Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment 5 std dev variation in scores on the K-TEA

I suggest you mentally file away now to look into Silverman's articles on teaching spelling to Visual Spatial Learners for when your son starts needing to spell. If he is having to picture what he hears in order to process it then this spelling approach is probably going to be exactly what he needs to learn to spell. You may find reading what she has to say on Visual Spatial learners interesting in general.

Wow, thanks. That's my whole family right there.

Spelling is our nemesis. (Wanna know how many tries it took for me to get 'nemesis' right?)

Good stuff all the way to the bottom for my family with the Golon articles:
http://www.visualspatial.org/articles.php

Lots to think about and process.

That is a different page to the one I found the articles on, but it looks like most of the articles that really spoke to me were by Allie Golon. I laughed until I cried when I saw the title "How to get your children out the door - WITH THEIR SHOES". My eldest lost every pair of shoes she owned in a single term of yr1, even her gumboots. She was at a fairly alternative school where she only wore them in and out of the gate anyway, so I sent her barefoot until I was due to buy the next seasons shoes at the end of term...

This rings a bell. In my case, I had developed a large vocabulary (spoken and written) from rote memory - like mentioned above, I thought all words were sight words. In first grade I had trouble with writing and various aspects of phonological awareness, such as not being able to split words into syllables or syllables into letters, such that I was behind the kindergarten students (I was moved from a first grade class to a mostly-kindergarten class). My basic phonological awareness only caught up when I was roughly ten or eleven, when my dad found a copy of Hamlet, and there were still aspects of phonics that were a complete mystery to me in the sixth grade, despite having reading comprehension scores at the college level.

Incidentally, while I wasn't late to speak, I had unusual language mostly repeating phrases from TV, and when my dad gave me options for what kind of lunch meat, my delay in understanding the speech was such that I would just repeat back something he said (often the last thing) even when I didn't know what it was. After a few times of him telling me "You said you wanted X" after I started complaining I didn't get what I wanted, I learned to be less picky. My parents had no clue until WAY later that I had language difficulties apart from the syllable problems mentioned in one of the regularly scheduled parent-teacher conferences, when in high school and I had developed the skills to communicate the problems I had processing language. So that is a time advantage you have.

Whether it's a learning disability or something else, it's definitely something to keep an eye on to make sure the school doesn't ignore it, or worse blame him for being lazy and choosing not to cooperate with the assignment because he's "obviously smarter than that". First grade was one of my least favorite school years for a reason, when days often culminated with my thinking I'm just lazy and stupid and crying, fighting with my parents. It's fairly likely that he'll get frustrated by the math in the classroom - at one point I walked out of the classroom after arguing with the teacher why I shouldn't have to show my work in adding two numbers every single time after I've demonstrated I understand the process and continue to get the right answers, but temperaments differ, and he may handle it better. Still, it's easier to learn to play nice with the system and remain interested in a subject when you get outside enrichment to actually learn things about the topic (in case he can't access gifted programming for math).

And while the rote memorization fo words can last long and be surprisingly effective, it does wear off more quickly than other systems - my spelling began to degrade between 8th and 10th grade, a few years after a huge word learning spike, the worst offenders being double consonant words like "obsess" (AKA obbsess and obssess and obsses) and "resurrect" (AKA ressurrect and ressurect), and the a/e words like "relevant". Those tirp everyone up at some point, though, and I did develop a significant amount of phonological awareness by the end of elementary school, so that's probably an important factor in maintaining spelling/vocab. The inefficient way of handling this data is probably also contributed to my deep, abiding hatred for rote memorization tasks in the classroom setting. So the resources can be more intense to get to a similar result, and learning phonological awareness early probably is a good initial investment to free up thinking space, instead of continually filling up the RAM to the max and causing language to crash or come close to it.

I would also second MumofTHree's recommendation (argh! another one!*) about learning spelling in a visual spatial way, although I am not familiar with those particular articles. I learned my spelling lists by visualizing the page we got beforehand, and doing this, I learned enough words to read independently and learn new words beore they appeared on the list, and so did well on pre-tests even though I didn't ace those nearly as often (even in third grade up until about seventh or eighth grade, it was vastly more efficient to ask my dad how to spell a given word or what a particular written word was than to use a dictionary, and did terrible at our 3rd grade in-class lesson on how to use a dictionary to look words up).

And it is a good thing that you're paying attention to this and the potential to do better in language isn't getting squandered - after all, I had similar problems and basically majored in creative writing while in high school, some college English professors commenting that my writing is publishable (good thing they don't follow my internet posts, LOL). Where there's a will there's a way, so they say.

*Another easily confused word, that is, not another recommendation*

LOL That's my daughter, who tried to leave the house two mornings in a row, when the outside temperature was <10F without a shirt. We consider shoes advanced skills around here.

I gave up on waiting for Smart but Scattered from the library and went out and bought it.


DS can break words -> syllables -> sounds and can take sounds -> syllables -> words as long as it's not in print. If I say it for him, he can put it together. He knows all his letter sounds (and can read more letter sounds in a fixed amount of time on random letters than my DD9 can.) There is a gap between text-> sound and then hearing the sound he makes to make it a word.

Watching him thinking about rhymes makes it apparent to me there there is also a gap there in how he hears the sounds. At this point, he's been tested twice (KTEA as above and KRAL on the first day of school) to produce rhymes, which is did just fine. However, they were on real, common words. I'd be willing to put money on his inability to identify or produce rhymes to nonsense words. We've worked on this since last fall when I discovered he didn't understand rhyming, so he's a veritable rhyming dictionary without much gut feeling of what rhyming really is: he's just memorized the word families.



YES. This is DS. It is positively infuriating to his parents.




I'm paying close attention to this because I feel that we did not respond appropriately until we had a lot of repair work to do for DD. By that point, she had been very effectively taught that you don't learn anything at school.

Gifted math programming starts in 4th grade in our district. Our school has about 1 3rd grader per year (out of ~120 kids per grade) placed into the year (that trend only valid for the last 3 years when Principal Cookie Cutter retired.)


Funny, my mom described to me last night about how she taught spelling to 7th graders in the 70s. It was practically word-for-word the method in those articles. I'm using Sequential Spelling on DD9 right now in an attempt to undo several years of inappropriate-to-her-spelling instruction. It's not V/S according to those articles. I'll test drive those methods on her 4th grade spelling lists as soon as they start coming home.

LOL add 'inappropriate' to the list.

Thanks ladies. I haven't gotten the answers I came here asking, but I've gotten a boat load of information.

I remember being told by our special Ed teacher that most dyslexics can't rhyme, so DD probably wasn't dyslexic. But I have a habit of talking in nonsense rhyme to my babies and have played rhyming games from when they could talk. Just a silly parenting quirk in my case, that may have been remedial.

Hmmm, my reading says that dyslexia is an umbrella of many sub-types, where some affect the phonological processing more than others. So it might just be that her form of dyslexia doesn't present with the rhyming problem?

I'm waffling - DS hasn't been in school. We do things "right" in terms of reading to our kids, including lots of poetry, but DS might just need a more systematic approach to teaching the phonological awareness skills.

We're giving it time, but in the mean time I'm making an appointment with the kindergarten teacher and the vice principal to discuss the report.

Sigh. This is a good example of a situation in which trying to avoid doing too much testing is leaving us with data that is very difficult to interpret. It's also a good example of a situation in which getting testing done by people who spend most of their time in situations in which "average" would be wonderful means that they get bedazzled by the few high scores and figure nothing's really wrong.

It is really hard to tell from this whether you're looking at a kid with a language-based LD, stealth dyslexia, ADHD, Asperger's, nothing really wrong but splinter skills that are confusing people into expecting that everything should be that good, or something else. I could defend any or all of those hypotheses based upon the data, but couldn't prove anything with what we've got here.

You need some broad-based cognitive testing to put this data into perspective. Given that they did the K-TEA for achievement, it might be a good idea to use the K-ABC for the cognitive test. It's conormed with the K-TEA, so it will be more possible to compare data and say, "Are these differences statistically significant? Are they unusual in the population? Do they match up with the problems we see in real life for this kid?" It also has some nice options at this age for out-of-level administration of subtests for gifted kids, too.

But my bet is that if you do only the IQ test, you're still not necessarily going to have a good basis for resolving between those hypotheses -- neuropsych screening at least will help, and if the Asperger's thing has any possibilities (note that it is typically extremely subtle at this age with GT kids), my experience has been that projectives are the place where that becomes the most clear one way or the other.

Dyslexia is a broad umbrella -- *many* dyslexics have difficulty with phonological processing, but there are many other subtypes. Also, note that rhyming is the easiest phonological processing task we have, so saying "dyslexics can't rhyme" is a massive oversimplification -- may serve the pressure put on the special ed teacher to avoid referring kids, but doesn't match the real world.

Thank you for that Aimee.

We have an appointment with a psychologist in October through Children's that may lead to the neuropsych exam. This process was launched by our ped who was kinda clueless on DS, but could see what I was talking about.... I'm the one that started the process that lead to the testing above by getting his hearing fully checked. The audiologist noted some things that looked like language processing problems, and so we were sent to the Speech and Language clinic with those observations, and a few more I tacked on about the rhyming issue.

I have an appointment with the kindergarten teacher in two weeks. I asked that she take some time to get to know DS before we met, but I'd like to go over the test scores with her. I'll talk about dyslexia with her at that point, but I also need to talk to her about the math. I tried to get in with our new assistant principal (who I'm told will be my ally), but she passed me off to the school psych (who I know is not my ally). The district is also under the gun on the dyslexia front with a new parent group making the administration circle the wagons. I'm being somewhat cautious on that front as a result.

Asperger's isn't really a consideration at this point. There are really no indicators of it with this kid, and a few things I'm told are specifically contra-indicators. He understands what others are thinking and may or may not understand, and he can verbalize his reasoning. He's aware of other people's moods. He's flexible with new routines and sudden changes in plans. He can tolerate a variety of levels of stimuli; he varies his interests and play over days to weeks. He likes playdates and can play well; he gets puns and jokes. He doesn't really flip out, and when he does, it's easily resolved.

Alright, so I just googled a bit and read through a bunch of "Asperger's checklists." Not my kid. The -->only<-- thing that sort of fits is "unusual interests" or "unusual play interests." He's a 5 year old that plays chess and does Sudoku. He's really interested in things like rocks, the Earth's interior and Earth's history (see my user name: it's part of the home environment). None are at all obsessive (OK, our sitter would think the chess is obsessive, but that's mostly a reaction to her trial-by-fire need to learn to play herself.)

Edit: Upon rereading, it's interesting to me: Note I didn't list math as a particular interest. We talk about math and mathematical ideas, we all watched the Nova on fractals. He lobbies for candy in the grocery store by calculating for me *how cheap* it could be (but mommy, it's only 20 cents an ounce!) He did beg for math homework last spring, which led to him working through a Singapore book when printing worksheets off online was putting too much wear and tear on my printer. The Singapore book was shelved for much of the summer, and I noted yesterday that it was back out again.