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    #103720 05/28/11 12:09 PM
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    ukmum Offline OP
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    Hi
    My son aged 6 had a WISC IV IQ test and the scaled scores were as follows:-

    Verbal comprehension (VCI)
    Similarities � 16
    Vocab � 12
    Comprehension � 17

    Perceptual reasoning
    Block design � 14
    Picture concepts -12
    Matrix reasoning -12

    Working memory
    Digit span � 8
    Letter number sequencing � 11

    Processing speed
    Coding � 10
    Symbol search - 10

    Due to the disparity of results there was no overall IQ score but the VCI was 130. Hope it is OK to post here as we are in England and the test was done by the NHS. Their overall conclusion was that he does not have a deficit in any area and even his lowest score of 8 on the digit span is �within an average level�.

    Am I correct that a score of 8 is on the 25th centile and that anything between the 25th and 75th centile is average in the UK?

    There were no recommendations for school to alter their approach based on these results. We advised the educational psychologist that we have simplified the way we give instructions at home which has been successful for us but she did not appear to understand why we would do this and advised that he does not have any difficulties with auditory processing. Our reasoning is that we tend to talk to him at a level of his comprehension (several years ahead of his age) but his ability to follow our instruction is worse than his 3 year old brother which we felt might be due to his short term auditory memory.

    If he were happy at school we would not be concerned about recommendations for them but unfortunately he is very frustrated by his work, often angry at playtimes and reluctant to go to school. He is not achieving anything much at school from the little we know for example he gets his maths wrong as he reverses his numbers. He refuses to write and is unable to form his letters correctly and says he is always the last to finish any task. He has told his teacher he does not need to learn to write. However at home he is interested in everything, constantly questioning and discussing things and spends most of his time reading highly technical books on space or science although he will on occasion read fiction too such as Roald Dahl.

    All advice on this IQ result and any suitable recommendations for school based on these scores are welcome or for us to help our son.

    Many thanks

    ukmum #103732 05/28/11 05:41 PM
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    My DD9yrs had very similar scores when tested at 7yrs5mth:

    Similarities 16
    Vocab 13
    Compreh 14

    Block Design 14
    Picture Concepts 11
    matrix reas 12

    Digit Span 8
    Letter Number Seq 6

    Coding 15
    Symbol Search 9

    Her comprehension and Letter Number Sequencing scores were appreciably lower than your DS, and her coding was appreciably higher. The rest are VERY similar.

    She has sensory processing issues, retained reflexes and has just this month been diagnosed with Auditory processing disorder. We are sure she has dyslexia and ADHD and are working on getting those formalised at the moment. Her first school kept assuring us that she was so bright that it was just a developmental/maturity thing and it would all click when she was ready and she would catch on soon. We changed school at the beginning of yr2 and they took the opposite approach of "She's so bright there has to be something wrong", so the testing started. She's had very intensive support at school and home and has now caught up with not just the national average for age, but her school's average (which is well above the national average). She's turned back into the happy and confident 4yr old we knew before school started, it was a rough 4.5yrs in between.

    Learning to read was absolute torture for my DD. She used to squirm around next to me on the couch trying to inch away up the back of the couch like she was being physically tortured. We could look at "The cat sat on the mat" and she would not be able to remember the first letter of any three letter word by the time we got to the third (naming each one was agony in and of itself). When we moved from "cat" to "sat" she would not recognise the "a" or the "t" or the "at" sound. If you turned the page and saw "The cat sat on the hat" she would not recognise she had seen any of those letters or words only seconds before. She was verbally precocious but simply could not comprehend any sort of mapping from the language she spoke to symbols on a page.

    Interestingly I looked back and realised that we had had the same problem with the symbols for numbers. At some point around 2.5-3.5 yrs old I had realised that her math concepts were way in advance of her peers but they all knew the symbols for numbers and she did not. She had one to one correspondence and basic addition and subtraction, they had counting in order and symbols... It took me MONTHS of looking at letter boxes as we walked every day to teach her the symbols 1-9.

    Despite all expert advice to the contrary (and what I can see works really well with DD2) having pictures related to the text did NOT help my DD learn to read. Partly because she could decode a picture with the best of them and fake reading, partly because if there was ANYTHING other than the words to look at that was what she would remember. She would not map the picture of the cat to the word "cat" she would just remember the picture. She did not start making any progress at all until we started doing the alphabet on starfall.com and flashcards of high frequency words and word rules (for example I made cards with "can" on one side and "cane" on the other, "tape" and "tape", "pin" and "pine").

    She did preschool and two years of formal school at the first school that thought it would all "just click" and in that time she had reached fairly reliable recognition of most of the alphabet (though not both names and sounds for every letter) and that was all. And that was only after starfall and flashcards. With amazing special ed support at her second school she has caught up but it was hard slog for everyone. She's now starting to show how fast she can learn concepts and how deeply she can understand them, but she still misses lots in the classroom too. We often have no idea whether her understanding of what is required of her is correct or not.

    I don't know how access to services works in the UK (we are in Australia) but I have found seeing a paediatric sensory OT and an audiologist invaluable. We currently have appointments booked with an behavioural optometrist and a developmental paed. I am going to PM you some notes from a recent conference I went to that really changed my understanding of inattentive ADHD (previously called ADD in Australia) and left me convinced this applied in my DDs case.

    Note: my mother in law reports that my DH learning to read looked exactly the same as my DD, specifically looking like it physically pained him, and was an equally slow and agonizing process. He's now an extremely competent technical reader and can scan for the information he needs with the best of them, but he reads fiction at about half to a quarter of the speed that I do. And when reading aloud he mispronounces words he would never pronounce that way in conversation ("said" for example). My DH and I were both late readers and generally late bloomers academically.

    Oh and one more slightly "out there" idea. You may have heard the Steiner theory that children are not ready to read until they start getting adult teeth? Well grasping at straws I asked our special ed co-ordinator about this and she first said "No, I know nothing about Steiner theories and don't approve of their delaying reading" when I clarified about the teeth she said "Oh of course - whenever kids come to me I ask to see their teeth and for the harder cases I don't expect progress until they start getting adult teeth." In her experience there were plenty of kids that learned to read with ease regardless of the teeth situation, but for the kids for whom it was not easy there was some developmental issue that was timed with teeth and their reading did improve around the same time they started getting adult teeth. And this was a factor for my DD who is a long, slow, late teether.

    ukmum #103755 05/29/11 01:08 PM
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    ukmum Offline OP
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    Thank you very much for your responses. Much appreciated.

    Mumofthree - thank you so much for your PM - that was very interesting and I will look at that further. Really glad that your daughter is improving. Yes it must help to know that your husband was the same. I was a model student, keen to please and dont think our son takes after my husband either. I am unable to help my son at home as he refuses to try to write and comes out of school needing to de stress but luckily he finds immersing himself in books relaxing. By the way my friend had mentioned about the teeth theory and my son still has all his baby teeth whereas all his friends have started to lose theirs.
    The only services we have here in the UK are those you pay for unless your child is far behind everyone (rather than far behind their IQ) as far as I understand it. Not sure if we have all the professionals you have mentioned but my sons school dont think he needs any help.


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