Dyslexic 8th Grader – new to writing and aiming for engineering school. Help!

I can’t speak to the dyslexic side of things as I don’t have experience with that. However, I can tell you that even a child who starts narration later can progress to written narration. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend Karen Glass’ book Know and Tell: The Art of Narration. Know and Tell is a thorough look at narration, what it is, how to do it, how to turn written narrations into formal essays, and much more. It is chock full of useful information and encouragement for you. Also, if it helps, let him type his narrations.

Discovering Design with Earth Science is not your average boring textbook. Dr. Wile’s style of writing is very conversational and he writes as if he is talking to the reader. Because your son also struggles with math, feel free to spread Earth Science out over more than one year if needed. Chemistry and physics both have prerequisites for math in order to complete the courses, so spreading out Earth Science and Biology (if doing) will give him time to learn the math needed for those courses.

My oldest likely has dyslexia as well though more moderate. He’s going into 7th and good at oral narrations…but struggles mightily with spelling. We are having slow success with All About Spelling.

Whatever writing you do, I would encourage you to start oral then scribe for him then have him write with out worrying about spelling or punctuation. This process could take a whole year to have him write push but gently. Also if he is diagnosed then even a college will give him accomodations. I know there is speech to text software that he could perhaps always use …then he could always use oral composition!

I have not been very good at getting written composition done….I might try WriteShop this year, but maybe just make sure to do more written composition too….with 5 children and a baby coming very soon things sometimes drop here.

Dr Wile has audio flash sticks for his books. I am getting that for atomic age for my son. He will also follow along in the textbook but it will likely help him get more out of it.

Ditto here to RightStart we’re partly through G. Everytime I try something else he struggles. We’ve used it mostly all the way through.

My husband is an engineer. He hated college and was not “good at school” like his grades were not that great. He has an engineering job now and is good at it. He understands how stuff works and keeps the manufacturing side in mind. This helps him be a lot more practical than some of his college comrades (who made A’s) were and helps him in the office.  I have no idea whether he would be called dyslexic or not now. His mother homeschooled him and coached him through his college writing classes. She is a good writer…..All I know is this, his spelling is atrocious (mine isn’t much better without spell check;) and he askes me arithmetic problems regularly:) But he understands calculus and differential equations! Though he disliked the classes greatly. He says no math is ever harder than the last class. It just always stays the same amount of hard as long as you understand it. He took aerospace engineering.

Another encouragement…I took Greek in college and a fellow student was dyslexic. He really wanted to learn Greek though and got a tutor and did it. He worked very hard and put hours into it!

I know this post is a little old, but I wanted to share what was a good fit for my dyslexic kiddo.

We loved Essentials in Writing (EIW, not IEW) and spelling workout for spelling.