He did not know vowels beforehand.
Step 1) I specifically named the list of vowels at least 3 times in the course of my short (2 minute) explanation and offered examples in words for each vowel. He didn't get any of it. he used random guessing to try to ID the vowels.
Step 2) I had him repeat the vowels back to me once. Just once. I dd not check to see if he got it beyond his repeating the vowels back to me in a list. We did no further practice or work with vowels for a full hour.
Step 3) An hour later, I asked him to name the vowels, and he named A, E, O and sometimes Y as vowels. He also knew that he was missing a couple. When I randomly named a bunch of letters, asking "is I a vowel? Is T a vowel?" he was able to say correctly "yes, that's a vowel" or "no, that wasn't on the list."
Listening alone is a weakness. He has to repeat things.
I am a big fan of questioning as a teaching tool. I'm practically Socratic in the way I work with kids most of the time (unless I get on a subject that I like to drone on about. I do that sometimes. DS8 eats it up; DS6 walks away.). For some reason, questioning doesn't usually work for DS6. He replies "I don't know" and that's the end of it as far as he's concerned. I prod, I say "give it a guess at least!" but he'll have none of it. Either he knows the answer or he doesn't. I have always chalked this up to his perfectionism. But answering questions is certainly not his learning method of choice, sadly. I'm not sure if that's related to his other issues or not.
We had been thinking that he might be a visual learner with a visual processing disorder, but that seems odd. If you had a visual processing disorder, wouldn't you favor auditory or kinesthetic learning? Why would you favor your weak area?
But if he's a visual learner whose *auditory* processing problem is *interfering* with his visual learning, well, that explains a lot. And auditory problems can interfere with reading, which I would have expected to be a favorite source of info for him.
I do think he is a visual/kinesthetic learner--note his strengths in math, chess and piano, not to mention his 4-leaf-clover spotting and his PRI strength on the WISC--but because he has this weird auditory processing problem, he has trouble "hearing what he sees" when it comes to taking in verbal information.
It fits.
It seems to be giving him trouble with reading, silent or on-paper problem-solving, and anything said aloud to him and not repeated by him. He must say it out loud--not just hear it said by someone else--to understand. Unfortunately, that makes relatively ineffective nearly every standard way of conveying information to a child!
I'm not sure yet what we need to do to help him. I'm not sure we're even at that stage yet. I suspect we need some tests specific to auditory processing problems to try to be a bit more sure about what we're seeing. As much sense as all this makes to me, I'm no expert. Maybe I'm just clutching at straws and it's something else entirely. I think we need a pro to take a look.
I get the testing report at the end of the week, and the psychologist and I will put our heads together then to try to figure out what's next. I suspect I'll be making an appointment with either the neuropsychologist or someone else specializing in auditory learning issues.
