Thank you, Trinity.
We have thought about getting "My Word Coach." I think that is a good idea. He liked Brain Age. But first he will have to buy a new Nintendo DS because his old one broke.
And now, for the rest of the story. I only posted about the "easier" problems I deal with, the ones that I have found some solutions for or found really good advice. I didn't have a chance to post the rest of it.
I think my son probably has some kind of dysgraphia, along with his vestibular and proprieceptive issues, and we hope to get a diagnosis in January when he sees the developmental pediatrician that he last saw two years ago at age 7. He was reversing some letters and numbers when he was tested then, but we were told to try Handwriting without Tears and since this did help with spacing issues and legibility, I thought his handwriting was as good as it was going to get and, of course, typing solved a lot of our problems. My son only reverses letters and numbers when he is tired, stressed, or distracted and he seems to be doing okay learning the Handwriting without Tears cursive.
But... we have not solved the problems that writing issues cause with math. Aleks lets him move forward as he learns new concepts quickly and he is doing middle school math and he even seems to like it, but it tests him regularly over the material he has learned. When it comes to things like long division and multiplication where he can't use a calculator he gets very upset that he has to do all of the writing because then he has to make sure that the 2's he has written are really 2's and not a 5 that he wrote backwards and then lining the numbers up is more difficult for him than other kids. He has always been able to do a lot of math calculations mentally but I know he will have to do a lot more writing in math as he progresses, so I have been making him do his own writing.
I homeschool, but I have read things on teachers.net about similar kids and most teachers do not understand this problem and some describe kids like mine as lazy because they resist doing a lot of written work. I can't imagine being a bright kid with this problem in our public school. I want to help my son but he gets upset with me to the point that he yells at me and wads up the paper and throws it out of frustration. He gets upset with me when I don't know how to answer his questions like "why can't I do it this way if I come up with the right answer?" He insults my intelligence because I don't have a good enough understanding of math to be able to answer all of this questions. I got upset when he told me he wanted a math tutor and I told him I would put him back in school and his "math tutor" would be a special ed teacher who would have to figure out what to do with him. I know this was a terrible thing to say, but I just lost it. There is just so much stress in our family right now and as a verbally gifted kid he knows how to push my buttons.
I so wish we could just be unschoolers. This would work well for language arts (since he can type) and history and science and just about everything, but there is no way he would do math on his own because of his writing problems. I lurk on their message boards and they sound like they are having so much fun with their kids and...
I am definitely not having much fun at the moment.
My husband, who is retiring from a very stressful job and is home a lot more now until he finds another job, says he hopes he can find another job quickly because he doesn't want to listen to this.
