Mostly, I want DS to keep the love of learning he's always had. That is my overall main concern. We are already having self-esteem issues due to the reading (saying things like "I'm so dumb!" and wondering why he can't read when everyone else can.) He is very aware of his "issues".
This is something that can easily happen with children who have learning challenges - they are surrounded at school by children who aren't struggling and they in turn feel like they are "dumb". We know they're not dumb at all - but it's a real challenge to help them survive with their self-esteem intact when they have to work so hard at overcoming their challenges.
The things that helped our ds the most were:
1) Being sure that he had opportunities to spend time working in his areas of strength, either inside or outside of school. We did a lot of outside-of-school activities such as fun (for him) science camps, etc - things that didn't involve anything that had to do with his challenges but were instead all about things that he was interested in.
2) Just giving him other activities, whether or not they had anything to do with his areas of intellectual strengths. He's taken music lessons, participated in a few after-school clubs, etc. The key is once he's outside of the classroom keep him active and engaged as much as possible without time to think about what happened at school that day, plus give him places to make friends outside of his classroom who won't know him as the student who has a challenge. Truthfully most of the kids *in* his classrooms never spent one minute thinking about ds' in terms of his challenges, but ds perceived that they did and that bothered him tremendously - still does.
3) Exercise. Our ds is a couch potato plus he has developmental coordination disorder, so he's not a kid who's inclined to *want* to get outside and exercise. It helped for us to semi-force him into that through family activities so that we were able to find him two individual sports that he's competent at as he got older. The exercise really does help.
4) Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Mostly that would be me doing the talking
And listen too. At first, it was mostly me talking, talking about all the reasons he really wasn't dumb, reinforcing his belief in himself and his strengths etc, and listening when he shared with me. Eventually he shared more and more, and that made it easier for me to figure out what to say when I talked to him. And... even though it took years for it to sink in, those early messages I fed him to help his sense of self-esteem *did* help. At the very least (yet very important too), he knew that he *always* had his parents believing in him even when he didn't think anyone else saw him that way, and that did help. It's not everything, but it's a big thing!
5) We found some good simple books that explain LDs, dyslexia etc to young (early elementary) children. He sometimes didn't want to look at them, other times they helped a bit. I don't have them out anymore so I can't remember the names of any of them; maybe you could post a topic specifically asking for book recommendations, or search around on Amazon.
6) Be sure he's with a teacher who is supportive and not sending negative messages without realizing it. Our ds' 2nd grade teacher was so insightful in that she really is responsible for seeing that our ds was struggling due to *something* being up that wasn't "normal" - yet she was so not a good teacher to be in the classroom with him because she contributed to him feeling hopeless and dumb. He had a new teacher in 3rd grade who didn't really help at all with ds' learning challenges but who helped him get excited about learning again, and that probably made much more of a difference in his life at that point than overcoming his challenges.
Sorry for all the rambling - hopefully some of it helped a little bit!
polarbear
