Thank you for your response. I'm not surprised that he has always been popular with the girls. He is so sweet! That is too funny about the Facebook account! He is so fired up to become a better reader and his writing is just taking off too! Thank you for previewing the story with him. In reading group he knew the book very well. He seemed to read a lot by memory, so at times he was adding or skipping words, but his confidence was through the roof and he remembered so well. We will work on strategies to help him keep the one to one pointing. Some really fun pointers might do the trick. We love his excitement and with his visual learning, memory, and dedication it shouldn't be long before he is just soaring. The writing often guides the reading with literacy development, so as we are seeing his writing is really developing rapidly his reading will likely continue to follow just behind this. Today he worked very well and did his best the whole day. Such a delightful child!
Have a beautiful weekend!
Ah, how happy I have been over the notes that I have been receiving from Jack's teacher. Jack is really doing well and I am now positive we made the right decision not to hold him back and put him in kindergarten again.
Check. One less thing to worry about.
Right now my main concern is Jack's reading. He is memorizing books. While it is not a bad skill to have, it requires someone reads the book to you in the first place. In order to self study and read for enjoyment, he is going to need to actually learn to read.
The book she was talking about wasn't that easy and I read it with/to him just once. So while my heart drops every time I watch him struggle, my heart soars when I see him do amazing things.
I need to call the reading specialist. I promised the school we'd hire one for him. More importantly, I don't know how to help him. I have read some articles and am reading a detailed book on learning disabilities in children, called The Mislabeled Child. [By the way, I highly recommend this book for anyone who has a child with a learning disability and who would like to learn how to help their child themselves or to gain more knowledge so they can better navigate their school services.] Yet, when I watch him, I can't tell what is going on.
To give you an example... For See, he said Seed. When I said it was See. He repeated Seed. When I said there's no d on the end... he looked at me, thought hard, and said Seed. Now that I think about it, oh my good, there was an exclamation point after the word See... It said See! For him, there appears to be no difference between See! and Seed. And then when he finally did say See, he looked perplexed.
For What, he just kept saying the sound t. We've read the word What a thousand times. But with each book the word has to be relearned in it's new context. We struggled the same way with the word The and A. It took about a year to get those words ingrained in his brain to where he will get them right about 90% of the time.
Jack's auditory processing disorder effects two areas, his ability to distinguish sound and his tolerance for ambient noise. [I learned their were more types of this disorder in the book, which was interesting in itself. Two children can be diagnosed with APD or CAPD as some call it - central auditory processing disorder - can bare no resemblance to one another in what they struggle with and what will help them. So if your child has this diagnosis, or something else like it, a one-size fits all program may not actually help them!] So in my brain that is ruled by logic... how can seeing a ! as a d have to do with hearing?
So that's why I don't sleep at night now. Could he also be having trouble with how he sees?
I just took a break from writing this and gave Jack a test I saw in the book. I typed the word 'bund' and then typed a series of words, like bund, dund, pund, bunq, punq, dund, and bunb. I asked him to circle all the words that were exactly like bund.
He first circled two correctly.
Then proceeded to circle all of the words, except the ones with a p or q... just as the child did in the book.
The child in the book had dyslexia.
While my little test is far from scientific, are the tears in my eyes from fear or because I know what I've been seeing?
Does Jack have both visual and auditory disorders?
Is it double jeopardy?
I have to remember... while my heart drops every time I watch him struggle, my heart soars when I see him do amazing things.
