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Can we talk a bit about accommodations for dyslexia at the high school level? Are there other moms on the board who are using HOD for high school kids who struggle with dyslexia?
For a bit of background, I currently have two kids in high school and one of them is dyslexic. He has come a loooooonnnng way and HOD has been a huge part of his success. We used MTMM for his 9th grade year (last year). It was the perfect choice, and he had a fantastic year. But this year, with the WG guide (for 10th grade) we've hit a wall, and I feel like I could use some discussion/advice from others who've walked this particular path.
I know going into a new guide that even if my kids are placed properly, there will probably be some struggles at the beginning and they may need some help to get going with the stepped-up level of skills and so forth. I actually love that HOD is set up this way. So I was expecting the daily requirements to make a jump going from the MTMM guide to the WG guide. But we are on unit 10 in the guide now, and we just can't seem to reach a place where the guide feels like the right blend of challenging-but-doable...
My son is working 7 hrs a day, some days more, and still not finishing (not even close). He is a slow reader, so that is part of it. He is also a slow writer (we're working on the typing skills... he currently types about 25 wpm and he's concentrating on bringing that up). He is also a slow-processor ... so it is not just that the physical process of writing takes more time, it is that even thinking about what to write down (or say, for oral narrations) takes extra time.
Here are just a couple of examples of areas where he is really struggling...
Book of Discovery is probably the hardest book for him. He gets finished reading it and has no idea what he has read -- narration is impossible. I can go through it with him paragraph by paragraph but that takes forever. Yesterday I started having him take notes as he reads, and I hope that will help. But of course that adds to the time requirement. I've looked for an audio book for him, but the only one I can find is a Librivox recording by someone who's native tongue is obviously not English and the accent is difficult to comprehend to the point of being totally distracting. So that's a no-go.
He is enjoying science but reading two chapters in one day takes a very long time and he seems to retain very little of what he read. I've dropped his requirements to one chapter per day, and his retention and enjoyment of the subject improved dramatically -- but accommodating like this puts him pretty far behind in this subject.
There are other places in the guide where he is struggling as well. He is typically a good narrator, so this is not an issue of not knowing how to narrate well.
I'm starting to feel nervous about not being anywhere close to finished with this guide when 11th grade rolls around next fall. More than that, I think I'm struggling with how much to accommodate. I want his daily requirements to be doable for him... I want success to be possible. But I don't want to accommodate so much that by the time he graduates, he is nowhere near where he needs to be to succeed in a college environment.
I'm really sorry this is so long...
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If anyone has any thoughts to share, I'm all ears.
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Jenn