Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Writing fluency?

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).