He was held back in 2nd grade due to struggling in pretty much all areas. He did have ADHD, then as he got older diagnosed as ADD. He no longer takes medication simply because he no longer needs it like he did. Meds or not it never changed his learning problems. He did have a 504 plan, which the middle school last year pressured me to stop it because they don't really utilize it anyway. One thing I have learned through all of these years of him struggling is, if your child is not technically learning disabled or an easy learner (including gifted or just smarter) then they can easily fall through those invisable cracks you always hear about.
Hi Kim
I pulled my kids from our small, private catholic school 2 years ago (dd was in 4th and ds was in 2nd). Our last 2 years of homeschooling have been the best years of their learning and our family lives!
Your ds sounds a lot like my ds9. I have a feeling the part I bolded above (and his AHDH and ADD) is more due to his
learning style than anything else. That could be why the meds didn't help w/ his schooling - because it wasn't the problem in the first place. Technically, there could very well be NO *problem* - it could just be his learning style.
I very, very highly recommend
http://www.learningsuccessinstitute.com/mariaemma.html
for you to assess his learning style. There's a homeschool assessment on the left side.
Assessing my ds and homeschooling him 'saved' him from a downhill spiral in learning and reaching his full potential. My ds couldn't complete his math work (2nd grade), and would come home w/ "INCOMPLETE CLASSWORK" in red ink on the top of the worksheet (made him feel really good - every day he said "mom, I'm the stupidest kid in class"), THEN after trying to complete that worksheet, we had all the regular homework to do. It was impossible for him. He was DONE with schooling for the day.
BUT the problem lay in his own, individual learning style, not in the school, and not in his brain. No learning disability or anything like that, but he learns very different from the average student, and schools can only cater to the average student (of course - they have 30 kids they're trying to keep under control and teach to). Here's what I figured out w/ my ds... the actual writing of the math was getting in the way of him 'learning' the math. He NEEDS to figure out something in his head on his own before he can really see it written down and get it (I'm soooo the opposite - I have to see it written down first), and i would have never known this about him, and he would have continued to struggle horribly if I had kept him in school.
His first grade teacher had called me in for a conference because ds wasn't showing all his work on the math problems... he was getting the correct answer, but that's it. He was doing it in his head. She said she was going to start marking them all wrong, even if they were right, because he needed to show the work. I get that the teachers need to see that - so we really tried at home to get him to do this. Never happened. Now, when I teach him math, we do it all verbally and with games, etc, then when he really gets it, we can go to paper. School has to do it the other way around.
When I pulled my kids from school (2 years ago this coming March), we 'deschooled' for a little while, which was hard for me to feel ok doing, because I was so programed to think that even a missed day of school would hold them back later in life. I LOL at that thought now, but it took a while for me to get there, with major support from veteran homeschooling moms.
In my ds's learning assessment, he scored extremely high in "inventor" and "performer", and very low in everything else, which the one homeschooling mom who recommended the site said is not very common (kids are usually a little more well-rounded, like my dd11 is).
This was one of the problems w/ my ds and 'school'... his learning style is fairly extreme, and a school simply cannot accomodate it. And the funny thing is, I didn't see any "inventor" in him at the time, because school can't really allow that type of learner to shine. It's amazing to me, this past year, how much of an "inventor" he's become, and how much he learns through his being allowed to 'invent'. And it's because he's being allowed to become his true self by me homeschooling him. Also, "performer" means he has to move when learning, and that's certainly kind of hard to do in a school setting. My ds is like 3 boys rolled into one, always climbing, moving, goofing, etc. But when allowed to learn the way he's comfortable, his learning is easy. That was never the case in school.
My dd11 had a more well-rounded assessment, and she was doing fine in school, but she can really follow her passions being homeschooled. But she'd be ok either way I think.
I want to also recommend John Taylor Gatto and John Holt. Please take some time to read some of their books. John Taylor Gatto was "teacher of the year" 2 or 3 times in NYC, has retired, and is now a huge homeschooling advocate.
My kids are younger, so I don't have advice for the high school years, but wanted to just give you my experience so far.
Good luck deciding what to do.
. It took several months for them to decompress and realize that "learning" and "school" were two very different things. PS kids have an instilled image of "what school looks like", so they often seem frightened that if their school doesn't "look" like that, how will they ever learn anything?
), so they do like to have their work evaluated in some way. Now that the oldest is in high school, I am having to mark her work to create her transcript. I just don't grade each and every thing they do.
)
to you!
!
