously optimistic or dangerously pollyanna-ish….
In the meantime, I also have a date with our local English school’s principal and learning support. They *do* provide an OG-type program within the school, so it will be really helpful to see the differences in how they could support DD. My biggest concern for DD is her being crushed through inappropriate demands and expectations, made in sheer ignorance. While an LD classroom best addresses this, just being in a more dyslexia-aware environment could help, too. I have really been bouncing between stay put for a bit, or jump all the way to an LD-specialist school. Now I am thinking more seriously about option 2 - public English school. It may be a better middle road, if they can offer a more knowledgeable and supportive environment and a single language. But I’d hate to be wrong and need to make a second school change within a year, if this move isn’t enough.
Please keep your very pertinent questions and comments coming. If you have further thoughts or see red flags triggered by my (very long, sorry) musings, please send them this way. They are helping me figure out what I need to ask and the implications and trade-offs of these choices. You guys are an enormous help, and very much appreciated!
