As some others have said, this is the time to start considering what accommodations can be helpful, whether access to audiobooks, screen readers, and/or material ahead of time. If your child is in FCPS Gen Ed, I'm not convinced there is all that much reading (though my child was in 7th grade during COVID and did remote learning all year).

Get him a full neuropsych panel. You won’t regret it. These learning differences come in all sorts of combinations. I don’t think you can unpack well without the full testing panel.

We have a 2E kid with high IQ and dyslexia and dysgraphia, though slow beautiful handwriting. Hard to get thoughts that can be expressed in incredible nuance verbally on to paper.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you have him read out loud to you every day? Do you read to him out loud every day? Be honest. Start there.

No, they are past this. This is a strategy for beginning readers without disabilities. Also, after years of therapy my kid can read aloud/decode high school level texts but his comprehension is elementary level due to his language disorder. They need specialized help.

Then get specialized help then.

Anonymous wrote:Do you have him read out loud to you every day? Do you read to him out loud every day? Be honest. Start there.

No, they are past this. This is a strategy for beginning readers without disabilities. Also, after years of therapy my kid can read aloud/decode high school level texts but his comprehension is elementary level due to his language disorder. They need specialized help.

Thank you, Pp. We did try guanfacine since it was a non stimulant. We just never saw any effect but maybe we needed a higher dose - and there were no side effects either so that was the one positive. We'll keep that in mind and maybe try it again at a higher dose.

Is your daughter still on meds?

Just throwing this out there. My inattentive ADHD daughter does well on Guanfacine. It is a non-stimulant, and it helps a little with emotional regulation, too. Zero impact on appetite.

Her extremely slow processing speed turned out to partially be from SSRIs, which gave her severe apathy as a side effect and sort of turned her into a zombie.

Also, a 504 with slow processing speed may be able to give him workload reduction as an accommodation. Mine, at her worst, had a 50% reduction. Stopping SSRIs in 9th grade with continued support and higher dose of Guanfacine, meant she was able to fully move off that accommodation by junior year. In college, she receives 50% extra time on tests, and nothing else. By second semester, she said she almost never uses the extra time, but what she really needs is the quiet testing center.

This sounds a little like my rising 8th grader; who just had neuropsych testing (last spring). He has dysgraphia and one of the main tips was listening to audiobooks while reading.

The psych also suggested a vision therapy evaluation and our son (always 20/20) scored very low in many areas—we are giving VT a shot, I know there are many who discredit it but we felt worthwhile to try, much in the same as if there was any other area we would look into a therapy.

In your case, maybe try and do the basic VT evaluation. It’s expensive and often not covered by insurance, our practice has frequent re-tests benchmarks and we will see how it goes

Do you have him read out loud to you every day? Do you read to him out loud every day? Be honest. Start there.

Anonymous wrote:Thank you PPs. What is CALT?

His IQ was in the average range.

CALT is a Certified Academic Language Therapist and it is the type of provider you probably need to remediate reading and writing for an older child like yours. Essentially we are dyslexia therapists and we teach dyslexic people to read, write, and spell. It is a two year training and supervision process to become a CALT, so it’s a highly skilled credential.

Locally most CALT have been trained by ASDEC and you can call them for a referral. You can also google “academic language therapy” and you’ll get some local CALT with websites.

And I agree with pp on audiobooks - drop the fight on eye reading at home and encourage all the audiobooks. They do so much good, and will build vocabulary and other background knowledge. They are gold!