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They did do CTOPP these were the percentile ranks:

Phonological Awareness 58th percentile
Phonological Memory 92nd percentile
Rapid Naming 8th percentile

Hey Athca!! Glad to see you made it over this way. These are the people you need to answer your questions and offer great advice. Good luck tomorrow!

Hi Athca,
Welcome. I'm so glad you are here. Your impression of your son as 'unusually bright' has been confirmed by the numbers. You should apply to DYS, it isn't a gaurentee that your son will be accepted, but it's certianly worth a try.

My son has similar Verbal and Performance scores to yours, with slightly weaker Working Memory, and Processing speed around 75th% (I can't remember exactly, but it's below average.)
For my son, it was part of Sensory Integration issues, anxiety, motor planning issues, slow-as-molasses-in-January issues, and ADD. He did very well once he learned to type at age 9. At age 10 I changed his school, to a private school, and told them - "I know he is bright - but you must agree to treat him 'as if' he has a writing disability, and allow him to type on a laptop anything longer than 3 sentences or math. BTW - for Math, turn the notebook paper sideways!

The laptop worked great once DS learned to type, and I sat with him and I bribed him big time to get that to happen. When my son finally learned to type, it was like watching Elsa the Lion return to the wild in the movie 'Born Free.' Very wonderful. Even though my son's scores aren't as much of a scatter as your sons, it was like his mind was finally being allowed to roam the savannah at full speed. ((little tear))

I get that your son is already feeling dumb in the regular classroom, and moving to the gifted classroom could be great:
(If, for example, on of the reasons he feels dumb is that his peers give him those blank looks when he tries to gain their interest in games or jokes he thinks are funny.)
or it could be terrible: (If the particular group of boys in the program are into the 'entity theory' of intelligence, and needing to compare themselves to each other over every little thing to see 'who has it and who doesn't.')

However - I would still encourage you to call the Gifted Coordinator at the other school just to request a meeting to sit down and 'pick her brain.' She may have seen other kids with similar spreads and be full of suggestions of things to try and even offer herself as a resouce to the teachers at your home school. Or she may beg you to give her program a try. I doesn't hurt to ask.

The ideal thing is to go over there and observe the classroom for a few hours and see what is going on over there, educationally and socially.

Best Wishes,
Grinity

Hi athca:
You have a lot to read and think about in the next few days before your next school meeting.

At some point soon, once you get a little more comfortable with all this information and ask more questions perhaps, I would suggest that you explain all this to your ds, if you haven't already. You might even put it in context of the bell curve. Just visually mapping out the bell curve (without numbers) and explaining the idea of it has been hugely helpful for my dds. You can tell him how unusually high his knowledge tested ("you're way out here to the right", how high his ability to figure thing out tested ("even farther"), and even how strong his memory tested. And then explaining how unusually low his processing speed tested (especially relative to the others), and what that might feel like. (A racecar in molasses? who's got a better metaphor? )

I bet he might have an "ahah" moment.

I suggest you read this:

http://eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/stealth-dyslexia-when-writing-is.html

Thank you all so very much for all your suggestions and insight.

Grinity - I am in Ontario, Canada so we can't apply for DYS but I will look into programs on this side of the border. Also, you bring up a good point about the gifted program possibly not being a good fit - very good insight and something that I had not even considered... as for the typing we started tonight, I already had a Mavis Beacon program that I had bought, he wasn't too interested in it a while ago but tonight I told him he had to practice 10 minutes a night and he was receptive to that

Cathy and Mich - I had read about stealth dyslexics in "The Mislabeled Child" and wondered if that was what was going on - I suggested dyslexia to the psychologist in the beginning but she didn't comment on it at all in her report. I kinda assumed she would have screened for this - but I will ask about it specifically.

Herenow - you are absolutely right I do need to sit down with him to explain what is going on. At bedtime he told me that there is no one else like him - I told him that we are all unique but that there are other people who learn similarly to him and we will talk about it tomorrow.

Kathleen'smum - a million thank you's!! I am so glad that I saw your post on the other forum - a serendipitous moment for sure --> Kathleen'smum and I used to commiserate when we both had sleepless babies on a different forum about 8 years ago, I hadn't been on for years, I went on a couple days ago right after she had posted a link to this site for someone else...

My DD8.5 really loved the Dance Mat typing lessons on the BBC kids website. If he gives you any resistance to the other program.. check it out!


And now we have good reasons for why our babies were so intense!!

The pseudo reading scores (reading nonsense words to test if the student can apply decoding skills) is significantly weaker than the other skills. Spelling is also quite low at 88. This makes me wonder if he is solid on his the sound symbol relationship (phonics).

It is good that the first two CTOPP scores are solid. This tells me he has adequate phonological processing (although I'd like to see the subtest scores that make up these composite scores to make sure a "high score" isn't covering up a "low" score within the same composite). His rapid naming skills are very low - this is the ability to quickly retrieve rote information and is closely linked to how automatic and fluent a person is with reading. His scores are not surprising given low PSI and low math fluency - many of the same skills are needed.

There are a number of theories about dyslexia. Most believe that there are at least two underlying skills to good reading: phonological processing (sound symbol relationship) and rapid naming (the ability to quickly retrieve). Given your son's scores, I would suggest that you pursue whether or not your child might have a language based learning disability, with a primary weaknesses in the naming skills. If the psychologist is not experienced in dyslexia, I would suggest seeking help from someone that is. I'm concerned that because your son is so bright, he may be able to compensate in the early grades. But, as time goes on, this will be harder and harder. And, along the way he may begin to believe that he is not smart or worthy.

Here is a good article about "double deficit" dyslexia - it explains the rapid naming issues: http://ase.tufts.edu/crlr/files/namgspd.pdf http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar00/dyslexia.aspx

Another researcher agrees that naming speed is critical, but believes it is a bit different than a double deficit:
http://www.fcrr.org/publications/publicationspdffiles/Fluency_chapter-Torgesen%26Hudson.pdf

All in all, it would make sense to get more information and to question your evaluator. Given how you describe your son's struggles and the scores you have posted, it looks like your reading concerns may be valid. (did he do the GORT - Grey Oral Reading? I would suspect that his fluency and rate were much lower than his comprehension - and lower than his cognitive ability)

One last resource: International Dyslexia Association http://www.interdys.org/

Best of luck!

Thanks again for all your input.

I have suspected dyslexia for a few years... DS will write 14 as 41 and then tell you it says 14, he doesn't do it everytime but once in a while. He also makes numbers and most letters backwards (starting from the bottom and going up or starting on the right hand side rather than the left hand side etc.).

The teacher has said that it's not dyslexia because it doesn't happen all the time... at the end of testing the psych. said that the reversals will correct themselves with maturity.

My husband asked the psych. yesterday if she screened for dyslexia - she said she did and that dyslexia is more of a reading disorder and he wouldn't be able to read as well as he does if he had it...

Something tells me I should pursue this further.

I agree -
With a PRI of 99.8 he could probably read as well as he does if the letters were formed from the bodies of live, moving, ants.

But of course, how many professionals have ever met a kid with PRI of 99.8? Not too many.

Sigh,
Grinity