It's been a long while...

Wow, last posted two years ago. At that time, Zach had just gotten his Irlen glasses. For some reason, his eyesight has "improved" with the Irlen lenses. He has not had to change his lenses because his "degree" has stabilised... He has been with DAS for about 6 terms now - the improvement is nothing to shout about... but it's better than no support I suppose.

Stacey is on her third pair of Irlens now... she's had to change her lenses twice as she grows and needs new colours. In her P6 year now, she now has new accomodations of larger exam papers (printed on A3 sheets instead of A4) with the corresponding enlarged print, as well as the usual extended time which she always had.

I've stopped teaching Melody - she has since started with DAS - and while her mom says she wishes the progress could be faster (understandable since she was having individual lessons with me, while it's only group lessons in DAS), she is still pleased that Melody is coping reasonably well in school.

In the last few months, I have taken up a new student for OG - little Cloud. She is a K2 student right now, preparing to go to Primary 1 next year. I started lessons with her in March, so tomorrow will be 4 months so far. Tomorrow we will have had 25 lessons in those 4 months since she sees me twice weekly. It should have been more but there were interruptions due to holidays and such. Still, I am pleased with how far she has come. A totally reluctant not-quite-reader, she was somewhat anxious and lacking in self-confidence... today she has blossomed and become a much more confident reader. We are making our way to the magic-e words tomorrow and she has already learnt how to read Rabbit words. Her letter formation has improved by leaps and bounds and she hardly makes mistakes now with writing her letters, although she still gets a little confused by where on the lines some letters sit or stand.

I have also taken on another student, Kay, a P5 boy with Asperger's Syndrome. I don't give him OG lessons though... I tutor him in Maths and hope to prepare him for the PSLE next year. I'm open to taking on children with mild ASD as I have come to learn a great deal about ASD and SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder) since my own chlidren have them.

Life has become more and more packed as I take on more kids... Zach is now much more mature and already in Sec 1. He travels independently and settles down to his work on his own. He helps me around the house as well, and doesn't need me to "chauffeur" him around anymore. :) With Stacey in Sec 1 next year as well, I expect only to be running around after the little one now... and so hope to have more time to teach. And maybe I will have more time to update this blog as well.

It is Official!!!

"Application for exemption from Mother Tongue - APPROVED"

Finally... we are free from the burden of Chinese... for Stacey that is... so no more Chinese exams this year and forever more! Yeah! My heart leapt with joy when I saw the official looking envelope from Stacey's school today... and when I saw the words above, I did a happy jig all the way to the kitchen to announce it to hubby... who was most amused by my dancing. Haha. But I am so glad that our battle with Chinese homework and Chinese teachers is now over!!!!

Update on Stacey

Stacey's Psych report finally came out at the end of July... the EP had just had a baby, and we had just returned from a H1N1 affected country, so we postponed the meeting till end of July.

Happily, the EP recommended an exemption for Chinese... much to Stacey's and my relief... sadly, the Special Needs Officer in her school has gone on long leave, and there is apparently no replacement for the time being, so I actually had to email the school's General Office to enquire about the status of the SNO's absence, and how that would affect Stacey's application for her exemption of Chinese. Thankfully, they were able to send in the application anyway, and we are now just waiting for the official approval from MOE for her to finally drop Chinese as a school subject.

The reason I am eager to have her drop Chinese is because the school is looking to bring up their results in Chinese, and they are piling on the homework and raising the bars... unfortunately for Stacey, this leaves her drowning in the process. Homework time is made so much more frustrating because there is so much homework, and she is unable to do it... and it frustrates me even more that we are spending so much time doing homework for a subject that she will eventually drop. So we look forward to the day when we can officially say byebye to the subject.

We have reinstated OG lessons to their rightful place - taking priority over homework and all other things, on the days that it is assigned. Still, it being done at home, it still gets pushed out of the way here and there... but we are back at it with much greater regularity now.

I'm also trying to work more now on fluency and automaticity... the EP revealed that Stacey seems to have trouble truly blending sounds... she tends to rely more on visuals than on blending, trying to "see" the word in her head before "sounding" out the word she is given. So we have been told to step it up on the visual memory side of things, as well as to train her to have a keener sense of visual differences - esp in letter positions. It was suggested that we use "spot the differences" games to train her to pick up on visual differences.

So I'm trying to do that more, besides playing more games that help her to distinguish between words that sound the same but are spelt different... a challenge because she's gotten to the stage where she has quite a few different ways to spell the various long vowel sounds.

I've also taken to spurring her on by giving her a reward system - to encourage her to try her best during class and to work towards her goal - receiving "cute paper" (something that is the rage now in her school apparently) when she finally accumulates enough stamps on her reward sheet. :)

Dead blog... but going to be revived...

Firstly, I must apologise, because this blog has effectively been dead for the last almost 4 months. Sorry about that.

I will now update in several nutshells about the various kids I have.

Kasser:
Kasser has stopped lessons for the time being. The economy has hit his family hard, but his dad is one of those who must pay for lessons and hesitate to accept when I offer to teach for free (until Kasser's mom finds a job). So I have not seen Kasser since the school holidays began, and I will not be seeing him for the next 2 weeks since I will be away, then on self-quarantine together with my children.

Zach and Stacey:
Lessons have been very haphazard in terms of frequency... homework got in the way most of the time, as well as a lack of discipline on my part. I have to do something about that. Next week, after we return, I am determined to set them back on track with OG.

Stacey's Psych Report:
We finally have exemption for Chinese more or less in the bag! Stacey went for a follow up session with the EP over the June Holidays, and the EP said that she would be giving her the diagnosis as well as asking for exemption for Chinese, and longer time during exams. So now, I'm waiting for the report to come out (we will only receive it after we return from our trip and after our LOA - cos the EP has a new baby and we don't want to bring any germs over...). This is a huge relief because Stacey's homework woes this semester has also been in part due to the Chinese teacher's habit of giving homework in chunks... 5-7 pages of work and writing, plus extra writing practice... and we are talking 2-3 pages worth. All due the next day. So not funny. And the task of writing is particularly difficult for Stacey, so she usually ends up in a meltdown on Chinese homework days. In fact, I took to not helping her and just asking her to treat her homework like the exams - so that her teacher would have a better idea of what she knew and did not know... otherwise, I would just end up giving her the answers and that made homework meaningless.

Exam Results:
This year, Stacey didn't have any special accomodations arranged like she did for last year in P1 (because she had a very enlightened teacher who provided her with good support. Unfortunately, we lost that teacher this year - she taught the P1s again) so she bombed her Spelling and (unseen) Dictation and brought home a score of only 66 (1/15 for S&D) when she could have scored 75 had she scored full marks for just the spelling section. Ah well. Still, she managed a 83 for Maths, which was wonderful, and of course, a fail for Chinese, which was expected.

Zach did reasonably well too - 74 for English, 70+ (can't remember now) for Maths... I think it was close to 80... then 66 for Science (where he got completely tripped up by the language and the fact that the answers had to be super precise). Without Chinese, his average score jumped up dramatically and he found himself ranked somewhere in the middle of his class, as opposed to the bottom 5 where he usually found himself in the previous years due to Chinese pulling his marks right down. So we're pleased with his work too.

My first Support Group Meeting...

Went to Zach's school TWICE today... once in the morning for a Parents Support Group for Kids with Dyslexia meeting, and once to pick him up from school because he had to stay back for Science Remedial Class today.

The Support Group meeting was interesting. The SNO gave a review of what happened last year, as well as talked about the kind of accomodations that the kids (or rather their parents) could request for in exams... I was actually quite surprised to learn that Special Accomodations in Primary School was something new... because in Secondary School, all the things that they had mentioned were more or less the norm - extra time, larger font, one sided printing for Compre papers and so on... yet, the impression that I got was that it was new to Primary Schools. Hmmm. So the stuff they were talking about were all really very familiar, esp from having babysat the Dsylexics for one of the exams one of the years - I think because I was pregnant or something, so they wanted to save me from walking up down and all around the school... so I sat in the Special Exams Room to invigilate those with extra time and what not. It was quite fun really, cos the room was "L-shaped" and the invigilator didn't have to stand up and walk around at all... just sit down. Haha.

Anyways, I digress....

Then there was some talk about "Homework Policy" which apparently is a new thing this year - something about making sure that the boys complete their homework. Honestly, I had not heard about Homework Policy until today... LOL. Maybe I did, but because life in our house already has a rule about completing today's homework today, I didn't think it was a new thing, or that it was some sort of an "initiative".... So some of the parents of the Dyslexic kids were saying that it was impossible for their kids to complete their hw (I think most of these parents are like full-time working parents, so they only have time to sit down for homework after they come home from work, which might be late) on time, and was wondering whether the teachers could be more understanding and give more leeway and what not.

Dunno. As for us, our "rule" at home has always been school homework must always be completed the day it is received... as long as you still have waking hours left, you should work hard to complete all homework. Exception to the rule - the teacher gives a great big whopping pile of hw but gives a longer deadline (eg 3 days later)... in which case, if you run out of waking hours (read 7.30pm) you get to stop and keep it for the next day. This has always been the case since they started bringing hw home from kindergarten, that you always completed your hw before you could play... so the kiddos just seem to accept it, and do not question it. Of course, while the cat's away, the mice will play... today was a classic example. Zach and Stace had 1.5hrs "free" each during the other's Chinese tuition time. I was away 'cus the youngest had chinese enrichment outside, so they stayed home with the Chinese tutor, taking turns. They are supposed to do their work during their 1.5hours but of course, the amount of work they completed in my absence was so miniscule, you just know that most of that 1.5hrs was spent daydreaming and playing a fool. Not that they couldn't because they are dyslexic. Not that they couldn't because of anything. They just didn't because they allowed themselves to be distracted.

So that made for a very frustrated mommy who came home at 6.30pm to find very little had been accomplished. In the end, Zach rushed through his school hw, and Maths Enrichment hw that is due tomorrow is not completed - not that they have time to complete it tomorrow because both come home late from school every Friday. Sigh.

And of course, with this my 2nd policy kicks in - I rescue no one (when it's a result of their own faults). They jolly well will get into trouble with their enrichment teacher for not having completed their work. Too bad. (The downside is that the enrichment teacher will not really scold them! So it's no motivation to make sure it's done.)

I digress again.

So basically the meeting was dominated by a few who had some bees in their bonnets really... I didn't say very very much because it was my first meeting, and I felt like I needed to sort of size up the people around first... LOL. But I did contribute and give suggestions, referring to what I had done with Stacey and Zach from past experience.

There was this lady who seemed very interested in signing up to get herself OG trained... the problem was that her pronunciation and mastery of the English Language in itself was somewhat lacking... and I knew that even if she did end up taking the course, she would not be able to execute it properly because the sounds would not come out right, nor would there be a full grasp of the nuances and subtleties of the language... but I didn't think I knew how to say it without sounding judgemental or condescending... so I didn't.

Still... this whole support group thing should be quite interesting. The SNOs are interesting people... should be fun to work with them in seeking to support Zach and the other SN kids...

The Special Needs Officer (Dyslexia)...

Today, went down to Zachary's school to meet the Special Needs Officer (Dyslexia) aka SNOD, mainly to sign the forms for application for the exemption from Chinese. She was asking me if he had passed Chinese in previous years, to which I literally laughed out loud... and told her with a twinkle in my eye that he had never crossed the 40% mark...

She told me that if that was the case, then it was almost guaranteed that he would be able to get the approval for exemption... that there were cases of children who were even passing (albeit only in the low 50% range) who were also given the exemption approval.

So in a few weeks, Zach will officially be exempted from chinese exams from the rest of his life... much to my relief, as well as the relief of all his chinese teachers (and unbeknownst to all would-have-been-future-chinese-teachers) present and future... heh.

{I'm listening to my brood of 3 children being taught chinese using radicals by the children's chinese teacher. They build on the words adding parts, going from ren to da to tai and so on... amazing. How I wish they could just do this for tuition, instead of slogging over Spelling lists and such what nots. Ah well. I think the tutor did not know what she was taking on when she volunteered to have all 3 children join in... LOL.}

Anyway, I digress. The SNO told me that Zach would be taken out every Friday during the 3 period Chinese lesson to do a group session on Comprehension... something that he needs. I think he will enjoy himself... I hope... but probably anything is better than attending Chinese lessons... LOL. So here begins our journey as an officially diagnosed Dyslexic. : )

Being Accomodated...

Stacey's teacher just called. It's the end of Week 4 now, and she and the EL HOD have finally decided to accomodate Stacey's needs by giving her only 5 spelling words instead of 10, in addition to the dictation passage that she has to learn.

I also requested that Stacey's teacher move the Spelling Day to Tuesday or Wednesday in order for Stacey to have more time to learn her spelling because having it on a Monday meant that she had to learn it way before and hope that she still remembered it by Monday since we don't have any time on Sunday to really learn it... and now Stacey's teacher has told me that next week onwards, the Spelling will be moved to Tuesday!!! Woohoo!!! That would help make all the difference in the world! Yay!

Her teacher this year is a little less systematic though... in that last year's teacher chose the 5 words based on words that Stacey would more likely need... but this year's teacher is just picking the top row (her words are organised on her list in two rows) for her to learn. Guess that will do too...

All in all, good news!!!!