School Days

     School isn't a lot of fun around here these days.  It's so hard for Nick.  He struggles so much.  I won't go into all the specifics, but he didn't have much academic success in Ukraine.  He could read and write in cursive, and his reading comprehension is fantastic.  That's as far as it goes, though.  After the year that he's been in school here, he now (in English, of course) reads on a 2nd grade level, writes on a kindergarten level.  His biggest problem is with RETENTION of things already taught and learned.  He can't seem to remember -- well, ANYTHING -- from one week to the next. 
     Nick is in public school.  Last year the school worked with us quite a bit, and gave us a lot of leeway.  They got him a reading tutor who worked with him for an hour one-on-one three times a week.  Later in the year an Americorps volunteer came in to do the same thing with him twice a week.  Coupled with ESL, he was getting a lot of low teacher-to-student ratio teaching.  The second half of the year, I decided to make him my own spelling lists (instead of the fifth grade spelling they were giving him) that were more on his level.  He was very successful with those.  Today, he can't remember how to spell any of those words.  :(
     Enter a new school year, and a new principal.  At the end of last year, I was told that Nick gets more accommodations in class by being an ESL student than he would due to his ADHD.  That's good.  The downside is that he has no IEP.  The downside of that is that we start all over from scratch at the beginning of the school year.  The first MANY weeks of school are a total waste as the teachers scratch their heads and wonder what's going on with my kid.  They send him home with all normal sixth grade work, which he just cannot do.  He can't read it, and if he can make out a few words, he doesn't know what they mean.  Finally -- last week -- his language arts teacher figured out that she needs to scale down his work to a level he can do.  His math/science/homeroom teacher figured it out about a week earlier.
     All that being said, since Nick seems to not be able to do any of the homework being sent home with him, I made a decision last week myself that I will no longer fight the homework battle with him.  I have ordered some homeschool-type remedial materials for us.  
     I'm starting him with MathUSee at the alpha level for math.  I've signed him up for Explode the Code online for learning phonics.  Other than that, I'm planning to work on some very elementary spelling, and some cursive handwriting.  I plan to make a new after-school schedule for us to start out with next week. I'll let you know how that turns out!