We were at a charter with a dyslexic child and had a similar experience. We moved to DCPS as I did not think that the long term support from the school existed for his learning needs. I did not see a path year to year.

I can not say that DCPS is fundamentally different with those self esteem challenges. What I do is engage the teacher with the outside approach and books so that it is as consistent as possible. It is hard - and I would recommend that you plan to spend the beginning of each year working with the teachers regarding your child and their learning needs.

He needs an IEP.

OP, does he have an IEP? He needs an IEP, even if you don't think the school could teach him and you are OK with providing all his dyslexic appropriate instruction. In the context of the IEP, you can insist that the school provide more appropriate activities - let him read the things his dyslexia tutor provides, let him practice different spelling words or whatever.

Also, he should be qualified by the school for Bookshare. You should also look at Learning Ally, which has tons of text books synced with highlighting and a voice reader, excelent support. He could be "reading" these books with a headphone in class while others are doing reading group. Teacher can assign different books or the same, depending on what's available.

Anonymous wrote:OP here. Thanks to everyone for your suggestions.

My son is in a public charter school in DC. The school is pretty good overall, but they don't seem to have much experience or knowledge of how to work with dyslexic kids. That said, I think they are trying hard to work with him. It's mostly that the overall environment is so full of strong readers that he feels stupid. And that their instructional methods exacerbate this by not being appropriate to the way that he can learn to read. It's frustrating.

I would love to homeschool for a year and I see how this could be much more productive. But I just don't see how we could afford it though. We need both my husband and my's income -- both of us work full time. And my income is 70% of the total. DH makes less so it would be easier to do without his income....but he could not be the homeschool lead because he is dyslexic and I think it would be hard for him to teach another person to read. (If only because he would need to read a lot in order to understand the instructional method). Is there any way to homeschool when both parents work out of the home full time?

The other problem is that I am afraid I might drive my poor dyslexic child nuts if the only thing that I did with my time was to homeschool him. He is my only child.

Other than DS is #1 or 3, I could have written your post. I think the best solution would have been homeschooling for DS but it just wasn't in the cards. My DH works from home FT so we could even cover childcare during my working hours fairly easily, but the thing I've observed is that successful homeschooling involves a lot of other activities outside of the relatively short blocks of structured learning. So while actual instruction could be ~2hrs/day, DS would be missing out on all of the other opportunities and I think that would be extremely unfair to him. So we are making public school work. DS does tutoring in the evenings every day during the school week and that's not ideal, though thankfully it's something he's able to do. It's really not fair how much more he has to work and he does get upset about that sometimes, but his progress has done marvelous things for his confidence.

I posted before about reading Ben Foss's book and talking to your DS about other really successful people with dyslexia. I would also suggest working with his tutor to chart his progress and create milestones. When they're in it day to day, they don't necessarily see the progress they're making so that can be very affirming.

And, ideally, get his reading instruction at school in place of the regular reading block. If not, at least have him removed from the competitive reading environment as much as possible.

I know most public schools wouldn’t allow this but since it’s a charter it’s worth a try-
What about scheduling his tutoring sessions during his reading block at school? That would get him out of the useless leveled reading groups 3x per week and as an added bonus give him more time after school.

I’m a tutor that specializes in elementary kids with dyslexia and I’ve found that I am able to make the most progress with kids that I am able to see during the school day at their school. Often kids are so tired after school and I can get much more done with kids during the school day and if I can save them from having to sit through classroom reading instruction that really isn’t helping them even better.

OP here. Thanks to everyone for your suggestions.

My son is in a public charter school in DC. The school is pretty good overall, but they don't seem to have much experience or knowledge of how to work with dyslexic kids. That said, I think they are trying hard to work with him. It's mostly that the overall environment is so full of strong readers that he feels stupid. And that their instructional methods exacerbate this by not being appropriate to the way that he can learn to read. It's frustrating.

I would love to homeschool for a year and I see how this could be much more productive. But I just don't see how we could afford it though. We need both my husband and my's income -- both of us work full time. And my income is 70% of the total. DH makes less so it would be easier to do without his income....but he could not be the homeschool lead because he is dyslexic and I think it would be hard for him to teach another person to read. (If only because he would need to read a lot in order to understand the instructional method). Is there any way to homeschool when both parents work out of the home full time?

The other problem is that I am afraid I might drive my poor dyslexic child nuts if the only thing that I did with my time was to homeschool him. He is my only child.

I was thinking “you need to homeschool” while I was reading your post and saw that you seem to know it but don’t see how. Do you think you could do it for a year? It may be all your child needs to catch up and get confidence back.

Several people have homeschooled temporarily for reasons like this and then integrated back in without a problem.

Anonymous wrote:Does he have an IEP? The school won't like it, but you can insist in the IEP what areas of reading instruction he receives at school. If your private tutor has experience in the public school system they should be able to give you pointers on things you want specifically included / excluded from his instruction.

I really feel for your DS. In K and 1st, mine figured he was "stupid" because he couldn't read and it took a lot of effort to undo the damage. He's in 4th now and has spent a year with a private tutor who has been life changing for him, rebuilding his confidence.

Me again. Read the book "The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan" by Ben Foss if you haven't already. There are so many really successful people with dyslexia. A lot of them had a really rough time in their early education but the thing that stands out is the difference their parents' faith in them made. In building up your DC's confidence, maybe talk about famous people like Disney who had dyslexia.

"Proust and the Squid" is also a really cool read, though a bit dated now in that it doesn't benefit from the most current research. You will walk away from it marveling at how unique and awesome your DC's brain is. Dyslexia isn't bad, just different. It's our educational system that makes it so very, very hard for anybody whose brain is wired differently.

I echo that the tutor is so, so important. My son's tutor from 1-4th grade was his biggest cheerleader, and helped him see he is bright, he just is dyslexic. His reading specialist at school - a pricey private, no less - made him feel dumb and incompetent. We couldn't change the school's way of teaching reading (they HAVE since changed it, thank goodness) but we could find a hundred ways to lift up my kid - the cheerleader tutor, making his outside passions a priority, and grasping every opportunity to shine a light on academic areas he shines at - which are few and far between, so we have to work at it.

My kid found that the school teaching didn't contradict or go against what he was learning in tutoring, it just didn't help. What actively hurt was the shame my kid felt at not being able to keep up. We worked on helping him understand why, and appreciate dyslexic strengths, and also made our goal to keep him at grade level for everything but spelling, fluency, and math facts. Its been a struggle because the school was happy to let him fall behind and call it accommodation.

Does he have an IEP? The school won't like it, but you can insist in the IEP what areas of reading instruction he receives at school. If your private tutor has experience in the public school system they should be able to give you pointers on things you want specifically included / excluded from his instruction.

I really feel for your DS. In K and 1st, mine figured he was "stupid" because he couldn't read and it took a lot of effort to undo the damage. He's in 4th now and has spent a year with a private tutor who has been life changing for him, rebuilding his confidence.

That’s sounds sooo frustrating! OP, where is your son in school? Public or private? It would be helpful to know so posters with experience could give advice.

My first grade child has been diagnosed with dyslexia. He clearly struggles a lot to read. We have been doing evidence-based tutoring with an OG curriculum three times a week and I also work with him at home using the same program. He has been making great strides at home and we are proud of how hard he is working. He also has been gaining confidence in his reading and reading more effortlessly.

Unfortunately, his experience at school seems to constantly undermine this fragile confidence. They use a leveled reading program and he is just now (end of the year) starting the leveled readers for 1st grade. All the other kids are in reading groups at a much higher level and he compares himself to them. The leveled readers themselves contain words that are impossibly long and difficult to read -- they don't make any sense as readers for kids learning to decode. And while they contain long words that are hard to decode, they also contain incredibly boring, repetitive text that DS hates. (Jane likes puppies. Jane likes unicorns). So, he is hopeless in decoding readers that he thinks are mind numbingly boring..........this is very frustrating for him. (At home, he can read a lot of words fairly well in controlled text books that his reading teacher pointed me to.) Then there is the phonics instruction and sight words approach at school, which just seems to confuse him by chunking everything together and teaching a lot of rules that he can't remember.

It is so frustrating! Emotionally, he gets all fed up at school from these confusing methods and then he doesn't want to try at home.

I am beginning to understand why people pull their dyslexic kids out of school to home school. I don't see how this could be an option for us. But right now, it feels like two steps forward, three steps back.