Please remind me of the good things about public school - Page 2

[meemee]

Originally Posted by kentuckymom 

DS will probably still mention homeschooling if he has a bad day, 

i think that's a good thing because then he knows there IS a way out. there is hope if things dont work out at school. 

however i wanted to share with you one strategy that REALLY helped my dd. 

i think if we had 4 days of school with wednesdays off she would have coped better. 

so what i did was take 'happy days' off. it helped dd GREATLY emotionally. 

the teacher knew. and that's when i realised K and first have loose policies on K and first attendance. we had to buck up in 3rd grade. 2nd grade she didnt want to miss a day of her teacher.

the thing is when i could tell my dd had had enough we took a day off. it really, really helped dd. we did mostly k and first. the school did not complain. we took anything from once or twice each month a day off. sometimes even more.  

[Doingourbest]

Hello,

Im responding mainly because I feel your pain. I have 3rd grade daughter who

started hating school in first grade. No one I know of,  but someone who really

has lived this walk with their child being dyslexic, really gets it. 

My child hates school. School can make her sick.  She prefers getting sick

to going to school. I fear it will make her emotionally sick or just suck away

her love for learning, if I just blindly agree with the teachers and the husband

that public school will do a "good enough" job.  This is the first year that her

teacher and IEP team seem to be actively working against her.

My "end date" for homes schooling is Oct 1.  Check your state. You can pull

them anytime if its the first time, just need to pull off the proper paperwork to

file with the school or state within 2 weeks.  I am currently waiting for administration

to come up with a good legal reason why I can not bring a Barton OG system

to her school and do the MN statue of  parental curriculum review (120.20b).  Given

1 out of 7 kids are dyslexic, and our town serves over 50,000 kids every year, I can

not believe how slow they are in responding to my request. I am in new territory.

Apparently parents blindly do whatever school says, or get fed up

and pull  their child to homes school- seems the only two options.  If our children

were blind, we would not tolerate the school telling them to "try harder and

sit closer to the board"  These kids can not learn reading under the sight

memory method used.  They can learn somethings, but certainly not as much

as they have the potential to learn and not without soul sucking frustration at being

told to just do it. 

I am waiting on the school and then my decision will have more say.  My husband

will not like it, but he has more say in most things and he has admitted one to many

times that the school system is failing our daughter. He struggled with a lessor form

of it in school.  He thinks it gives him more say, I say it gives him less.  Just because

his school and parents failed him, does not give him the right to let it happen to his

child.  Us moms really are their first and best teachers.  We have the ability to

see our childs hearts breaking. It is our responsibility to protect them, teach them

and love them. 

Good luck with your decision. You are not alone.

[kellybeth]

you are definitely not alone.

my own mother struggled with me, when she found i just wasn't learning in public elementary school up to 1st grade. i was good with art and creative processes, but couldn't grasp much of anything else. she transferred me into a private catholic school in 2nd grade up until 6th, and it was awful. they all thought i was learning impaired and pulled me out of math and reading classes to go out to a trailer in the parking lot with the kids who actually did have disabilities. i've managed to block out a lot of this, but i wandered into this forum today and had to comment. i cried every day i went to that awful school. five years of tears. i was never diagnosed with autism, but there is a video that my dad took of me reading a sign at the park backwards, and i still mix numbers up daily.

i went to public school for middle school through high school, and was put in honors art and english (i placed out of regular classes) and excelled. i don't know what it was, or why i had problems. i couldn't even tell time until 5th grade, and math was the most humiliating subject for me. i'm still awful at it, but went through college and my master's degree. i think a lot of kids just need time, and for their parents to be patient with them. i don't remember how my mom was, but i think if she knew how horrible every day of school really was for me, she would have taken me out of that school a lot sooner. i think you're wonderful for caring so deeply about your son's feelings about school. it really will stick with him to know you understand his feelings.

[librarygirl]

I didn't read all of the responses but I skimmed and didn't think I saw anything like this.

You mentioned that he does better in the morning than in the afternoon. Does he have food allergies? Have you ever tried cutting dairy or grains from his diet? I ask only because I am the same way. Even as an adult- I'm good to go in the morning. I am alert, focused, learning, working, productive. If I eat anything with dairy in it on my lunch (including caramel color, natural flavoring, caseinate, or whey), I'm useless all afternoon. I can't think or focus. My mom is the same way and we're positive it's why we always did so bad at math in school. we drank milk at lunch and then went to math class "drunk on milk". Food allergies don't make us hyper like they do so many kids. We actually feel drunk when we consume dairy products. Sleepy and unable to pay attention and learn.

Just thought I'd throw that out there on the morning vs afternoon learning. good luck with this school year!

[kentuckymom]

Thanks for reviving this thread with new replies!

Doingourbest:

I hope you're able to convince your school system to let an OG tutor come in. It's amazing to me that so  many schools just don't get what it takes for dyslexic kids to learn to read. Don't even get me started on the totally unhelpful "reading strategies" that my son was taught when he went to the reading intervention teacher in kindergarten. Okay, I got myself started: he was taught to look at the first letter of a word and then guess what it was from context. He was taught to guess the words based on the pictures. And those are just the two he still tries to use two years later. I guess those strategies must help (or at least not hurt) some kids because I know the kids from his class who went to intervention with him and they're all reading on grade level now, but those strategies just give dyslexic kids even less motivation to try to decode words. The good news is, my son doesn't hate school this year. He still says he'd prefer homeschool, and I'd still love to pull him out, but he's not crying or feeling sick about school at this point, and the first month of the year was the absolute worst in first grade, so there's hope. It helps that he's started to make a lot of progress with his OG tutor outside of school and that has helped him in school. Last night he read all of GO DOG GO to me and half of ARE YOU MY MOTHER? Sure, a lot of his classmates were reading those books at the end of kindergarten, but at the end of first grade he was struggling through phonics readers, so that's great progress.

Kellybeth:

I'm so sorry to hear you had such a horrible experience in school, but I'm glad that it did finally click for you and you did well and enjoyed school in the end. You're right that some kids just need time that most schools, public or private, can't give them. According to my husband, that's likely to happen to our son when it comes to math. DS just learned to count to 20 over the summer, and he's in the lowest math group at school and still struggles. However, he gets on the computer and plays "math" games that deal with spatial and logical thinking, and he blows me out of the water. When the math changes from arithmetic to mathematics, he'll probably shoot ahead. However, we have to get him through the arithmetic first. DH is in engineer. He'll ask me to add two numbers for him, then he'll do the rest of the calculus problem in his head.

librarygirl:

I appreciate you bringing up the food question, because that's always something to consider. DS does have some food issues (a lot of fruits give him diarrhea, as well as most things with artificial coloring), but he actually drinks milk for breakfast every day and water for lunch, so I know it's not dairy that's giving him problems in the afternoon :). That said, I'll have to reflect on whether he ever does better in the afternoon based on what he's eaten. Thanks for turning me on to that!

Everyone: As I said above, homeschooling is still attractive to me, but school is going much better for DS this year than I thought it would.