After 3 ½ months Pamela in Kansas had her son retested at the same center that did his testing before he started Edublox. Read her story and view the results.
Doug was very ill as a newborn and spent the first six weeks in the hospital. The next few years were filled with ear infections, visits with physical therapists and speech therapy. When Doug started school at six we soon began receiving notes from the school about his inability to concentrate, possible ADHD and learning disabilities. At 8 he took his first WISC III IQ test which showed an IQ of 89 with serious problems with Digit Span (6), Information (7), Picture Completion (2) and Coding (5). A psychologist diagnosed Doug as ADHD and the school diagnosed him as LD. After three more years of little progress in public school, we began homeschooling when Doug was 11.
Homeschooling was a tremendous help to Doug. His IQ was retested in 2002 at 115, with his lowest subtest score at 10. But, school was still very difficult for Doug and I felt like some of the programs we were doing were teaching him how to score well on an IQ test, but did not transfer over to success in academic areas.
After reading about Edublox on a website for a year, I finally decided to purchase it in January, 2003. First I read The Right to Read. I really wondered if it could be true. Weren’t learning disabilities supposed to be permanent problems? Could something be done other than changing teaching styles and teaching kids how to accommodate for their problems? I decided it was worth a shot and decided to: 1) have Doug tested at a reputable center and 2) sign up for the customized program 3) stop having Doug take Ritalin for his ADHD.
Then we started doing Edublox five days a week for an hour — without Ritalin. Benetta told us what to do and we did it. Every Day. It got boring. It got hard. It was hard for Doug to control his behavior without Ritalin. If it wasn’t that he would have had to work on geometry instead, Doug would have begged to stop! Then he started doing a little better. That was fun. After a few more weeks, when Doug was reading from Rainbow Dreams he sounded better — more fluent and the pauses between the words were gone. That was definitely fun.
After 3 ½ months I had Doug retested by the center that did his testing when we started Edublox. Here are his scores:
| 1/24/03 scores | 4/11/03 scores | |
| Peabody Picture Vocab. | 22+ mental age | 22+ mental age |
| Design Reproduction | 2%ile | 37%ile |
| Detroit Oral Directions | 50%ile | 75%ile |
| Listening Comprehension | 39%ile | 81%ile |
| Woodcock Word Attack | 30%ile | 68%ile |
| Slosson Oral Reading | 57%ile | 69%ile |
| Spelling | 21%ile | 25%ile |
| Gray Reading Rate | 25%ile | 37%ile |
| Gray Reading Accuracy | 50%ile | 75%ile |
The bad news for Doug was, with Edublox helping so much, we were going to keep at it. But, Doug hung in there and pretty soon he read Chapter 2 with no errors, then Chapters 3 and 4. In May, besides his Edublox math practice, Doug began a separate math program that Edublox’s web site recommends. His computation speed has skyrocketed. Benetta had us start working on spelling and now Doug’s spelling is beginning to improve. And, last week, Doug read Chapter 5 of Rainbow Dreams with no errors.
This fall we’ll still be doing Edublox every day, but at 17 Doug will be taking his first college class and I’m confident he will do great.
Thanks Benetta!
Pamela
Kansas
