Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Writing fluency?

I've been giving DD my own assessments to try to figure out exactly how impaired she is, and compare how she is medicated vs. unmedicated. Dh was having her write down names of states and she seemed fairly fluent while writing. But then I asked her to write the alphabet in all lower case and she only wrote about 38 letters in a minute. I'm not sure if the problem is that she can't remember what letter comes next, she is getting mixed up trying to recall how to write letters in lowercase vs. uppercase, she's becoming unfocused (or what). It's was really odd to me how Dh asked her to write Pennsylvania (not copied) and she didn't seem particularly slow, but then kept hesitating when she was writing the alphabet from memory. Does anyone have any idea what would be normal for a 9 year old in fourth grade?

I also had her copy sentences out of a book and she only wrote about 30 letters per minute. She spelled "appeared" like "appired" even though she was copying. There weren't really any other errors which surprised me because sometimes she writes over and over letters, trying to correct mistakes. She only did that a couple times.

I guess I'm wondering how far "off" this sounds. I found some norms saying it should be about 50-60 letters per minute on average for copying sentences, so obviously she's lower than that, but how impaired it really is, I don't know. I timed myself writing lowercase letters in 1 minute and wrote 99 compared to her 38. But of course, I'm an adult, not a 9 year old. Tomorrow I will try it again when she is medicated.

Did your dh time her when she was writing down the names of states?


Copying is a slightly different skill than writing something you know, like the name of the state or the alphabet. I don't know how it's technically supposed to work, but I know that my dysgraphic ds has trouble with copying, and the way he describes the process is he has to look at what he is going to copy, remember as much of it as he can, and then write it down on his paper (or type it on his keyboard), and he complains that he can only remember three words at once so it makes copying really slow (and it is really noticeably slow for him).

Re if the speed of writing states is faster (lpm) than letters, part of that might be that she is thinking about how to form the letters when she writes the alphabet but she knew she was being timed and was less focused on individual letters when she had to write out the whole words for the states.


One way to get an idea of how impaired is to google "letter per minute + 2nd grade" (or whatever other grade you want to compare to. Find the lower grade that matches your dd's lpm range. If it's two grade levels below her grade level, that's considered to be severely impaired.

polarbear

We weren't timing her for writing names of states, I was just watching her and she looked so normal, for a few moments I felt silly that I put in a request for a special ed eval. But then I saw the alphabet writing which clearly didn't look normal. I think her copying speed is probably around a second grade level. But I can't find norms for writing alphabet letters.

The school is saying that they would compare her to third graders since she should be in third grade based on her age, but she is very close to the cut-off and has been exposed to more curriculum than they have, so I don't really think that's fair to her.

I also (a few weeks ago) had her do a story with a starter sentence, and she only wrote about 20 words in 3 minutes and it should have been more like 40. After the first 3 minutes I told her to keep going, but she had no idea what to write after that and only wrote a few words. I asked a college professor about this (who specializes in 2e kids and writing issues) and he said that it sounds like executive functioning issues related to her ADHD, not dysgraphia. Her handwriting is usually very neat unless she's in a big rush. I'm not sure what to think.

A few differences:

Writing the names of the states from memory involves a meaningful retrieval task, where the letters are already in patterns.

Writing the alphabet is also a retrieval efficiency task, but it's not all that meaningful.

Near- and far-point copying involve not only fine-motor and visual tracking skills, but sustained attention, organization, and self-editing.

Composing a story from a starter includes some retrieval factors, is meaningful, but also requires substantial organizational, working memory, and self-monitoring skills. (You have to have a mental sense of the structure of your writing, hold it in your head through the whole process; compose and organize sentences in your head, hold each one in working memory until you get it down on paper; manage self-monitoring of rote mechanics skills throughout.)

People with EF issues, such as in ADHD, usually do better with meaningful than with rote tasks, which have insufficient intrinsic interest to keep them focused and organized. Organization, working memory, and self-monitoring are other EF skills, also frequently affected in ADHD.

In dysgraphia, the ladder might look like: copying letters>copying words>copying sentences>generating letters>generating words>generating sentences>generating paragraphs+.

So composing paragraphs is at the end for both causes of writing difficulties, but some of the earlier tasks may be in a different sequence.

blackcat - I don't know if this will help, but I had a similar kind of odd experience with our DD8 (recently diagnosed dyslexia, probable ADHD-I).

To set up our OG-type remediation program at home, we were putting magnets on a couple sets of letter tiles and putting them on the whiteboard. At one point, I had the whole alphabet laid out across, in order, minus about six letters. I suggested DD find the missing letters in the pile of tiles I had now added magnets to.

Now I'd have sworn this child was practically born knowing her alphabet. I think the first time she wrote it out, she was barely two and appeared one day with it in hand - I had no idea she had the faintest clue how to write most of those letters. She taught herself cursive staring off at a border in the classroom (when one presumes she was supposed to be doing something else), and came home and wrote it out one night (when she was supposed to be doing something else).

And yet - she had a lot of trouble figuring out which letters of the alphabet were missing (and I had left gaps), and where to put them. I was a little shocked, to say the least. Up to her diagnosis, we'd been making her read Percy Jackson to us at night. A week into remediation, and I am constantly boggled at some of the things I am now realizing she can't do, but has hidden so well.

I'm not sure if she can't remember how to write the letters, or if she can't remember what letter to write next, as in "I just wrote an r, what do I need to write next?" Her working memory on the WISC was 127 (arithmetic and letter-number sequence) but maybe a completely different type of working memory is involved here. She said she was getting mixed up about keeping all the letters lowercase. She does have a history of making errors when she writes (esp. when copying I think) and then writing over the letters. I'm not sure if they are spelling/copying errors or if she is actually forming letters wrong, noticing they are wrong and then writing over. I think it's probably the former, where she is not able to copy words accurately, but does know how to form letters. I haven't seen any reversals, like writing a b instead of a d. Her writing is VERY inconsistent where sometimes she writes over and over every other letter and otherwise it looks very neat and adult-like with no errors. She presses down very hard on the paper and always wants to write with a pen. She said when she uses a pencil, it breaks all the time and it hurts to write. I told her that if she didn't press down so hard on the paper, that wouldn't happen. She said she has to write super dark or else she can't see it. She wears glasses and is nearsighted, and can read fast/fluently with or without her glasses so that makes no sense. Here's a story she wrote sometime last year, in third grade (handwritten in her notebook). Her handwriting is very neat. It's one of the only stories she wrote. I think she sat there most of the year and did nothing.

"Once apoun a time there was a girl who went to the library. She borowed a book. The libraryian warned her not to fall asslep with the book open. But she did not listen to her. So that night she fell asslep with the book open. But when she woke up she could not breath so right when she woke up she died. The Libraryian mutered to her self "she should have listened." Her family also died, because the vines spread all over the house. The house had to be knocked down imedetly."

I don't even understand this story--what do vines covering a house have to do with someone dying because they fell asleep with a book open? I don't get it. This story was done sometime last year but if she wrote another story now it would take forever (probably days) and it would probably be similar.

So is this a different kind of working memory than what is measured on the WISC and if so, is there a way to test for it?

The story seems relatively clear to me. I would bet she had a visual of the story in her head, and her writing was more like reporting that vision. She just mis- or under- selected what to report on. Likely the book was about a magical vine, and the girl was drawn to it. The librarian's warning probably included something about it being a very special book. And when she read it she was so fascinated, she couldn't stop, despite remembering the librarian's warning.

My DS does that, because of his writing issues, but the full vision is in his head. Any mild questioning and he'll tell the epic context of his story.

The WM tasks on the WISC are done orally, so it's testing auditory processing->memory->production/manipulation. Visual WM can potentially be different, and some SLPs can test for it. I've monitored it at home with the game Simon with the sound off ("Crazy Copy" free iPad app).

Both my kids have also struggled with copying, which is what had me probing for visual vs auditory WM, but to no avail. The issue seems to be one of an overwhelmed memory nevertheless, compounded by the fact that neither kid sees parts of words, but only the whole. So to copy the spelling, they would have to both be aware that their spelling was different and also to copy it letter-by-letter.

On alphabet fluency, DS had a 143 second lower case alphabet writing speed as a baseline this last summer. It was very much a function of not knowing the alphabet from any arbitrary starting point. He would write it slowly, lose track of the song in his head, and then start over singing it from 'a' to progress. We've been doing AAS (thanks aeh!!), and one of the things that it works on is exactly that - being able to pick up the alphabet from any arbitrary starting point. I thought it silly initially, but DS has learned it, and we're finding all sorts of things now come more easily, including writing the alphabet in 30 seconds. His WM also tested in the high 120s (don't recall exactly the #).

aeh: You said: "People with EF issues, such as in ADHD, usually do better with meaningful than with rote tasks, which have insufficient intrinsic interest to keep them focused and organized." This is the exact opposite of what I'm being told by the school - DS can't compose because of his attention issues (a diagnosis I do not have clarity on, BTW) as composition uses so much of the brain whereas wrote skills do not. Can you elaborate and clarify? DS certainly looks more like "generating letters>copying letters>copying words>copying sentences>generating words>generating sentences>generating paragraphs+" I've moved "generating letters" to the front of your sequence. Generating words is tough to determine as intermingled with resistance to do anything due to poor spelling.

That's funny about sudden death, because 3 of the 5 "stories" (if you can call them that, they are about 4 sentences long) involve sudden death.

"Once apoun a time, there was a home. One night when avery body was asleep, the attic, all of a suden, lit up. The house lifted off the ground. So, the house was never seen again. And, for the people in the house, well, they died. They went to heven, to live in heven. They were never heard from again."

I took this to the IEP eval planning meeting and was almost embarrassed to pass it around--she looks like a kid with emotional issues even though she is usually happy/exuberant.

I'm not sure if the teacher had odd pictures, and the kids were supposed to write a story based on the pictures, or what. I'm not sure that she even came up with these ideas without looking at some sort of picture or starter.

What is AAS.

I tested her this morning medicated and in 1 minute she wrote about 46 letters which is a little better, but I'm guessing still not great. I also had DS7 do it and he wrote 33 letters in one minute which probably isn't normal either. He has developmental coordination disorder, though, so it's pretty much what I expected.

Sorry to ask a somewhat OT question, but I'm curious about how this might relate to a child who has dysgraphia (and developmental coordination disorder) who also has difficulty with expressive language (written and verbal). When DS is tasked with a writing assignment and is completely stuck, he says he "has nothing" in his head re ideas, and the problem isn't getting the ideas out of his head, the problem is there is nothing to "get out". Is it possible that the knowledge is there, or the knowledge required to generate the ideas, but the steps leading up to it are so overwhelming (or undone) that the child just isn't able to access the ideas?

I'm not sure if that made sense. DS does much better with written (and verbal) expression when he is dealing with facts that he obviously knows. Or when he's just totally lost in thinking through some interesting scientific challenge/problem etc. But give him an open-ended or non-science-related prompt and he's lost.

Even discussing the results of a science experiment - if he has to write a lab report, it's minimal and his conclusions are not terribly deep. But if he did the same experiment without having to write a report, just did it for the experience to see what happened, he can draw some pretty amazing conclusions.

Sorry, didn't mean to go off-topic, just always trying to figure out what's up with our kids who are so challenged with expressing their thoughts

polarbear

Following, because DS9 has a similar, but possibly different, problem. He knows the alphabet (i.e. can sing the ABC song), and knows how to write all his letters. But he cannot alphabetize easily, and does not know the alphabet order well without singing the ABC song. Some he knows (e.g. E comes after B), but I don't think he knows that M comes before S without giving it a lot of thought.

I haven't tried timing his writing, but perhaps that would be a good idea.

This is basically what is going on with DD as well. She would have problems telling me a story as well, although if I sit with her and prompt her after every single sentence, and do all the writing, she would be able to pull something together. Her language comes across Ok, at least on a "sentence" level. I remember scribing a story with her and she said "the next sentence is 'they ventured further into the forest'". She was 8. That doesn't sound like a kid with a language issue, but she would not be able to tell me a story. She did very little pretend/dramatic play when she younger either. She just couldn't seem to be able to organize a "story" even for play. She would carry her toys around the house, but never really play with them. The school wants to do the WIAT writing cluster and I asked about language and they pretty much ignored me. I'm not sure if there is even a test that would pick up the issue because she is fine on a sentence level, or a few sentences. But ask her to "tell a story" and a wall goes up immediately.

This is exactly where DS is as well. He's got a history of expressive speech/language problems that I don't feel have every been fully explained.

How do you deal with a kid who WON'T write, seems to have no ideas there to present, but when he does come up with something, it's along the lines of "I hesitate to go trick-or-treating tonight because my cheeks will sting in the bitter wind."

Sorry, blackcat - AAS is All About Spelling (home Orton Gillingham) I have a thread in the 2e board from late August about Stealth Dyslexia.

It's ironic because DD seems to have no problems making up "stories" about things going on in real life (eg grossy exaggering or lying). "Why didn't you clean up your floor the way I asked?" "Because my light burned out and I couldn't see anything. I went to look for a new lightbulb and couldn't find one." "Huh? Light looks Ok to me." She's made up elaborate stories of things that happened at school, like conversations with people that never occurred, and is very convincing. Yet seems to have no creativity or ideas when actually asked to make up a story or act out a story. It's very frustrating. She does seem to do better with writing if it's factual information that can just be rewritten or explained, but does the bare minimum possible with very little detail.

I'm going to try to respond to some common themes above, without conflating children too much. I don't have high hopes!

Grossly, writing involves the mechanics of written output, the language content being communicated, and organizing said content. An individual child struggling with writing could be challenged by any or all of those areas. Working memory affects all of them.

There are assessments for other aspects of working memory, such as visual working memory (usually block span). Subtests include the SBV nonverbal working memory, the Wechsler Nonverbal/WISC-IV Integrated spatial span, finger windows from the WRAML-2.

Other aspects of EF are heavily involved in writing as well.

Here's a nice little presentation on EF:

http://www.nasponline.org/conventions/handouts2010/unstated/nasp_ef_presentation.pdf

Lots of good stuff in it. It starts with a bunch of neuroanatomy, runs through assessment, and then ends with educational manifestations and interventions. I'll just abstract this slide on EF and writing:

"Examples of EF Problems in Writing Skills
• Poor graphomotor control and lack of automaticity for handwriting.
• Poor organization of written material.
• Poor retrieval cueing or poor generation cueing (idea generation or idea fluency when writing).
• Inability to use multiple self-regulation EF’s at one time (hold, manipulate, retrieve, generate, execute)."

As you can see, different aspects of EF affect different aspects of writing. Working memory is involved particularly in automaticity. Planning can be part of what is termed here "poor graphomotor control" (i.e., motor planning).

And now, in no particular order:

"nothing to get out": this may have something to do with mental flexibility/shift, initiation, or retrieval. Often there are facts and ideas, but the child does not have ready access to them. I compare retrieval weaknesses to a disorganized filing system with lots of documents, but poor file structure. Unless it's a document that is very frequently accessed, (so there's a brute force rote memory path to it), the inefficiencies of the filing system mean someone else often has to start opening drawers (or folders) to cue memory of what is in them, or where to find something specific. You can imagine that if your files are in a big mess, starting a search can feel overwhelming, which relates to initiation. (Think of it as the reason few people want to start big closet cleanouts. Except for those of you with excellent EF!)

stories with parts missing: This sounds very much like an EF issue, with organization/sequencing, working memory, self-editing, and maybe a little perspective-taking thrown in. The examples read like there is a complete story somewhere in the child's head, but it's difficult to re-tell it so that someone else understands it. Cueing with sequencing key terms can help (first, next, then, so, finally). Also cueing with sensory descriptive questions/sentence starters, asking for show-not-tell. Using graphic organizers to provide a little external structure and cueing for omitted sections. Generally, scaffolding that makes the process more concrete and externalized. Paper (or an electronic document) is a great working memory aid. Reading aloud what you've written is helpful for self-editing, as is asking yourself, how will the reader know this?

aeh, thanks for the information. I noticed possible memory/retrival problems when she needed to learn States and their capitals. If I named a state, DS almost always yelled out the answer before her, and he was there a fraction of the time learning. I tried giving her mental images to use, like a boy named Trent or Trenton is fighting a herd of Jersey cows, but she just couldn't remember anything. I told her to make her own associations, and she didn't. She doesn't have a problem finding states on a map, though. If I say"where is New Jersey?" she points to it. So I'm not sure what the issue is. I'm not sure how to sort out what is slow processing speed, and what is a retrieval/memory problem or if they are the same thing.

She has to write a memoir for class told in the first person, and the teacher did have a sort of outline for them to fill out first.

Action:
Dialogue:
A Thought, Question, or Feeling:
a Sound Effect:

The kids are supposed to fill in their thoughts, and then write the memoir. DD just filled in a couple words on each section and then wrote (typed--with spell check) this:

"When I was little I went to a snow tubing place called XXXX with some of my relatives and I thought it was just going to be fun fun fun FUN!!!!
But surprisingly I was wrong. We ended up having my little brother YYY getting a skull fracture (which was really scary because I wasn't with him and he's my ONLY brother I will ever have!!!!)
We were just having lots of fun. Then when we went down another time there was an accident. I don't know who bumped into me. But we collided, YYY hit his head, and had blood gushing out of his ear! He had to go to the hospital in an ambulance! YYY had to wear a neck brace! He had to wear an eyepatch because he had double vision. He had to stay home from school. When he could go outside he had to wear a helmet until he got better. THE END.

I don't think this is what the teacher has in mind. Part of the problem with this is that DD doesn't really remember the episode enough to even put in enough detail. If we have her switch topics, what specific graphic organanizer could i use to make this turn out better?

That example has me curious: where is the threshold between helping your kid and undermining things?

If a school assignment is viewed as an assessment, will extra scaffolding break that communication loop?

Or is there authentic learning required to bridge between your child's uniqueness and the teachers style?

This is stuff that I've pondered with very similar assignments. Because DS has motivated teachers who seem really engaged and attuned, I worry if we help too much then the teacher is led astray in terms of ability and their personal effectiveness. I know I can ask probative questions to get DS to open up and restructure things, but I'm not sure how I know it wasn't temporary.

DD actually had to turn it in, so that's what she turned in. I'm not sure if that was considered a rough draft or final paper (the communication is lacking, to say the least). I emailed her teacher and said that I wanted her to see what we're dealing with...so I did not help at all with the above writing, so now she should know what it is like "unassisted" but either she or I are going to have to sit down with her and say "here's what the assignment is supposed to look like instead." Otherwise I don't know how she's going to learn anything. The teacher could go ahead and give her a "D" (and she might), but that's really not going to help DD learn to write.

The outline provided to her was not an unreasonable start, in terms of some idea generation, but provides very little in the way of structural/organizational scaffolding. The details of her memoir are not actually all that bad for this grade level. It's really the organization and sequencing that is a bit lacking. I would look for graphic organizers that depict the structure of a paragraph or set of paragraphs. Using her existing story:

topic/introductory sentence
beginning--with subordinate fields for a detail, such as those represented by the existing fields provided by the teacher
middle/action--might include the unexpected twist
ending--how the action was resolved
concluding sentence

Each of the main sections of the body should have subordinate fields for sensory details, dialogue, etc.

Here are a few examples:

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top-teaching/2014/03/graphic-organizers-personal-narratives

Given the sequencing weaknesses, I would lean toward organizers that include time and sequence cue words in them.

On retrieval: the behavior you describe with finding states on a map is exactly illustrative of retrieval weaknesses. Characteristically, those with retrieval challenges have a difficult time pulling facts or ideas out of their heads efficiently, but can be quite facile with recognizing the same points. Multiple choice tests (such as much of group standardized testing) can be quite suitable for them (or conversely, mask their deficits), because it's all recognition. Open response, especially extended writing, is their enemy. Your approach to trying to give her visual associations is conceptually the correct approach. She needs meaningful hooks to fish learning out of long-term memory when she wants it. She may do better if there is more meaningful context attached to the states and their capitals, such as (summarizing this from wikipedia) "Trenton, NJ is named after William Trent, who was a wealthy merchant. He had a big property in central New Jersey with a village around it, that came to be known as Trent-town." For people with retrieval problems, rote learning is not their friend. Not enough, or vivid enough, hooks.

Slow processing speed is a symptom. The cause may be retrieval inefficiencies, or it may be something else. In her case, her profile looks more like a retrieval profile. The Rey-Osterreith is a good quick assessment for that, and the WRAML-2 is a good more in-depth measure.

Thanks for the link. I will check it out. I think I'm going to have to take her to a neuropsych and just pay out of pocket. But then again, I'm not sure what the point would be because the school would ignore the information anyway. She has a 504 with things like giving her extended time, the teacher scribing, etc. and no one is really bothering to follow it. She could name most of the capital cities after I went through the flash cards with her 800 times but got a D- on the test because she didn't write them down. She probably could have said them to the teacher. She could say them to me at any rate. She also had to memorize an interesting fact about each state (for instance there were a lot of battles in New Jersey during the revolutionary war, which is why I was trying to give her a mental image of Trent battling a Jersey cow). She says that on the test, there was a list of facts and a list of states, and they just had to be matched up so she got all those correct. But I doubt she would have been able to recall the facts about the states. DS is able to do it, even though he was only listening for about 10 minutes. If I asked him to name a fact about Pennsylvania he would say "Battle of Gettysburg." DD probably wouldn't be able to do that anymore. It's the same with math facts. She learns them, and then after a while, forgets a lot of them. They don't stick in long-term memory, or if they do, it takes a long time to retrieve the information.

Just a funny aside. DD had a problem tonight in pre-algebra which showed a graph with "height above ground" on the Y-axis and "time" on the x-axis. The graph looked like a U or V with a flat bottom. The problem says to "write a possible situation for each graph."

DD wrote a situation all right. I've never seen her write that much in one sitting. And once again, it had to do with sudden death.

"A girl is skydiving but she messed up and fell to her DOOM!!! (And Dies). She just lied there dead for a few hours then they put her in a coffin and rolled the coffin up a hill and buried her in the skydiving graveyard of skydivers.
P.S. Her gravestone looked like this. (insert drawing of RIP tombstone "skydiver girl who had died when skydiving"). And her dead head looked like this: (insert drawing of dead zombie girl head.)." Lovely.

Death resolves all the conflicts for the main character rather neatly, which allows one to bring the story to a rapid close without a lot of messy explanations.

LOL.. I needed this tonight. I love it.. if they are going to give you a problem like that they should expect that kind of answer.

When my son was evaluated by an OT after a grade skip I requested that the evaluation be scored against both age norms and grade norms....I felt that both sets if scores would give the team information to work with.

I don't know why the school psych is digging in her heels about that, insisting that third grade norms should be used. It just comes across as them doing what they can to boost percentiles and make sure she doesn't qualify for anything. It says specifically in the State eligibility criteria that either age or grade norms can be used. I've already called the State, special ed director, etc. trying to make the school get their act together. I haven't signed anything yet. What's probably going to end up happening is that I'll need to request an independent eval at district expense, since the district is incompetent. I don't know if she's low enough to qualify as being learning disabled, but I think there's enough evidence that she's not making much progress in terms of writing. Her second grade writing looks exactly the same as her writing now. It's also hard to say how much is the school's fault (rather than DD having a disability), in that they were not teaching her last year, doing any interventions, etc. Her writing notebook from last year had about 5 pages with writing on it. So was the teacher just letting her sit there day after day staring around the room? Probably.

Same here for my ds. FWIW, prompting was a strategy we used for a long time (still do sometimes) when he was in elementary school struggling with getting any ideas out at all. Repeated prompting him through was one of the tools that I feel helped him make significant progress in his ability to improve his written expression.


Same here for my ds - from the time he started talking, when he *does* talk, it is in complex sentences using advanced vocabulary that sound like a little adult talking. That's part of the reason it took us years to realize the significance of what he *wasn't* saying.


Our ds also didn't do any imaginary play. Since he was our oldest, I didn't really realize the extend of what he wasn't doing until I had my dds - and they were soooooo so totally opposite - they were pretend-playing all the time and so were their friends. DS did build things though, which is a different type of "imaginary" work altogether.


Don't forget that you can request testing in writing. I think you've already done that, but you can make a written request at any point in time. I'm not sure if this is exactly where you're at, but let's suppose you've made your initial request and the school is saying "we don't have any test for that" or "we don't have any concerns about language" - then turn in another written request that's a follow-up to the original, state what you understand the school to have said to you, and then state what type of testing you want to add on, and state the reasons. Speech/language eval is what you want for receptive/expressive language issues. The school can still say no, but they will have to be able to justify their "no", which you can then use when you disagree with them and seek an independent eval if it gets to that point.


Has she ever had an SLP eval? If not, you might be surprised at what it reveals. Our ds is of course a totally different kid who might not have anything in common with your dd (other than the above things lol!), but fwiw his initial SLP eval was at 10, and even though he appeared to be fine on a "sentence" level... he had huge issues with one of the CELF subtests - it was a test where you had to put two words together in a sentence type of test. He was able to complete the subtest, but his score on it was significantly lower than the other subtests, and his SLP observed that when he had to answer those types of questions it "was like a light went off and the elevator to the top was grounded" (or something like that lol!)... because it took him so long to answer.

Re the age-normed vs grade-normed issues - I wanted to ask - is the school insisting on age-norming for *all* of the tests they will give or only for fine motor or other tests that are looking at physical functioning? I think that it might be hard to argue against age-norming for the physical (OT/etc) type testing, and really that's probably what you do want to know (for your own info). On achievement/etc tests - anything that's looking at learned knowledge, she should be normed against grade level.

That said, there is another aspect to the physical functioning even if she's normed against age level for fine motor for instance, and doesn't meet the cut-off bar for services. If her handwriting (or whatever) is holding her back in her academics, you can still make a case for accommodations such as keyboarding even if she doesn't meet the bar for services. The key is to provide as much data as you can through testing and work samples showing that handwriting is preventing her from accessing her FAPE.

Gotta run - hope that makes sense!

polarbear

Note to everyone--please don't quote me because I'm probably going to come back and edit some of this later, being that it's a public forum.

Polarbear--On the eval proposal it says "5 minute Timed Writing Sample compared to age-level peers"...so they consider her "peers" to be the kids in the grade level below, and they would give those kids the same assessment, and compare DD to them. First of all, this is a very low performing school (other than the gifted program). Half the kids in DS's second grade class can't read basic words. And DD would probably actually be older than most of the third grade kids, because of her fall birthday and the Sept. cut-off. I'm not sure what this "writing sample" would entail. I pointed out to them that it's like comparing apples and oranges because she has been exposed to higher level curriculum, and there was no response. I can see how they would want to use age norms for fine motor skills, but I think this is totally different.

They didn't want to evaluate her in the first place and the principal had to intervene. The school psych is the same psych that was at the last school and she has no idea what she is doing. There is a request in in writing, we met and I explained my concerns, and they sent me a proposal with a box to check if you agree or don't agree. I can't check the box saying that I agree if I think it's a dumb proposal and not comprehensive. They are basically refusing to evaluate all areas of concerns because her computerized (untimed) achievement scores are high. I asked them to evaluate math fluency and language, as well as check for information processing problems and how that's affecting academics, and that's all being ignored. Finally the school psych caved and agreed to give her the BRIEF (which we already had done privately) to check for processing problems. It's basically just a parent inventory asking things like "does your child have a problem organizing materials?" strongly agree, agree, etc. Considering the fact that I asked them to assess her issues related to ADHD, that should have been in the very first proposal.

DD was getting private OT for a while (for executive functioning) and was given some sort of test where she had to name animals in alphabetical order and it was timed. DD couldn't do that at all and named like 5 animals in a minute or 3 minutes (I don't remember, but she was excessively slow). The OT said she did better when it wasn't timed, so anxiety may be playing a role. She's never had the CELF but I should try doing that subtest unofficially and see if she has issues. The kid is given a couple words and needs to make a sentence and it is timed? Not sure if she would have problems with that or not. Without knowing what the norms are, I guess it would be really hard to do it unofficially. The people at the private therapy center wanted her to have an SLP eval but whenever DS has had testing, he always does great, and I know DD would do even better in comparison. So it seemed like a waste of time, but I'll look into it again and see if they can do the CELF (since apparently the school system is going to refuse).