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    #225424 11/24/15 05:54 PM
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    I'm updating our situation with DS8 after taking the very useful and insightful advice from forum members. To recap - DS8 is in Third Grade and always performed at an average/below average level (apart from in a few isolated areas). Because he was born the day before the cut off and because red shirting is very common in our area he would actually be a better fit age-wise with the year below. i.e. he is the youngest boy in third grade but would be the 8th oldest in second grade. Given this and the fact that he sometimes struggles academically we had him assessed by an educational psychologist to get advice on whether he should repeat third grade. That assessment showed he had an IQ in the 98th percentile and as a result the psych recommended against repeating.

    We were surprised (to put it mildly) by this result and (to be honest) I'm still not sure I believe it. On the advice of Forum members we've had some further assessment for some type of learning disability that could be masking the high IQ but without uncovering anything. He's been assessed by a behavioural optometrist and found to have no vision issues. He's been seen by an OT for writing problems and found to be perfectly normal. I met with the learning support teacher at his school and asked about stealth dyslexia (because he needed a lot of remediation before he learnt to read). She was not the learning support teacher when he was doing reading recovery so she doesn't know him but she laughed out loud when I asked her about him and showed me his latest reading scores which put him apparently at a 7th grade level. This is not as advanced as it sounds as (when I pushed her) she said that what this meant was at the minimum level for 7th Grade and about 30% of the year at already at that level. So he's not way ahead but given that they have (apparently) 8 students in the year who can still barely read, they are not going to spend any time worrying about any problems he has. I also met with his class teacher who was polite and said she was 'mildly surprised' at his IQ score but couldn't give me any reason for him not doing better in class. She says he doesn't have any behavioural issues that would get in the way of his learning - he's sometimes a bit talkative but nothing major. I also talked to her and to the gifted and talented program coordinator about the gifted and talented pull-out program (1 day a fortnight plus some afterschool sessions, shared with 2 neighbouring schools). The cut-off IQ score for the program is 95% so on paper he would qualify but from talking to them about what is involved we all agreed that it didn't seem like the right thing for him (for a whole heap of reasons both academic and personal).

    So, my questions are: is there anything we have missed? Or anything else we should test for? Or is it possible to have an IQ this high and perform at an average/below average level without there being a reason and without this being a problem? Should his IQ make any difference to whether or not he repeats a year or should we just ignore it and focus on the other factors that are relevant, like his grades and age? Or, if he has a high IQ and no learning disability, should we be challenging him more by putting him into programs like the gifted and talented one - even if he doesn't feel like he fits? Or should we just do nothing and forget about the test scores and let him find his own way?



    Pirion #225427 11/24/15 07:08 PM
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    Well, it does sound like you've done due diligence on looking for a 2E reason for his performance in school. I'm assuming you've had his hearing checked, as well as vision? If so, I'd probably move on to thinking about whether what your DS is doing works for him. Is he underachieving because he cannot achieve or chooses not to? Does he need extra help because he is doing poorly on tests, hasn't mastered the materiel, has bad teachers, is bullied, doesn't want to do the work, doesn't know how to study, doesn't see the point of expending extra effort to move from a C to an A? There are so many reasons for grades to not be top notch--only some of which are under your DS's control. Assuming you have access to his detailed grades, I'd take a hard look at where he is "failing". Tests high, homework low? Participation? Good on participation and homework, but failing the tests? Is is only in one subject? He's losing points somewhere, and figuring out where can help you decide how to best help him. Once you've figured out what aspect is the weakest, I'd ask him about it. Maybe he knows that he struggles with some aspect of school and does not know that everyone doesn't struggle with the same thing. Maybe he thinks you already know about it and don't need to be told. If you can narrow it down, you can tease it apart and help him succeed by targeting that weakness. Gifted or not, learning how to succeed in school is, IMO, a process. Moreover, it is a process that often needs to be scaffolded so that the child gains the skills that will help him throughout his lifetime. IMO, there is a risk that if you do nothing and the school is content with his "middle of the road" achievement level, your DS may assume that this is all he is capable of.

    Reading this over, it occurs to me that your may also want to explore whether your DS learns well and eagerly in other settings --perhaps music lessons, chess club, or robotics club? This could indicate that providing more interesting, challenging courses, like the gifted program, would help.

    Just to sound like total helicopter parent, I'd also be aware that you have only 1-2 years to get this straightened out before middle school. IME, middle school shines a bright light on any weakness and it can be hard to change a trajectory at that point.

    Pirion #225428 11/24/15 07:23 PM
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    I have a child who was like yours - not doing well in school, very gifted, not understanding why it mattered that he was performing below his potential etc. He has no learning issues or deficiencies when tested. We started after schooling him to see if challenging him academically made him care about learning - and it did, he has progressed remarkably ever since. We also put him in music lessons, chess classes, robotics club etc and he has great interest, focus and progress.
    So, we changed schools a few times until we found one where he is challenged, is learning something new to him every day, has peers who are equals and he does not need to "dumb down" to blend in - he is in a gifted class now with kids who are very driven and capable - and he is competitive now and cares about his grades because he wants to stay in the gifted group and poor performance might mean going to the general ed class.
    So, as brilliantcp says, try to challenge him in non-school settings to see how he responds and if he is interested, then it could be a lack of challenge in school. Good luck.

    Pirion #225431 11/24/15 07:38 PM
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    I am not that surprised that the learning specialist at school blew off the entire idea of him having a subtle reading disability. This is probably more common than not with kids who are compensated (stealth) dyslexics. Without doing the appropriate testing, she would not be able to see the data that supports a compensated dyslexia diagnosis. This testing includes measures of phonological processing, word-level reading skills for novel words (nonsense words, usually), oral (and silent) reading fluency, reading comprehension, spelling, spelling of unknown words (also usually uses nonsense words, and may be called spelling of sounds or grapheme/morpheme knowledge, or some similar term), writing fluency, and spelling/grammar/mechanics in extended writing.

    I would not discount dyslexia based on your available data. Some students are amazing at masking their word-level reading disability. In recent years, I evaluated an upper school student who had passed all the benchmarks required, up to that point, and never been raised as one with potential learning issues, although minor behavioral questions had been raised ("attitude", inconsistent work completion). A decade worth of trained teachers thought this student was just your average mildly street-tough kid. Turns out the child had virtually no phonetic decoding skills, and read purely by rote-memorized sight vocabulary. As in, couldn't even consistently sound out CVC (c-a-t) words. By sheer orneriness and determination, this kid had managed to power through classes every year, produce just-adequate writing and reading comprehension, pass state tests--all while literally being unable to decode at a kindergarten level. The behavior was probably mostly a learned response to escape reading/writing tasks that were too difficult (and possibly exasperate teachers into just passing the student along). And this is not the only such child that I have encountered professionally (though one of the more astonishing, for how effective the masking was.)

    If a child of essentially average intelligence can fool teachers for that long, it shouldn't be shocking that a 98th %ile kid might be perceived as having no reading issues. It does come with a cost, though, as in my little anecdote. That child has lost the joy of learning that might have been present at the beginning or developed along the way, and has also had to deal with the uncounted subtle discouragements from authority figures, peers, and themselves, who judged behavior as character or motivational defects, rather than as attempts to maintain some pride in the face of serious learning disabilities.

    If the school won't test, then I suggest that you go back to the psych and see what resources are available there for further evaluation.


    ...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...
    Pirion #225433 11/24/15 07:54 PM
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    Thanks for updating us. I had been wondering about you.

    I was just going to post saying don't be put off of stealth dyslexia so easily, and aeh beat me to it with much better information and more nuance! Still, I will chime in with my two cents. I was homeschooling my then seven year old son and it was just *weird* what he was doing with reading. He learned late, first of all. And then he could read James and the Giant Peach, but couldn't read the word "parties" aloud to me. There were odd inconsistencies, especially when reading longer words. BUT, when I took him to reading specialists and asked about stealth dyslexia, none of them had heard of it, and they told me he couldn't be dyslexic because he was reading too well.

    I took him to Lindamood Bell, and he scored in the 90th percentiles on comprehension, but much lower on decoding, and the director of the center noted that that was odd, because most kids decode first, and then comprehend. I had read enough of the work of Brock and Fernette Eide to recognize that pattern as typical of stealth dyslexia, but the LMB people had never heard the term.

    Eventually, he was diagnosed as dyslexic and dysgraphic. It took a full psycho ed eval -- several days of testing. The tests really showed that there are significant strengths -- and significant weaknesses. We paid the big bucks for two intensive weeks of remediation at LMB. It was worth it. He used to guess at longer words based upon the first and last letters. After remediation, he was decoding.

    He is in middle school now. He is still slow, and has poor accuracy at times. His spelling and handwriting will never be great. But he is not being taxed by the reading demands of text books, etc. because (I believe) we remediated. He is aware of his own weaknesses and has some strategies to deal with them.

    If your kid needed some help getting to be a fluent reader, I would keep alive the suspicion that there might be some dyslexia. Don't assume the "experts" know what dyslexia looks like in a gifted kid. They probably don't. Read up on the work of Brock and Fernette Eide. They have a slideshare presentation online, and lots of other resources. If what they have written sounds like it "fits" your kid, I would definitely want to follow up with a full evaluation done by someone who understands giftedness and learning disabilities.

    Pirion #225451 11/25/15 09:16 AM
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    Chiming in with aeh and gabalyn. When DD was in grade 2, her teachers swore she could read, in two languages. In reality, she struggled mightily with a list of three-letter words - but faked it incredibly well with complex text. We spent grade 3 doing proper remediation, and it's been a lifesaver to her happiness, not just her schoolwork.

    It takes extensive and expert testing to find the underlying problem in a child who can nonetheless read - our reading specialist almost laughed us out of the room after the first hour of our assessment, but eventually concurred that yes, it actually was dyslexia. Just not dyslexia like she had ever seen it before. There's a number of experiences and resources shared in the thread:
    http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/217055/Stealth_dyslexia.html

    It's also worth knowing that there are questions about the usefulness of Reading Recovery for children with LDs (for example, see http://www.wrightslaw.com/info/read.rr.research.farrall.htm). Just because your son has been in this program without improvement doesn't mean that his reading isn't a problem, nor that it can't be improved.

    Looking back through your previous post, you don't describe a child who is tuned out or can't be bothered with boring work. Rather, it sounds like your son is working hard, yet struggling constantly with a range of tasks that ought to be easy for him. It sounds very much like something - maybe several somethings - are in the way. If those 'somethings' are a problem now, they are likely to grow, rapidly and brutally, as he heads towards middle school, so don't let anyone convince you that's just the way he is and you just have live with it. He clearly has the ability to learn a lot and do it well, but needs help finding the right strategies to learn, and how to remediate and/ or accommodate the the blockages in his way.

    Repeating a year will simply give him more of the wrong kind of teaching that didn't work the first time. He needs different (evidence based) remediation. It's also worth noting that research strongly supports placing a child according to their strengths, and then supporting their weaknesses. Curriculum that stretches them at the level of the intellectual ability is far, far more motivating to work through the pain. My two 2E kids, for example, will put forth supreme effort to battle through their LDs to work on a task that is exciting and challenging. But to complete make-work and tasks they could easily do years ago? Not so much.

    So don't give up! Your son is capable of thriving, and you are doing a fantastic job of finding out what he needs to get there.

    aeh #225466 11/25/15 08:25 PM
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    That is an amazing example, I had no idea that this sort of thing could happen. It did actually ring a few bells for me as when DS was learning to read he really struggled with phonics and was much better with sight words (compared with my other children who were the other way around). I remember getting so frustrated because he would read lists of words like 'dog, log, cog' correctly and then, just when I thought he was getting the hang of it, he would come to 'bog' and say 'because' or 'beautiful' or some other word that started with a B that wasn't even remotely related sound-wise or even the same number of syllables. He didn't seem to be able to translate the sounds from one word to another. I was probably really impatient with him because it seemed like such a simple concept to me and my other kids never had any issues getting the hang of it - I feel a bit guilty now but I had no idea about how complex all of this was at the time. Will definitely follow it up with the psych and get some more testing done - thanks again for your advice.

    brilliantcp #225467 11/25/15 08:44 PM
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    Thanks - very useful advice. I totally agree about middle school - part of thinking about whether he should repeat is due to the slight feeling of panic that he just won't be ready for middle school in a couple of years. I actually hadn't had his hearing checked, for some reason it didn't occur to me. But I will do that too - he's never shown any obvious signs of hearing loss but I know that it can sometimes be hard to pick and it won't do any harm to have it checked.

    I'll also look more closely at his performance at school and try to assess the reasons for it. His grades so far have been pretty consistently Cs with the occasional B and D, he's only ever got an A for sports. I have talked to him a bit about it and he doesn't really have any answers - he says he likes school but more for the social side of things, he doesn't hate the academics but doesn't love them either. He feels like he is 'quite smart' but not one of the 'clever group of kids that get picked for stuff and always get awards'. So perhaps he either doesn't care or doesn't think it's worth the extra effort to work hard to get a higher mark. He never does his homework (it's optional at his school) and I don't make him because he plays a lot of sport after school and after that I think he needs time to relax - his main form of relaxation is reading which up until now I've thought was just as beneficial as homework. This might have to change next year though if he goes into Year 5 when homework becomes compulsory.

    You are so right about success at school being a process - I remember so many kids at my school who were super bright who didn't have a great school experience because they just didn't get how school worked. It's such a shame - all kids deserve to get the support they need to be successful at school. I don't care whether DS gets high marks or gets prizes etc but I do want him to be confident in his learning and see some benefit in trying hard and as you say if he doesn't get this before middle school it will be hard to change then.

    gabalyn #225468 11/25/15 08:50 PM
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    Thanks so much for sharing your experience - it does sound really like my DS. It's so hard when the professionals I am dealing with are well-meaning and probably very experienced but don't know about something like stealth dyslexia or some other reading issue that might be relevant to DS. I'll read up on the Eides and then organise some more testing. Thanks for the advice!

    ashley #225469 11/25/15 09:03 PM
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    That's awesome about your son - he is really lucky to have parents who realised what he needed to thrive and were able to give it to him. My son's interests so far have been mainly focussed on sport but lately he has become interested in robotics so I'll look around for a robotics club or program that he could do. Superficially at least it does look to me as though he is challenged in his current environment. His school streams for English and Math in years 1-3 and he has never been higher than the middle group for either. Most of his friends are in the top group so I know he would like to be with them if he could - at least if he could do well enough to be in that group without doing much extra work. He is very uncompetitive about academic work though and doesn't seem bothered about his grades at all (good and bad) so perhaps it's more of an attitude thing with him.

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