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hehehe, my baby turned 27 on Sunday. I don't remember having brain lapses during pregnancy, but I don't remember much now-a-days!

I saw an article once in an obstetrics journal about the average IQ drop for women in their 3rd trimester. It was significant (10-20 points,, I think). The point of the article was that even bright women will require different educational materials when they are "impaired."

My baby is 12years old and I'm loving it. I have never once looked back or been nostalgic about those first 5 years, but I have never been a baby person.

I'm 100% with you, acs. I wanted my kids to be born at 18 months, walking and speaking in complete sentences!

It helps that I have very cuddly kids, so I don't miss out on snuggles. If they stopped doing that, I might feel a bit more nostalgic.

(But I doubt it! I like to sleep!)

I keep reading references to lower achievement in VSL kids. ONe was at a teacher chat board - that using achievement tests to select kids for gifted programs will miss VSL kids. Can anyone speak to this lower achievement in VSL kids? If true, is it b/c classrooms are not geared toward strongly VSL kids?

Dazey

I'm no expert, but yes, Dazey, I think that has a lot to do with it. They learn differently, and regular classrooms often don't meet those needs.

I think even the achievement tests themselves often aren't written to make good sense to a VSL kid. That means that VSL kids might not perform as well as they could if they were given a test that met the VSL person where s/he is, intellectually speaking. Just like I wouldn't do very well on a test given in Portugese, VSL kids don't show what they can do as well if given tests that were designed for non-VSL kids.

I think some of that depends upon how VSL a person is, no, Dottie?

Ok I can see how a standard achievement test would favor the verbal kids and that VSL kids might be at a disadvantage. For the same reason highly verbal kids can do more poorly on non-verbal tests such as CoGAT and Naglieri, I've read.

Don't you love those crossposts, Dottie?!

Your post reminds me of a piece of wisdom that I think you gave me months ago, back when I was trying to figure out whether DS6 was VSL or not. This wise woman (whom I will assume was you--it was either you or Grinity, I know) said that a child who shows many of the signs of being VSL, but who does lots of things well may just be REALLY smart!

I remember it well because it was actually one of the posts that helped lead me out of my GT denial.

So if a child is good at puzzles and mazes and all things VSL, but he's also an early reader who has a vocabulary bigger than some college students, he might not be VSL so much as he is HG+ and able to learn easily just about any which way.

Food for thought...

Hey,
I�ve been following along here and have picked up my copy of the book to determine if I could part with it for $75. I decided no.

A chapter that I reviewed emphasized that VSL do better on more complex tests than the easier ones. I think this is true in my daughter�s case. She did much better on the Explore test she took this March than she did on the ITBS last fall. The part that really stood out on the ITBS was her low score for ending punctuation and capitalization. She doesn�t have a problem with these areas IRL, but for some reason got most wrong on the easy ITBS. However, she landed at the 98th percentile for English on the Explore test.

Their school used to give the Terra-Nova which I believe has more above level questions than the ITBS.


That child might be both VSL and HG+. My daughter was also an early reader and had very high Verbal scores early on.

True. Good catch. I didn't mean to exclude that possibility.