Parents Eve - Livid at School - Son's Literacy Well Below Average

Mupette

stressedoutmum my DS is 15 and i think he should be a doctor, his handwriting in pen or pencil is bad, then i look at OH (who is not the father) and his is bad and he's a full grown man.

I have nice neat handwriting, all three of us are lefties.

dizziblonde

My handwriting's god-awful, and I teach! Mine's a legacy of being a stroppy little nowt aged 8 refusing to join up when the teacher tried to make me - to this day I hate my cursive writing and print wherever possible (kids think it's hilarious when I admit I don't like my handwriting and explain why - I suppose it's a cautionary tale).

My trouble is I find writing actually fairly painful to do for extended periods of time - pencil's much more comfortable (and neater) and I'm picky as anything about pens that I'll write with - there are only certain ones I feel I can write neatly in (the Berol handwriting ones are great - no wonder schools use them). Little tip I was given from an older teacher... one of the thin disposable italic pens (the green ones - wilkos often sell them cheap) hides a multitude of sins and makes even attrocious handwriting better - I often use them if I need to write anything by hand for displays or kids' books etc... but I'm the word processing queen and a stupid font addict so anything that can get done on the computer, does get done on the computer (best thing I ever learnt how to do was touchtyping - it's so painful watching kids hunt and peck at a rate of one letter per minute trying to type things, even more painful watching other teachers do it - or turn into gibbering wrecks because their computer's made a funny noise... then sending for me to make it stop!).

SingleSue

Just to give a little message of hope....

My eldest son was a 2c when he started High school, a 4c when he started his GCSE years....he is about to take his GCSE's and has improved amazingly to a predicted B or above in English and been accepted to take A levels in English Literature and Language in 6th form.

It drove me mad all through his primary years and for most of his senior years too, help was rare (apart from a great teacher in year two who taught him the trick of telling left from right by looking at his hands - hold up your left hand with your thumb out and see what letter it makes). Countless times extra help was asked for and countless times, nothing was done.

Then year 10, he gets a brilliant English teacher who notices that despite his writing and spelling problems, that he has a talent for story telling. She then proceeded to tutor him during breaks, lunch time, after school and even a couple of weekends and he started to improve.

At the end of year 10, he had raised his predicted E/F in GCSE to a C/D, by the start of this year, he had improved so much his predicted grade became a B and he was put in very last minute to take English Language too.

heretolearn_2

He sounds very like my son at that age. Read very well, terrific vocabulary and speaking skills, very intelligent, great scores top of the class at everything....except writing. He could barely write his name at that age and getting him to pick up that pencil and even try to write anything could take hours of pleading, threatening, begging and convincing. Even then he'd do very little.

I eventually kicked up such a fuss that the school put him on the list for dyslexia assessment. Never happened. Too many more extreme cases on the list in front of him! However, he did start having 1-2-1 sessions with a special needs teacher for a year and she was absolutely fantastic. Although she couldn't officially diagnose him, she did drop me enough heavy hints to let me know that she thought he was dyslexic. Those sessions changed his life. The first thing she said to me when I told her how difficult it was to get him to even try to write was 'he can read. He's intelligent. He knows his writing is appalling. How keen would you be to keep trying to do something you know you are going to fail at, time and time again?' and told us to all lay off him. She worked with him to boost his confidence and somehow (miracle worker) he got to trust her and did start working on his writing. She also helped a lot with his maths - he can't simply memorise times tables, for instance, and finds mental arithmatic impossible. She worked with his teacher on differrent activities for him when the rest of the class were doing things he just couldn't do. It's not that dyslexics can't learn this things, they just have to learn in a different way. She taught him various strategies to get round this.

Unfortunately then the secondary school let us down very badly and I wish I'd paid privately to get him assessed and forced them into more support.

Anyway, he left school with zero GCSEs but picked up his education again later on, and is now doing a good degree at one of the top universities.

Schools just aren't cut out for dealing with kids that can't follow the routine learning structure. So push push push now for your son. Push to get him assessed properly. Push to get him more than 10 weeks (that's pathetic) 1-2-1 help.

But also, tell your son you know he is trying and it's not that he is stupid or lazy. Some people's minds learn in different ways, and the school hasn't figured out his way yet. Boost his confidence.

What gave me some comfort through all the worry was that he could read, and was smart, so at least the information was going in, even if he couldn't get it back out on to paper. It sounds like your son is the same.

dizziblonde

The one thing I'd say is - if you go down the road of paying out for something like a private dyslexia assessment - the private reports I've read do smack a lot of a "you're dyslexic - buy this wonder publication from us, and you need this strategy which we detail in this publication" and so on. Just keep a healthy degree of cynicism - I never query the diagnosis when I come across these reports - just the fact they tend to descend into a "buy my stuff" fest in the second page.

bestpud

dizziblonde wrote: »

The one thing I'd say is - if you go down the road of paying out for something like a private dyslexia assessment - the private reports I've read do smack a lot of a "you're dyslexic - buy this wonder publication from us, and you need this strategy which we detail in this publication" and so on. Just keep a healthy degree of cynicism - I never query the diagnosis when I come across these reports - just the fact they tend to descend into a "buy my stuff" fest in the second page.

Where are they from?

I thought people would go to a private educational psychologist or similar and make sure they are reputable?

The ones you speak of sound dodgy - they surely aren't all like that?

Are they full face to face assessments?

summerday

You could encourage him to do some writing with you at home. These are the rough steps that I would reccommend:


Planning a piece of writing is important to get past the empty paper syndrome, and to avoid getting continually stuck about what to write in the next sentence. Make sure you make clear who the audience will be- eg this is a letter for granny (that you actually will post off), or a set of instructions for playing a game, that he could share with a cousin, etc.

Then, draw boxes on a piece of paper to plan the paragraphs, with an arrow pointing to each next box. Eg for a story plan the setting in 1st box, describe the characters in 2nd, then what happens at the start of the story in the next box.

Then your son can refer to the notes in his plan to help him write up the piece of writing on lined paper. As he has this guidance, I would say something like he has 20 minutes to follow his plan to write in paragraphs (and YES 2C writers are capable of this!), you can't wait to see what he comes up with and expect at least one whole page, hopefully more, play some quiet classical/inspirational music in the background and come back after his time is up, with lots of praise for how much he has written. As you know, sometimes quantity is as important as quality!

Re the punctuation- I would let him just write without saying too much about the punctuation at first, then when he has written the piece of writing provide him with a coloured gel pen or similar and ask him to add in all the punctuation he can.

Then encourage him to insert extra descriptive words etc with the coloured pen to make his work more interesting. It is important to stress that everyone, including adults, can and should improve their writing after a first attempt, and adding these bits after can change his work from good to great!

If he is good at typing, you could get him to type up the finished version and print it off as a reminder to him of what he's capable of.

These are a mixture of my own ideas and those in the 'Big Writing' philosopy. I've used them with lots of children and combined they can really help, even the ones who find writing a struggle.

summerday

bestpud wrote: »

Where are they from?

I thought people would go to a private educational psychologist or similar and make sure they are reputable?

The ones you speak of sound dodgy - they surely aren't all like that?

Are they full face to face assessments?

I have known times when private Ed Psych's have diagnosed conditions without any consultation with the school the child attends whatsoever, the SEN co-ordinator doesn't get contacted at all, nothing. What invariably happens in these cases, surprise surprise, is that the child gets the exact diagnosis that the parents have gone to them and said they suspect the child has.

Much better to go through the SEN dept at the child's school to access the county Ed Psychs who will look at a broader range of evidence/what the child can and cannot do. Yes, the child may get the diagnosis that a prent may suspect, possibly in addition to another disability, or something else completely. Just my personal experience/ opinion.

bestpud

saraht wrote: »

I have known times when private Ed Psych's have diagnosed conditions without any consultation with the school the child attends whatsoever, the SEN co-ordinator doesn't get contacted at all, nothing. What invariably happens in these cases, surprise surprise, is that the child gets the exact diagnosis that the parents have gone to them and said they suspect the child has.

Much better to go through the SEN dept at the child's school to access the county Ed Psychs who will look at a broader range of evidence/what the child can and cannot do. Yes, the child may get the diagnosis that a prent may suspect, possibly in addition to another disability, or something else completely. Just my personal experience/ opinion.

I see where you are coming from but that is a moot point surely?

Many parents presumably arrange a private assessment because the school refuses to act or support the child...

In that case one has to wonder if the school should be contacted?

I don't know btw - that's just my initial thought and it may well be flawed!

dizziblonde

I've had private assessments passed through to me from parents with kids who weren't going to be severe enough concern to be able to get access to ed-psychs through the school system (it's wrong, it's horrid but it's like mission impossible to get a kid seen by an ed psych through our school referral system sometimes). Often these were done by specialist dyslexia organizations, and, while I've no issues with the content of the report - they did tend to stick their own commercial products on at the end of them.

If parents had gone privately to get some form of diagnosis (and I can't blame them, I'm not trying to suggest you should have to - I think it's flipping shocking how hard it can be to get a child seen by an ed psych) - then of course I'd act on what was found in the report and support it within school as much as possible.

It's not so much a refusal to act generally - it's a "we've got 5 hours of ed psych time available to us this year - and it's going to be little Johnny who's tried to stab three classmates with a pencil, little Tommy who's currently barricaded himself into the library etc etc..." and the quiet little plodder sat in year 4/5 doesn't get a look in (which makes me flipping angry).

I've also known at least one LEA ed psych who shrugs his shoulders and refuses to give a diagnosis with a label to any child... course, a diagnosis means that mechanisms of support have to be put in place... and that costs the LEA money... cynical? moi?