Wow. I thought I might get one or two responses. Thanks so much for your advice, everyone.
Dottie:
His WIAT total reading score was 142,and his pseudoword decoding (126) was his lowest scoring in the subtests. All subtests were lower than the composite score, perhaps his composite reading score was higher because he was almost uniformly good on all of the subtests?
Also, thanks for the advice on the WJ including timed sections. He really struggles with handwriting or anything requiring fine motor skills, so a timed test wouldn't work for him. I actually think that is part of the reason he didn't score as well on the perceptual reasoning section of the WISC and the numerical operations section of the WIAT. He was precocious in math as a toddler, preschooler and kindergartner, and I can't imagine that all just went away when he hit first grade (even though it doesn't show itself that often any more.)
Trinity:
One of our big issues is very poor fine motor coordination. I think he has reached the point in school where he really needs to be able to write, so it is starting to interfere with how he is doing in class.
For example, the school did pre-testing and grouping for his second grade math, so at math time, kids would switch from homeroom to the teacher who taught their level math. He never did well on the tests because he simply did not write fast enough, I think, or reversed his numbers or put them in the wrong columns, and sometimes even skipped questions, so he always wound up in a math class covering material he already knew. On the WISC and WIAT his math-related scores ranged from 87-98, but with 76 kids in first grade, he was placed in the second- or third-highest of the four math groups. He wasn't in the group of top 16 kids and sometimes wasn't even placed with the top half of kids. For his group's geometry section, they looked for rectangles in their room, and he and another boy sat at the back of the class and talked about Dragonology. Until the OT evaluation, I didn't really have anything to support my claim that he should be in a higher math class -- and should be taught at a faster pace and perhaps given more material -- because they had those objective tests that "showed" he didn't know as much. In my neighborhood of pushy, overachieving parents, I would have been just another parent demanding my kid be switched into the higher class. I will feel more confident about demanding this next year, now that we have these test results.
His struggles with handwriting are also affecting his other subjects. His school uses the Writer's Workshop model, so he is expected to write -- a lot -- about what he reads (luckily, they have been pretty accommodating about letting him pick his books from the library and home) and write fiction and non-fiction.
His teacher suggested we request an evaluation for OT services, which we did this spring. The OT evaluator didn't seem to do much testing, honestly -- it seemed more like she looked at him writing and decided he should get OT. The IEP was faxed to me the day after school got out. His IEP essentially says he should be given OT twice a week in 30 minute sessions, after school, and get a scribe and 2X time for completing tests. It also says they will seek input from the treating OT as to whether other modifications are necessary. Therapy will be paid for by the school district and will occur only during the school year.
I really know so little about handwriting issues, so I don't know if this IEP seems reasonable and if the OT will be making the right recommendations, so I'm hoping as the school year goes by to get your feedback on what is happening -- I thought this might also be one area where the young scholars program would be helpful.
I DO know that he has responded very badly to all my attempts at home to have him practice his handwriting, or pursue any academic area that didn't interest him. He gets sullen, teary, uncooperative. I take your point about pushing him to the point where he is challenged and I just looked at Aleks and I think I will try that with him -- perhaps if he is not getting the instruction from ME, he will be more receptive.
I am so leery of pushing because of something that happened when he had just turned four. One Saturday, he called me into his bedroom, where he had a bunch of alphabet letters. He explained how reading worked and proceeded to put together many different words, cat, cot, lot, bot, bat ... on and on just changing one letter to produce another word with a short vowel sound. After a prompt from me, he added two-syllable words with short vowel sounds that didn't repeat any letters. (It was an alphabet, so only one of each of the letters!) This went on for more than an hour. I was really excited for him and he seemed to have such a good time, I decided to introduce the concept of silent e to make a long vowel sound. He didn't get it. Within five minutes, he said he wasn't interested in doing any more. He did absolutely no more reading until kindergarten, when he suddenly started reading again at Level P. He wanted me to read books to him in those intervening years, but he would refuse to do so much as sound out a letter.
Reading the book Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom, I got some insight into this behavior. From the moment he could talk, he has been having people tell him how very smart he is, and he's never had to struggle to do all of those things that made total strangers tell us he was smart and he should get tested, or go to their kids G&T program/school when he was older. So much so, that he would introduce himself by saying, "Hello, I'm _____. I'm tall and I'm smart!" It was a big part of his identity and he loved the exclamations he would get from other people by identifying obscure dinosaurs or imagining in the sandbox that he was drilling through igneous rock that had been hurtled by his volcano onto the sandstone, which is a sedimentary rock.
All of a sudden, with this incident with reading, he went from showing me how smart he was to not getting something and feeling less smart -- so he simply stopped. From reading Teaching Gifted Kids, I realized that I needed to show him that there is also value in trying, not just "being," and I've tried to emphasize that, and that I think it is great when he is struggling to learn or do something, because it shows he is really challenging himself. Instead, he still seems to just panic and shut down. I'm thinking that if he could have that struggle -- just not in front of me -- he might react better. That's why I think Aleks might work.
At any rate, I think I have half-discussed two of the issues we're facing. For the handwriting, do you have any books or resources you would recommend, and for the fear or trying anything challenging that makes him feel less smart, any strategies to get him to try new things and work at a challenge level?
Once again, thanks so much for your responses.
