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.
It sure seems that this is what's going on. But remember, that you are very close to the age where keyboarding is going to be a viable option. I started bribing my son to practice "Mavis Beacon" at age 7, and by 9.5 he was touchtyping with ease, at about 100 wpm. I don't honestly know how a regular school could have helped him before he learned to type because he couldn't have done much subject acceleration without the typing - we kept him in public school, but he had a rough time of it. For him, his handwriting was messy and ugly and hard to read, and it hurt his hand to produce. The teachers wanted him to fill out worksheets in full sentences that echoed back the question, and he wanted to put "one word answers." Now that he is 11, with a single gradeskip, he lives in a "laptop" academic environment, where his homework is emailed to his teachers, and notes are taken on the laptop. He reports that his handwriting has even improved some. I wish that there had been a way for him to have both his typing skills and developed his handwriting, but I do want to reassure you that if you can help him develop his typing, it will solve many of these problems.
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.
Oh! I am so sorry this happened to him! It's really good that your school has Math Groups, although I doubt that even the top grade level Math will satisfy him in the long run. It will be interesting to see how the school reacts to the "new information" - one one hand the test results may be enough, on the otherhand, you may have to point to the IEP and say: I want the test redone, with a scribe, and 2x time. Interestingly, I always see the ability to not switch the numbers, or to keep the columns straight as one group of skills, and getting the ideas of math as another group of skills and perhaps memorizing times tables as a third- and that it's fine to zoom ahead in whatever skills area one is ready for, but my son's teachers have rarely agreed with me.
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.
Again it's a really good sign that they let him pick his books. I think that your school has some potential, once they start to apply what they know to your son's unique situation. Print out the Davidson's guide book to advocacy
http://print.ditd.org/Guidebook1.pdfand start highlighting!
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.
This IEP sounds excellent. I would insist that they add Typing Instruction and access to a keyboard when his typing becomes good enought to use as a tool. Is there someone at the school that you can talk to? Seems that they really want to have things in place by next year...is anyone around that you can talk to this summer?
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.
The IEP sounds like a very reasonable place to start. It's true that the other YSP parents will say - yes, "asynchronous development" has been an issue for some of our kids. and yes, for some of us OT helped, and yes, for others of us we gave up and went straight to keyboarding. That is a very helpful thing. It's ok to accept the lable to get the needed services, but it seems like this is so common, that it's more of an "alternate path to development" than a disability. The one other thing they will say is to try to balance the attention on the challenge areas with a chance to really move in the strength areas. Perhaps you son will enjoy doing OT excersises more if sometimes he is practicing the Greek alphabet and looking up what each of the letters mean in science. That sort of thing.
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 call this the Goldilocks problem. Once they have been left unnacomidated for so many years, everything seems "too hard or too easy, too rough or too smooth." Thats why the Moms who have brought their children home to school at this point have long periods of "unschooling" where they toss out the TV and lock up the video games and just do trips to the library, and let the kid heal before they start any kind of pushing. I'm not sure you have gotten to that point - and you might hunt around a bit before you take that drastic step. I like to use the "principles of unschooling" in my afterschooling attempts, and try to follow my son's interests 2/3rd of the time, and push my own agenda - typing practice 1/3 of the time, but of course - his 2/3 come first. I take the attitude that I can twist anything he's interested in to meet my goals, but unfortunatly, this is somewhat of an exaggeration.
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.
I don't think you did him any harm. As you try and try again, you will learn how to read him better. Think about this- all the other children have had use of those elementary school years to learn how to fight for learning - he's just learned to defend himself. His education so far has not led him to trust adults or himself. It takes a while, but you are making giant steps forward.
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.
I think that you are exactly right, and all the more reason to teach at home, so he has lots and lots of opportunities to feel this frustration, and hopefully, handle it more maturely that he did when he was 4. The more you provide him with chances to learn what he wants to learn, the more you are building his trust. Also, read anything by Sylvia Rimm, your above example could have come right from one of her books.
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.
He may actually want you next to him during the Aleks, or he may not. One of the terrific things about Aleks is that now, being careful is being positivily rewarded with one of the strongest motivators out there. I found that my son couldn't teach himself new material using Aleks, but I was eventually in a position where I could gently suggest that he "ask nicely" if he wanted my help. There was a lot of babyish temper tanturms before that point, but I figured "Who better than me for him to have them with?"
Best Wishes,
give it a try and let us know how it works out!
Trinity
