[00:00:00] Amanda Capps: If you notice something and your gut is telling you something is going on with your child, you are probably correct. You can go and invest in expensive testing and diagnosis, and there are definitely programs and accommodations that are helpful in those situations. Again, it’s just information. It’s just something that gives you tools or lets you understand how to reign in your expectations.

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[00:00:37] Gretchen Roe: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this very special episode of the Demme Learning Show. I can’t think of anybody I would want to have this conversation with more than my dear friend Amanda Capps. Amanda is the mother of eight, and she also is a homeschool mom. She is one of our placement specialists here at Demme Learning. She is one busy lady. What we’re going to talk about today is something that only if you have a child who has a learning difference will you truly understand. Amanda has several of those children.

Now, I too was a parent of children with learning differences, but I’m beyond my homeschooling journey. Amanda is still, as my German father said, in the mittendrin of it. Today, we’re going to talk about what it’s like, first of all, to grow up in a family that’s different and see that from a sibling perspective, and then recognize it in your own children. Amanda, take it away, man. I’m just so delighted that you’re willing to share this conversation because I think there are moms who are going to see themselves in the stories that you have to tell.

[00:01:56] Amanda: Thanks for having me. I’m thrilled to be here. I think of myself almost at this point in my life as a educational advocate because that’s what it takes with these kids is being their advocate, being their ardent observer, and really getting in their corner and providing the support that they need.

[00:02:16] Gretchen: You were homeschooled.

[00:02:18] Amanda: I was.

[00:02:19] Gretchen: You are our unicorn at Demme Learning that you are a second-generation homeschooler. You understand what it’s like to be homeschooled, and you also understand the journey of a homeschooler. Can you talk a little bit about being the eldest child growing up in a family where there was some neurodivergence and what your mom had to do? Frankly, not disclosing ages or anything, but there’s more support available now than was available for your mom when you were a kid.

[00:02:53] Amanda: Yes, absolutely. I am an ’80s child. I’m turning 45 in January. I don’t mind dating myself a little bit there. Yes, when my parents made the decision to homeschool, it was still illegal in a lot of states, and you had to make that decision and be willing to die on that hill, so to speak. There were very limited curriculum options at that point. I did attend a preschool-type situation, and my parents very quickly realized they weren’t impressed with the system. My dad actually attended an IBM training when he was hired by that company.

The gentleman he roomed with was homeschooling five daughters. His wife was a psychologist, and he was obviously in the technology field. They were doing it strictly for the academic and the child development. They were doing it on a scientific basis. My dad just really was like, “Wait, I have never even heard of this. What is this?” Anyway, six months of rooming with someone was a great influence. He came home and told my mom, “I think we should do this. I want you to start researching it.” She was like, “What? What are you talking about? My mom is a teacher. What do you mean you want me to homeschool?”

That was the catalyst that got our family going in the home education direction. They basically went at it from the idea of, we can’t screw up kindergarten, which is true. No one can screw up kindergarten, so let’s just put that out there. Then it was just a year-by-year basis, and it just turned into a cumulative. I was asked at the point where I was hitting high school level if I wanted to transition into a mainstream classroom. I was like, “Absolutely not.” I was seeing what those kids that were my friends were committing to with their day, their week, their months. I was like, “I have all this time freedom. I’m able to get things done in a much shorter amount of time and then devote more time to my interests and the things I want to pursue. Why would I sign up for that? Absolutely not.”

[00:05:12] Gretchen: You are the quintessential firstborn child who dots every I, cross every T.

[00:05:19] Amanda: Very Type A.

[00:05:20] Gretchen: Gretchen Rubin would call you an upholder. You don’t need to have the rules to follow the rules.

[00:05:28] Amanda: No, and I’m going to make sure everyone else follows the rules, too.

[00:05:31] Gretchen: This might be true until you get on a trip with me, and then it gets a little bit interesting. However, I digress. Then your mom had kids that weren’t Type A upholder personalities. Talk a little bit about that.

[00:05:51] Amanda: I didn’t realize until I was much older and a mother myself that my mother was neurodivergent, because you’re raised around what you’re raised around, and it seemed completely normal, and you just assume everyone else is experiencing the same thing. My mother was a little bit all over the place when it came to consistency and schedule. There was a little bit of tension there because I wanted things to be structured, and I wanted everything really lined out. I worked off of lists and things like that. Then I understood, also, the older I got, why her attention and her focus, all the bandwidth, got sucked up by the siblings that really needed the support and that were not easy to home educate.

I was left to be pretty independent and responsible for my own journey. That was fine. I did fine. It just made a lot of things make more sense as I got older and then became a mother myself. It was like, oh, there’s a lot to juggle here. This is a lot. It just made a lot of things more grace-filled and more just understandable as I got older.

[00:07:11] Gretchen: What is it like to be a sibling who’s neurotypical, and you see a sibling who is neurodivergent, and you see their needs as different? Talk to me a little bit about the emotional bandwidth there because that couldn’t have been easy.

[00:07:32] Amanda: It wasn’t in certain ways. Looking back on it now, I picked up a lot of that responsibility on my own. It was never something that either one of my parents put on me. It just seems to be that natural. There’s a lot of eldest daughter core going around social media right now, and I identify with all of it. It’s like, oh, yes, that’s me. That’s me. I took that on. I picked that up. I’m the oldest. Then I have a sister. Then I have three brothers. There is an 18-year age gap between me and my youngest brother, and a 9-year gap between the next youngest brother and the youngest brother.

The daughter after me was not only struggling with significant visual and auditory processing challenges, but she was also medically fragile. She had two very chronic autoimmune diseases; asthma and Crohn’s disease. Crohn’s was diagnosed much later in her teen years, but all of that impacted her physically and academically, and what she could bring to the table. Then there was my brother, Eric, and then my brother, Stephen. He was the second son in that spread. He was diagnosed ADHD and then was a very slow reader, slow, struggling student.

He really struggled with retention and comprehension, which when my mom had him evaluated, we found out he basically didn’t have a working memory. It didn’t exist. He went through a program called LearningRx. Ashley went through Lindamood Bell’s. She was evaluated by a gentleman named Ken Schmidt, who is still in Independence, Missouri. I know when my mom got the results of her assessment, he just said, “You deserve a standing ovation. I don’t understand how, based on what I am finding as far as her deficits, how you got her to an eighth-grade level. You are a rock star. My hat is off to you. I don’t know how you did it. I’m a technician, and I’m the one that prescribes the remediation for these kids. I don’t know how you did this.”

She really just broke down at that point because she’s like, “It was so hard.” It was so hard, but she was determined. She kept pushing for answers and trying to find the next piece. I got dragged along in that process because she really wanted me to build empathy and understanding for these siblings that not everyone was wired the way that I was; not everything comes easy to everyone. It was such a God thing because I had no idea how that was paving the way or preparing me for my own journey as a wife and a parent.

[00:10:16] Gretchen: I think it’s also important for us to play Paul Harvey for a second. Your siblings are all functioning members of adult society, and they’re doing well.

[00:10:27] Amanda: Yes.

[00:10:28] Gretchen: Now let’s fast forward into your academic journey with your eight children. Your first child was pretty much a mini-me of you.

[00:10:38] Amanda: In a lot of ways, although I did notice there was something funky with her handwriting. I was like, “What is happening here? I don’t understand.” She was basically self-taught reading by about four and a half.

[00:10:55] Gretchen: You probably thought that was the way it rolled.

[00:10:58] Amanda: That was the way that I was.

[00:11:00] Gretchen: Sure.

[00:11:03] Amanda: Again, dating myself, I had the little Disney, pring, you turn the page, it reads out loud to you. I was just matching. I was like, “Oh, if and is here, and is here, it looks the same.” I just literally figured it out. My mom was like, “You’re just reading. What is happening? We didn’t do anything.” I’m an incredibly strong auditory learner. That literally just gelled all the pieces for me, and I just figured it out. Math was definitely the area where I struggled the most personally as a student. It didn’t make sense to me. I struggled with understanding it to a mastery level. I was a good memorizer, so I memorized a lot of processes, which is not the same as understanding what you’re doing at all.

[00:11:49] Gretchen: Sure, but it looks good, and you got the right answers.

[00:11:54] Amanda: Right. Exactly. My dad had this- oh, he loved to trap us in the car- start throwing out word problems. Then, of course, my little brother would be just shooting out the– I would be like, “I don’t even know what’s happening. Shoot me. This is the worst.” Oh, talk about anxiety, so fun, so fun. I noticed these things with my daughter and knew of a vision therapist in our area. I, of course, got her in for a appointment. They were like, “Yes, she’s got some tracking and convergence issues.” They put super cute little red glasses on her, and they did six months of vision therapy with her. Like I said, it never impacted her reading, but it definitely showed up in her handwriting.

[00:12:49] Gretchen: For the parents who are watching this recording, what were you seeing in her handwriting?

[00:12:56] Amanda: It was like she was starting a new word with every letter. It was really like there were gaps.

[00:13:02] Gretchen: Oh, yes.

[00:13:03] Amanda: There were gaps. In her mind, and when she looked at it to read it, it looked totally fine to her. I’m the one looking at it, going– That and her sister, who was three years younger, had better handwriting for me. Her letter formation and her handwriting, her writing looked better than my oldest’s did. It was just incredibly sloppy, all over the place. Couldn’t hold a line. It was very much like, this is not developing the way that I would think handwriting would be developing for this kiddo. She was about six years old when she went in and did the vision therapy. Like I said, six months, corrective lenses. She was golden. She didn’t even have to wear the glasses. She wore the glasses for about two years. Then those went away, and she didn’t need glasses again.

[00:13:52] Gretchen: I think it’s also important for our audience to know my eldest son taught himself to read at the age of four. He came to me and said, “I want you to teach me to read.” I said, “I’d like you to learn to play cooperatively first.” He said, “If you’re not going to teach me, I’ll teach myself.” I said, “All right, smarty pants, have at it.” Three weeks later, he brought me The Cat in the Hat and read it word for word. It did nothing. I thought this was the way we rolled academically. Now, his older sibling had gone to a private parochial school for kindergarten, a public school for first grade.

She was very neurotypical developmentally. The important part about Lucas was his handwriting was abysmal. He would bring a note to you, and you would go, “Which way do you read that, Lucas?” He would bring a note to us and say, “What does this say?” We’re like, “Dude, you wrote it. Come on, you tell us what it said.” We used to tease him when he was a preteen that he needed to be a pharmacist or a doctor because they would be the only people who could read his handwriting. He had no vision issues. He just had no interest in creating neat handwriting.

About 17 or 18 years old, he said, “My handwriting doesn’t have to be messy.” Two days later, he brought me an essay in the most beautifully scripted handwriting. I accused him of lying to me because I said, “Who wrote this?” He said, “I did.” I said, “You did not. There’s no way that you wrote this.” It’s important to recognize that sometimes it has to do with “I don’t care.” Sometimes it is, as Amanda has stated, indicative of a burgeoning issue. I’m so proud of Amanda for recognizing, oh, something is not right here. Let’s move into your subsequent darling kids and the things that you discovered.

[00:15:59] Amanda: Yes. My second born actually was more developmentally on track and really didn’t ever have any academic issues. I did have her evaluated for auditory processing because you could not say anything to her that she didn’t respond with, “Huh?” I was like, “Oh my gosh.”

[00:16:22] Gretchen: I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh because I also have one of those children.

[00:16:27] Amanda: Right.

[00:16:28] Gretchen: Just, it’s delay.

[00:16:28] Amanda: She passed with flying colors. It was not a thing. Again, I was not going to not check. I just feel like if you suspect something– Here’s the thing. I’m not a huge fan of diagnoses and labels and all the things, but it does give you information. It gives you something to work with, so you know if you’re up against something or not. I just found with Elsie, if I just paused and said, “You heard me,” and then it just took her a minute, and then she would respond to the question. It was almost like it was just a default for her for whatever reason.

[00:17:07] Gretchen: What a patient mom you are not to go, “I already said that.” [laughs]

[00:17:13] Amanda: Then my next two were the ones that threw me for a loop. We were not emerging as readers. Everything academic seemed to just be a struggle for my third daughter. I highly am aware that she is dyslexic and dyscalculia. She’s definitely got the math and the reading now. If you listened to her read today, you would never know that she was dyslexic. She actually progressed better as a reader and read more fluently than my son. My son was more profoundly dyslexic. He’s dyslexic and ADHD, but he was always super good.

Math was his jam. Math was always the area where he excelled. Eva was stronger in the language, but it was definitely something she had to work really, really hard at. Both of those children had two rounds of vision therapy. One when I noticed the issue initially when they were on the younger side. Then one thing to be highly aware of as a parent, if you notice these things in your kiddos, is things can regress when they hit puberty, and the hormones start ramping up and affecting their muscles. The eye muscles are very small, very affected areas. They can regress a little bit, and sometimes a second round is necessary. That was the case with both of them.

[00:18:58] Gretchen: Yes, indeed. The fact that you were staying on top of that, did you notice that issues had re-arisen, or did they say, “Oh, I’m having issues again.”?

[00:19:13] Amanda: It was both.

[00:19:14] Gretchen: Both. Interesting. Very interesting, which I think is also important. Now, both of these children, Amanda has told you, have a dyslexia diagnosis. We actually had a conversation with the two of them about a year ago. We’ll include that in the show notes because I think it’s really wildly valuable for you to hear from the heart of a child what it’s like to have that experience. There is an enormous value in seeing the world through their eyes. Amanda, how have you had to modify their academics so that they could be successful? I should say now they’re both teenagers, and they are successful, but you’ve had to put in a heck of a lot of work to make that happen. Talk to us a little bit about that.

[00:20:08] Amanda: The strategies that really changed the way we approached academics was realizing how short their window of focus is. If you have a child, and this applies to all children, which is the crazy part that as parents and educators, we don’t know this, and we don’t shout this from the rooftops more, their maximum focus for taking in and retaining new material is their age plus two to three minutes, if there are no attention deficits present. A five-year-old, you’re going to get about five, six, seven minutes. That’s it. Don’t sit there for 30 minutes.

Don’t sit there for 15 minutes. Having that knowledge and that understanding and then applying that to the academics and to the subjects that we were trying to do was huge for us. Don’t push past their fatigue point. If they have attention deficits, it’s their age minus two or three minutes. We need to back that up even a little more and make it an even shorter window. Now, it’s not that we can’t switch from one thing to a new thing. We can go from math to something English and language, arts-related. We can do that, or we can go to history or reading a book aloud or whatever that looks like.

The brain just needs to switch gears. We just need to change up what we’re doing. We don’t want to sit and try to slog through 30 minutes of a math page. If they can only get through two or three problems in that window and they’re bringing fresh energy and fresh eyes, stick with that and then put it away. Bring it back out later in the day if you want to do that, if you feel like you need to get more accomplished, or just be really consistent with smaller, digestible, focused sessions. You are going to see much better gains, way less frustration, anxiety, emotional, because they get overwhelmed, they get frustrated, and then we are too. That’s just not a good environment for learning.

[00:22:15] Gretchen: No, it’s just a recipe for a lack of success on both parts. It can quickly become a pattern. You have to recognize that in advance. Amanda, when you switch between subjects, do you take a stretch break? Do you take a bathroom break? I recognize I just loaded the gun because, sure, you can have a two-minute break means you’re going to have to go find them. Tell us about the transition. How did you make that happen successfully?

[00:22:49] Amanda: It really depends on the kid. With my son, big muscle movement and fatiguing him was critical. We have a swing set. We have a trampoline. I have a trampoline in my classroom. They have the little bands on their chairs where they can swing their feet. We did exercise ball that was weighted that they could sit on, and they could bounce. These guys have to move big muscle groups in order to have any sort of attention or focus. Honestly, it helps with their retention. You may think where I struggled with this is that was distracting to me.

I had to position myself to where, as long as it wasn’t auditorily disturbing me, we’re golden. You learn how to set up your classroom or learn how to set yourself up for success. That’s going to look different for each student. My daughter is ADD. There’s the focus and retention issues there, but there is no hyperactivity. There’s no H there for her, and so it’s different for her. She didn’t necessarily need the muscle movement, but do not even attempt to do anything with that child before 10:00 AM because her brain is not engaged. It is not here. She is just not going to focus.

[00:24:06] Gretchen: Is she in bed until 10:00 AM?

[00:24:09] Amanda: No.

[00:24:09] Gretchen: The reason I ask this question is I think it’s important for parents to recognize I am the type of person who can get out of bed. I’ve had 100 thoughts. I want you to have 99 of them before I’ve been on my feet for five minutes. It’s before the alarm goes off; I’m ready to go. I am married to someone who needs two hours, a cup of coffee, a quiet corner. Don’t bother him until he’s had his second cup. Which of those is she?

[00:24:40] Amanda: She’s like your husband, 100%. She just needed time for her brain to wake up, engage. She needed to get some protein on her stomach. She is also my kid with the most dietary sensitivities. I have noticed that her ability to get up earlier and be more, her brain online, has changed drastically with eliminating dairy, eliminating gluten. She decided herself to forego all refined sugar.

[00:25:11] Gretchen: I’m going to rabbit trail here for a half a second because this, to me, is remarkable that she knew what made her feel good and what made her feel bad and chose for herself to help herself feel better.

[00:25:28] Amanda: Yes, she did that on her own at 15. She was just really tired of dealing with some of the symptoms, the brain fog, the fatigue, just not feeling well. She’s always been my kid with a sensitive tummy and the gut issues. We know the gut and the brain are connected. There’s so much data out there now that affirms that. I didn’t want to be the mom that was like, “Oh, well, you can’t have this.” I didn’t want to be restrictive in my parenting. She decided; she’s like, “Hey, I have nothing to lose. Let me give this a try. I’ll try it for a month. Let’s see what happens.” After the month, she saw enough positive effects that she was like, “I’m going to keep going. She actually lost a lot of weight. She started functioning better on all fronts. She has kept that up. She’s 17 now. That was 15 to 17. She looks and feels great. I’m like, “More power to you, girlfriend.”

[00:26:30] Gretchen: The other thing I think that’s really important is sometimes as parents, when our kids struggle academically, we forget that what they’re consuming is a part of that process.

[00:26:42] Amanda: Absolutely.

[00:26:45] Gretchen: I’m going to bend the rabbit trail one other direction. I want you to talk to us about your sourdough maker, because I think this is absolutely fascinating.

[00:26:59] Amanda: This again, okay, my son is 15 now. This was about a year ago. I was like, “I am intrigued by the idea of sourdough. I do not need another thing on my plate. I need another thing to learn or do, like I need a hole in my head. He was like, he found out he gets migraines if he ingests yeast in bread products. Sourdough doesn’t have yeast. It’s a natural fermentation process. We found out that we don’t react to gluten as a family as long as there’s been a 12 to 14-hour ferment. He was like, “I will do this. I will take this on. I want to be able to eat bread and all the things.” He turns out sourdough for our family. It saves us a lot of money, budget-wise, on our groceries because we can use wheat flour. I can buy it in bulk, but we can do the fermentation.

[00:27:55] Gretchen: Really?

[00:27:56] Amanda: Yes.

[00:27:56] Gretchen: You’re using wheat flour doing the fermentation. Oh, I didn’t even realize that.

[00:28:02] Amanda: Yes, ma’am.

[00:28:02] Gretchen: The fact that he was willing at 15 to take on a chemistry experiment. A little bit of that, Amanda, is your parenting because you have taught them how to read their bodies. This is something that it’s important for parents to understand when you have a child who learns differently; teaching them how to be in touch with how they can learn is as important as what they learn.

[00:28:28] Amanda: He literally just graduated from LearningRx. That has been a part of our journey. We have done a program that is available to us locally. We have centers. We have two centers here where I live in Northwest Arkansas. They do have locations all over, and they have expanded to online. You can actually work with a trainer online. He was always my kid who has a good attitude, who believed in himself, and had confidence, but he hated school. There was nothing I could do to make it easier for him or to make him enjoy it. When I tell you that he picks up a book and reads for pleasure now, that was the goal. That was the goal we set out to achieve. Now he wants to do his last two years of high school with dual enrollment at our community college. He has the tools to be successful doing that because of this program. I am so grateful.

[00:29:32] Gretchen: One of the things I’m very excited about is the end of the month, I’m going to have Dr. Amy Moore, who is the chief development officer for LearningRx. She is publishing a book on ADHD. It’s called Hearts on ADHD. It comes out sometime this fall. We’re going to have a conversation in advance about her book. I’ve been so impressed with her. I’ve been so impressed with the program. I’m just wildly delighted at the success you have found with the kids. Talk to us a little bit about the mind change that he experienced when he came home and said to you, “Oh, this is making a difference.”

[00:30:19] Amanda: In the state of Arkansas where I live, kids can go get their learner’s permit at 14. I have already got three drivers. He was the next one in line. He turned 14 in May. He was like, “I want to get my permit.” I’m like, “Okay.” He’s never been a good tester, so I was hesitant as to how this was going to go. I knew that going to the police station where they administered this test was going to be, when you have little cubicles, everybody is all in one room, there’s a lot of noise and movement, and a lot of distraction happening.

Cooper attempted on four different occasions to pass the written test for getting his learner’s permit. We had the assessment done with LearningRx. He started a program with them in February. He was turning 15 in May 11th. He had most of February, all of March, all of April of LearningRx under his belt. He came to me, and he goes, “I want to go try to take the test again. I feel like there has been a change. I’m feeling confident.” I signed him up. I’m like, “If I do this on your birthday and you don’t pass, is this going to be like the end of the world? Are you going to be okay?”

He’s like, “Yes, I’m going to be fine. Regardless of what the outcome is, I’m going to be fine.” I’m like, “All right.” We roll up in there. It had probably been four or five months since he had attempted the last time. I will tell you, because this will scare you all to death, that the people who administered the test told us that the average teenager walking in off the street to take that test takes it eight times before they pass successfully. Be really aware. Be a defensive driver, please. He walked in. I’m sitting in their lobby just sweating bullets, praying so hard, “Just, Lord, let him be successful. Let him just have this because he needs this.” He walked out 20 minutes later, huge grin, passed paper. He was on cloud nine. He’s like, “I told you, it’s made a difference. It’s working.”

[00:32:42] Gretchen: Amanda, I want to back up a little bit and talk about how you modified academics for them, knowing that they had deficits. I know you have told me over the years many different things that you have done. I wonder if you could step back through. One of the things I know that was important for them is to ascertain their learning preference and to teach to their strengths, not their deficits. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:33:16] Amanda: Absolutely. Yes, we’ve always identified with our kids as quickly as we could. Are they auditory? Are they visual? Where is their strength? Then the more I can cater either the curriculum or the lessons to how they learn best, how they absorb and retain information best, that is huge. That has been so necessary. Again, LearningRx doesn’t do anything academic. It’s all brain cognitive skills. They’re building the visual and auditory memory, all the processing, all the things that have to be working in the brain. What you’ll see on their testing, and what I saw in my children’s testing when we did the initial assessment with them was, my son Christopher, for example, his auditory processing was in the toilet. It was literally just non-existent. His visual processing was in the 97th percentile. As he was a developing reader, he’s trying to memorize all the words, the way all the words look, because visually, that’s where it works for him. That’s the strength that he has. He’s not really decoding the sounds and really getting the letter to sound correspondence, which is really challenging.

What Dr. Jackson told us is when you see a big gap between those two, that’s where the frustration lies and the tension between the two because they really need to be on about the same level or closer to the same level for that to be a fully developed skill. You’re getting the full picture. You’re getting the full circle of all the things that need to be working together and working. That was just, again, information that was just so helpful because then it made it so clear as to why he fatigued quickly and why he would just get so frustrated, and I would just be like, “Buddy, it’s okay. We don’t need to go 0 to 90. It’s all right. We can take a break. It’s fine.”

Now he is not losing that attention and focus. They’re coming back to being more on the same level. I’m just seeing it’s almost just it makes everything easier. That was something that was so crazy with my sister with the visual processing. Once they got her the right glasses and the prisms that forced her eyes to see at the same strength and all the things, she told my mom, “Oh, I can hear better.” You take pressure off of, you fix something on one sense that is struggling, suddenly there’s more energy and more clarity and focus in another area that’s weak. It’s crazy how the brain and the body compensates like that.

[00:36:13] Gretchen: Yes. It, to me, is quite fascinating. Now, did you limit the kinds of academics? Did you stick to the reading, writing, arithmetic when learning was difficult for them and you expand that later, or how did you do that?

[00:36:32] Amanda: Interestingly enough, Cooper was well ahead in math. He asked me, “Can I just pause math where I’m at right now to do LearningRx?” because he was still doing ELA and everything with our tutor. He wanted to have the brainpower and the ability to still produce on that level. I was like, “Absolutely. Sure, no problem.” My brother, Stephen, actually went through LearningRx many years ago. That’s how I even knew about the program. We just didn’t have one in our area for a while. My mom took the complete academic load off of him for the six months he was in the program and then put them back on top after that was completed.

Like I said, he was in the zero percentile for working memory when he went into that program. He was in the 49th percentile when he came out of that program. She was like, “It was literally like working with a different kid with a different brain.” It was drastically different. I think that contributed a lot to where he’s at and the success he’s in currently in his career and in his life. My sister runs her own business, her own company. She always identified better with animals. She’s like, “They don’t make me talk.” She hates interacting with people that make her talk and think about all of her emotions and all the things.

She’s like, “Animals, they just sit there. They let you wash them and make them cute.” She’s a pet groomer and loves it, and runs a very successful business doing that in our area. Yes, the sky is the limit for any of these kids. I think that’s one of the things that I love the most and that the homeschooling has done. I know for a fact kids can be brutal. My children have been protected from that. Their struggles were not seen as a deficit. They were seen as something that we have to take into consideration but also overcome. It’s not an excuse.

I’ve never defaulted to accommodations. Sure, if Cooper was like, “Hey, Mom, can I listen to this assigned book with the history course on Audible?” I was like, “Absolutely. I’m not going to sit there and make you struggle through trying to read the physical book. That’s fine.” He did have to read the lesson in the history book. You don’t take all the pressure off. You don’t keep zero pressure. You don’t take over and do everything for them. That is the biggest thing. You figure out where their threshold is, and you stay at the threshold.

[00:39:12] Gretchen: One of the things I have found fascinating over the years watching you educate these kids is you’ve done it in such a way that, yes, they have deficits, but you didn’t allow those deficits to be an excuse for them not to become educated. It’s hard when you’re a parent, and you get a diagnosis, or you suspect a diagnosis.

It’s very easy to go, “Oh, well, my child can’t do this because of that.” The adult world doesn’t care. Both of them will function marvelously well in the adult world because you have said, “Not yet, but you’ll get there.” That’s so huge. Speak to us, Amanda, about now in your role as a placement specialist, what are the things you listen for when a parent calls and says, “Oh, we’re so frustrated. Things aren’t going the way they should be,” and they ask for your help in figuring out placement?

[00:40:21] Amanda: A lot of times it comes into play, I hear keywords like, “We’re still counting.” Okay, we’re counting on our fingers, we’re counting in our head. Math is one of those subjects that, in my opinion, if it is taught correctly, it is sequential, it is incremental, it is multisensory, and it is logical. Every concept we learn builds on a previously learned concept. If, at any point, if you’re jumping curriculums a lot, you’re creating gaps automatically right there. There is not a curriculum on the planet that is gap-free, or that your child won’t maybe have a gap if you’re not looking at a mastery-level understanding of a concept.

There are a lot of parents and educators out there that do not know what that entails. They don’t know what that means, and that’s fine, but those are huge key components to where I start to see the wheels come off, the struggles. They’re trying to do higher-level skills and operations, and the foundation is gappy. The foundation has holes. If we don’t go back and address those, then we’re always going to have tension and struggle where we’re supposed to be at. It’s just the way that that manifests as you have a math journey. The same thing can happen in reading and language arts.

The thing that I have always tried to do academically is focus on the three key components. Your child needs to be good at math. Your child needs to be able to express themselves well in compositional writing, and your child needs to be able to read fluently. Those are the three-legged stool that every other academic skill gets built on top of. Almost everything else academically can fall under the reading. To be fair, you can do history, and you can do science as a group. You have to do spelling one-on-one. You have to do math one-on-one. Each kid needs that one-on-one and to be at where their skills are.

Another thing that really worked for us that we haven’t addressed yet, but was a huge factor, is we school year-round. I do not take breaks. I do not take a big, long summer break. I take breaks periodically, short and sweet throughout the entire year versus trying to do three months in the summer. We would lose too much ground. We would spend more time reviewing every year than we would ever spend making progress. When I figured that out and recognized that, it was huge to our success. That has been a key component in our journey.

I’m not telling you to, “Everybody needs to do that.” Do what you need to do. That was just very early on. It also worked with our lifestyle. We were adding babies to the family, so there was postpartum time where it was like, “Yes, there’s four weeks I’m not doing school here because I just had a baby,” or working, and working around my schedule, obviously, I work. We have made homeschooling a lifestyle and an educational choice that has worked around our life and what we have to do versus just being like, “Oh, we can’t do this because X, Y, Z.”

[00:44:02] Gretchen: You said something when you were talking about your own mathematical journey that I want to revisit. I have two questions that I want to ask. Question number one is you said you were a great memorizer, but that didn’t help you when you got beyond a certain point in time. Can you explain to parents? I know what that means because we’ve worked together for 12 years, but for our audience, can you explain why just being good at memorizing stuff is not the whole picture?

[00:44:33] Amanda: Memorization only helps you if you’re adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing, if you’re doing decimals and percent. It only helps you solve a formula. If you have a word problem where you have language that is mathematical and it’s providing clues as to how to build a formula, but you don’t understand the concept on a mastery level, you are sunk. I can literally remember looking at my mom and going, “Well, what do I do? Do I add, subtract, multiply, or divide?”

As long as I knew what the operation was, I could do the math, but a word problem will absolutely derail you if you do not understand the language of math and you do not have that mastery-level understanding of the concept, because you will struggle to build a formula with the information that you are given, which is something that my parents were seeing as an issue. I did great first through probably about fourth or fifth grade because I was adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and the majority of the things that I was doing were equation-based or formulaic.

Then I got to fractions, which you have to know what you’re doing. You have to have had all this foundational stuff to a mastery level to be able to build that higher-level skill onto. I was like, “I have no idea what I’m doing. I am lost. I am sunk.” I had never seen manipulatives, or I had never seen math presented in a visual way. I know this sounds insane, but even something as basic as 5 + 3, it never registered that it’s five of something plus three of something equals this total amount.

Until I saw manipulatives and saw that actually in context, and there was something tangible to attach that formula to, like I said, I had literally just memorized a process. I just recognized numbers, and I knew that when they were together, they equaled this amount, and that was it. I could do the drill sheets in under three seconds. I could get them 100% correct. My parents weren’t noticing a major deficit. I didn’t like math very much. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in what I was doing, especially depending on what the day entailed. We started using Saxon when I was in about sixth grade, and I crashed out. It was not good.

[00:47:21] Gretchen: I’m so impressed that you, as a teenager, would recognize, “Oh, this makes so much more sense for me.” Yesterday, I answered a question for a parent about if you’re just doing review, do I need to use manipulatives? It was a social media question. I think this bears repeating, and I’m going to let you do the answering here. Why are the manipulatives so valuable in helping us put the information into our brain properly?

[00:47:55] Amanda: They give context. They give you something tangible. If you just do parts, you’re only getting a fraction of the full picture. You’re not getting the full circle. That’s why we are always talking about when a new concept is presented, we’re doing the Build, Write, Say. We’re doing all the pieces, and we’re modeling that for our child so that they can see all of it tied together and the context. Then they’re like, “Oh, yes, I understand this. I’ve got it.” Again, if you’re doing review, we should be past the point of needing manipulatives at that point because we should have already achieved mastery.

Another huge component of Math-U-See’s success is we’re doing that modeling at the beginning, and we’re making sure that the child really understands the concept, but we’re also maybe then working with them or allowing them to work independently through the lesson material, the lesson practice, and the systematic review, but we have to sit back down with our kids, and they’ve got to model it back to us. That’s called our teach-back. If you miss that component, it’s going to be really telltale as to how well they are doing in the curriculum. There are so many times I have conversations with parents, and they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t know to do that,” or, “That never occurred to me.”

It’s in front matter of our instruction material, and we have a great graphic of the Build, Write, Say process that you can literally go get a PDF out of our digital tools and print it off and hang it on– I have it hung on my magnetic whiteboard in my classroom because it’s like, “This is the process. This is what we do.” Then my kids have learned. Did they do it perfectly? Was there any hesitation or confusion? What do you do when you do anything for the first time? It’s a little awkward, but as you continue to put these things into place in your teaching style and how you use Math-U-See on a weekly basis, you’re going to see incredible gains. It really is remarkable when it’s used the way it was designed to be used.

[00:50:16] Gretchen: I want to talk about something that’s tangential to this. You talked about, at some point, a child has to circle back to you. Now you have teenagers. I know this is a loaded question because having six kids, all six of my kids took the reins of their own academics differently. How did you start transitioning responsibility for academics to them, particularly for your kids who struggled in learning? How did you build that confidence in them so that they began to take the reins of saying, “Okay, mom, can I set aside math for a little while because I’m ahead so that I can catch up with English language arts”?

[00:51:05] Amanda: Absolutely. I think the biggest thing around that has just been how we define what learning actually is. In our household, mistakes are the learning. If I’m getting an answer correct, if I’m confident and I’m flying through things, you’ve got it. My children have been well aware that, “Okay, if I am struggling, if I’ve worked through this problem and I’ve gotten a wrong answer, I’m coming to mom, and I’m going, ‘Okay, this is what’s going on. What am I missing? What am I not understanding?'” Sometimes, for my kids, that was simply, “We got a little disorganized in our columns, and it stinks, and it’s frustrating because I’m dyslexic and trying to keep things neat and organized.”

There were different strategies that I employed to help them mitigate careless errors, like color coding problems. Our blocks have colors, and so we just went off of that. Anything that was supposed to be in the units place was green. Anything that was in the tens place was blue. Anything that was in the hundreds place was red. We assigned colors for the other larger numbers, and we just stayed consistent. We used notebook paper turned where we had lines to keep things straight and organized. There were just things that naturally evolved that was like, “Okay, this is helpful, and this helps us keep things organized and straight, so we’re not just making careless errors.”

I also really gave them the opportunity to go, “Okay. Well, where do you think the wheels came off? What do you see? Go back through your process,” because, again, this is very hard for them. For a child who has dyslexia, they may use the word, and it may be spelled correctly, but in the wrong context. They may not catch it because, in their visual processing, that’s where they’re the weakest, so that’s where the struggle lies. They know they need somebody to proofread or to edit. Now, that has gotten dramatically better as they’ve gotten more grammar under their belts, as they have gone through the LearningRx program.

Cooper has graduated out of LearningRx. I currently have three kids still in LearningRx. My second daughter that’s in that program will graduate in just a couple of weeks. Then my other two kids will be graduating closer to Christmas. Out of my eight children, four have needed vision therapy, four have needed LearningRx in some form or another. We have, as a family, committed financially and time-wise to make that happen for them.

[00:54:13] Gretchen: Amanda, I can’t believe this conversation has gone so quickly. In these last couple of minutes, speak to the parent who’s listened to us and is sitting here going, “I don’t know what to do. Every academic day is so frustrating.” Talk to them about what they can do. What is in their power to control.

[00:54:37] Amanda: First of all, if you notice something and your gut is telling you something is going on with your child, you are probably correct. Like I said, you can go and invest in expensive testing and diagnosis. There are definitely programs and accommodations that are helpful in those situations, but again, it’s just information. It’s just something that gives you tools or lets you understand how to rein in your expectations. That is so huge.

If I expected all of my children to operate at the level that I do, every one of my kids would be a failure. They just would. They’re not going to operate at the same level that I am. They’re also not as old as I am. They don’t have as much life experience as I do. We’re in completely different seasons of life. I didn’t start there. My mom didn’t hand me a baby when I was five and go, “Here, figure this out.” You know what I’m saying? I will say, I have very intentionally added responsibilities, added things that were going to push them, that were going to be a little bit harder, challenging. Not to the point of them feeling overwhelmed and frustrated and just damaging our relationship.

I cannot tell you the number of times. One example in particular, I had a child that– we were in the van, and they were trying to buckle themselves, and they were starting to lose it. “I can’t do it. I need you to–” I already had the car running. I was buckled in. I was not moving yet. I’m like, “Buddy, I need you to take some deep breaths.” I walked him through the steps. “You have to calm down to be able to do this.” “Okay. Okay.” “Calm down.” “Okay. Oh, I see what it is. This is stuck.” “Okay. Get it unstuck. Then make sure you hear the click. Tell Mommy when you hear the click.” “Okay. It’s clicked.

We’re good.” “See, I knew you could do it. I believed in you. You just needed a little bit of support.”

A lot of verbal and external affirmation. “These are the steps. This is how you do it. I know you can do this” is key to them being successful and even being willing to attempt something because failure is scary. Whether you’re a kid. Whether you’re an adult. If you can teach your kids not to be afraid of messing up and self-correcting, you’re golden.

[00:57:20] Gretchen: That brings to mind one thing that I want us to talk about before we conclude, and that is the difference between internal processing and external processing. You and I sat at Jodi’s feet and learned this, but I think we were both a little bit taken aback in this process. Please share for our parents because this may be the difference for some parents with success and not quite success, as far as your student is concerned.

[00:57:50] Amanda: Absolutely. Typically, what happens is an internal processor and an external processor marry each other, and they have kids. That’s how this starts. [laughs]

[00:58:02] Gretchen: That’s what happened. Okay. [chuckles]

[00:58:05] Amanda: That’s how it starts. Then you will have kids that process the way that you do. Then you will have kids that process the way that your spouse does. That could be either the funniest or the most frustrating thing on the face of the planet. Don’t assume. Do not assume that just because your child is an internal processor, that they understand what they’re doing. Don’t assume that if your child is externally processing, that they are trying to talk all the time and annoy the snot out of you. Sometimes that is just how they have to work through the process. They have to verbalize. They have to talk it out.

Then there are other people who it’s like, I’ve got 57 million tabs open in my brain, and nobody could keep up with me. I promise you, if you got inside my head, you’d be like, “Whoa, this is really overwhelming.” It looks like that meme where the guy’s got all the strings, and they’re moving all the things around all the time because I am the executive function and the frontal lobe for eight people, most of the time in my household. I have learned I’ve had to develop better external processing skills. My husband has had to learn to scale back sometimes. Sometimes it’s just too much. It’s too much information. It’s too much detail.

You can be a little more concise, more patient, and more clear, but just be aware that that is something that is at play in your relationships, in academics, in how you take in and process information. Being aware of that, it can just be really, really helpful. I started doing more external dialoguing when I realized I drive, but my kids don’t actually know why I’m making the decisions or doing the things that I’m doing. As they were starting to develop driving skills, I’d be like, “I’m doing this. This is when I’m looking in my mirror. I’m checking this, and then I’m putting my blinker on, and then I’m merging over.” I’m doing all of these things, but they may not necessarily pick up on all the subtle nuances of the full process of how I got from here to here.

[01:00:26] Gretchen: Amanda, I want to thank you for sharing this time with me. I apologize to you before we began in the fact that here we are at the height of busy season, and I have dragged you into this conversation. I think those of you who have spent this hour with us and listened to the things Amanda had to say have learned a great deal because she has really adapted to whatever is presented to her. I think she’s a remarkable parent, and I think you can learn from her example. Thank you, everyone, for trusting us to come into your living rooms with this information. We don’t take it lightly.

This is the third in a series of four conversations. The final conversation will be recorded with Dr. Rosalie Hopkins. She is an FCOVD, meaning she is a fellow of the– Oh, geez, let me see if I can do this. Fellow of the Optometric Vision Developmental Association. She is a vision therapist. She’s going to talk to us about the semantics of what does she see in kids when they present with vision dysfunction and how to remediate that. It’s going to be a wildly valuable conversation. Join us for that one. If you’re wondering what part one was, that was a conversation on kids struggling to read, and that was with Dr. Karen Halinga. You can find that in our vlog.

Then the second conversation was with our placement specialist, Lisa Chimento, on the kinds of questions she asks and the things she sees when kids present with challenges, and what we can do about that as parents. Thank you all so much for joining us. Amanda, again, thank you for your time. I’m grateful, as always, to spend an hour with you. Take care, everyone.

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