I am so glad that I found this forum because I see that I am not alone! I have a son who just turned 5 who gets speech therapy and OT and has been diagnosed with Sensory processing Disorder - he is not autistic or Aspergers - just has a sensitive system....we have known for quite awhile that he is extremely bright as well. We have had his OT and Speech teachers over the past several years tell us they believe he is very gifted and that his issues are stemming more from the fact that he is gifted than he is SPD. We have been very stressed about his placement in Kindergarten in the Fall as I am a K teacher and he is leaps and bounds beyond the league of Kindergarten. We wanted so desperatly to take him to Dr. Amend to do gifted testing since he has such a history with SPD children but we just couldn't raise the money for the trip from Florida to Kentucky..so we found someone a few hours away. Our little guy wasn't feeling his best the week of the testing but he got really upset when we suggested waiting - so we went ahead with it....VERY dumb on our part. 2 days after the testing we went to the docs and found out that he had a raging ear infection and ended up spending 12 hours in the Emergency Room from severe vomitting and dehydration. So in my opinion, not the best testing set up for him!!!
He took the Stanford-Binet 5 and it was split into 2 sections for him. When he came out to use the potty near the end of the first day he told me he wanted to be done and didn't want to do anymore and I could tell that he was shutting down and I told the assessor and she said she just had a little more to do and wanted to try to get it finished up....so he went back in with a big "I'm ticked off" look on his face and her definition of a little more was like 20 minutes. We came back 2 days later to do the next part. When I sat down to discuss the testing I saw a lot of things that concerned me...his score was 125 but it was all over the place and I saw right away that it was in areas I knew were greatly affected by his sensory disorder....he has a real problem with manipulating puzzle pieces or block pieces and being able to properly send the signal from visually organizing them to making his fingers place them where they should go because his sensory system goes into overload and he just sees a jumble...but if he is able to block out parts of them at a time so he only focuses on sections, he is very able to do puzzles and copy block designs. We have to do the same when he is reading - we have a paper that blocks out all the other print other than the sentence/line he is reading. His fine motor skills are also not great since he has issues with visual perception and he is very much able to tell you where a puzzle piece goes faster than he is able to do it with his hands....the strange part is that he LOVES mazes and completes them in no time flat and even makes his own maze puzzles...which I just don't understand! His test sections he scored the lowest on were the last ones done on both days and I could tell that he had shut down when he came out for the potty break and sure enough the tester told me that he answered with a lot of "I'm tired", "I don't know". he scored very high in the fluid reasoning and quantitive reasoning sections and I guess I am totally confused with these scores...he scored in the 63% on nonverbal visual spatial (last test section done the first day of testing) but scored in the 99.6% on Visual Spatial verbal....how can you have such a difference in scores on the same thing - one is just verbal and the other nonverbal.
I am frustrated because some of the things she told me he had problems with pulled down his higher areas...such as looking at a picture and being able to distinguish the silly parts of it...I told her that he gets visually overwhelmed when a picture is shown to him with many things going on in it because his sensory system gets overloaded but if he is able to block out sections at a time before taking in the whole picture he has no issues....stuff like Where is Waldo - he is really interested in it but you can see it in his face when he opens up the page - he is just overwhelmed with the amount of stuff on the page and he can't focus on one area he tries to take it all in at once and gets overwhelmed. She said but when she just spoke with him, he obviously could explain how certain things don't belong together or would be silly.
When I called and spoke with our school district she was pretty much "out of the loop" when I said I firmly believe that my son is 2e and did he need the exact score of 130 in order to qualify for services...she said it had to be 130 with no exceptions which makes no sense to me....so my son isn't able to build puzzles but he scores in the 99.6% in verbal visual spatial, 98% in nonverbal fluid reasoning, and 95% in both verbal/nonverbal quantitative reasoning??? I had a few gifted teacher friends tell me that I really should look at having the test redone because in their opinions, having a diagnosed bad, ear infection at the time of the test and harboring a nasty stomach virus that sent him to the hospital did not allow him to show his true colors....would love to hear opinions??? Thanks for just letting me share!
