Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional testing and 2e and confused

I am so glad that I found this forum because I see that I am not alone! I have a son who just turned 5 who gets speech therapy and OT and has been diagnosed with Sensory processing Disorder - he is not autistic or Aspergers - just has a sensitive system....we have known for quite awhile that he is extremely bright as well. We have had his OT and Speech teachers over the past several years tell us they believe he is very gifted and that his issues are stemming more from the fact that he is gifted than he is SPD. We have been very stressed about his placement in Kindergarten in the Fall as I am a K teacher and he is leaps and bounds beyond the league of Kindergarten. We wanted so desperatly to take him to Dr. Amend to do gifted testing since he has such a history with SPD children but we just couldn't raise the money for the trip from Florida to Kentucky..so we found someone a few hours away. Our little guy wasn't feeling his best the week of the testing but he got really upset when we suggested waiting - so we went ahead with it....VERY dumb on our part. 2 days after the testing we went to the docs and found out that he had a raging ear infection and ended up spending 12 hours in the Emergency Room from severe vomitting and dehydration. So in my opinion, not the best testing set up for him!!!

He took the Stanford-Binet 5 and it was split into 2 sections for him. When he came out to use the potty near the end of the first day he told me he wanted to be done and didn't want to do anymore and I could tell that he was shutting down and I told the assessor and she said she just had a little more to do and wanted to try to get it finished up....so he went back in with a big "I'm ticked off" look on his face and her definition of a little more was like 20 minutes. We came back 2 days later to do the next part. When I sat down to discuss the testing I saw a lot of things that concerned me...his score was 125 but it was all over the place and I saw right away that it was in areas I knew were greatly affected by his sensory disorder....he has a real problem with manipulating puzzle pieces or block pieces and being able to properly send the signal from visually organizing them to making his fingers place them where they should go because his sensory system goes into overload and he just sees a jumble...but if he is able to block out parts of them at a time so he only focuses on sections, he is very able to do puzzles and copy block designs. We have to do the same when he is reading - we have a paper that blocks out all the other print other than the sentence/line he is reading. His fine motor skills are also not great since he has issues with visual perception and he is very much able to tell you where a puzzle piece goes faster than he is able to do it with his hands....the strange part is that he LOVES mazes and completes them in no time flat and even makes his own maze puzzles...which I just don't understand! His test sections he scored the lowest on were the last ones done on both days and I could tell that he had shut down when he came out for the potty break and sure enough the tester told me that he answered with a lot of "I'm tired", "I don't know". he scored very high in the fluid reasoning and quantitive reasoning sections and I guess I am totally confused with these scores...he scored in the 63% on nonverbal visual spatial (last test section done the first day of testing) but scored in the 99.6% on Visual Spatial verbal....how can you have such a difference in scores on the same thing - one is just verbal and the other nonverbal.

I am frustrated because some of the things she told me he had problems with pulled down his higher areas...such as looking at a picture and being able to distinguish the silly parts of it...I told her that he gets visually overwhelmed when a picture is shown to him with many things going on in it because his sensory system gets overloaded but if he is able to block out sections at a time before taking in the whole picture he has no issues....stuff like Where is Waldo - he is really interested in it but you can see it in his face when he opens up the page - he is just overwhelmed with the amount of stuff on the page and he can't focus on one area he tries to take it all in at once and gets overwhelmed. She said but when she just spoke with him, he obviously could explain how certain things don't belong together or would be silly.

When I called and spoke with our school district she was pretty much "out of the loop" when I said I firmly believe that my son is 2e and did he need the exact score of 130 in order to qualify for services...she said it had to be 130 with no exceptions which makes no sense to me....so my son isn't able to build puzzles but he scores in the 99.6% in verbal visual spatial, 98% in nonverbal fluid reasoning, and 95% in both verbal/nonverbal quantitative reasoning??? I had a few gifted teacher friends tell me that I really should look at having the test redone because in their opinions, having a diagnosed bad, ear infection at the time of the test and harboring a nasty stomach virus that sent him to the hospital did not allow him to show his true colors....would love to hear opinions??? Thanks for just letting me share!

Oh Belle,
I feel your pain on this one! So hard to wait for the right opportunity, and sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't! It seems to me that the school can do it's own testing and on a different day your son might do much differently. When my DS11 was tested in school at 4th grade, they broke it up into 6 visits, I think!

I'm not sure if the tester is allowed to modify the test for folks with particular disabilities, but I do agree that his challenges are masking his giftedness, and in a way, that's what you mainly wanted to know. Will his challenges mask his giftedness in a real life situation? That matters more, in the long run.

I want to say "Well Done" for having gotten him to the OT at this young age! Also 'well done" for being able to look at him and 'know' that he isn't doing Kindy level work. I guess the questions now are:

1) Is he happy in Kindy?
2) Is he learning that learning involves 'a bit of a challenge?'
3) Is he acting out at school?
4) Do you anticipate 1st grade will be worse? (Longer day, more focused on reading, etc.
5) Is the gifted program worth fighting for? What I've overheard is that for MG (moderatly gifted kids, the majority of gifted who are around that 130 mark if there was some mythical way to reduce a child to an acurate number) a program that meets a few hours a week can be enough to keep that child engaged in school, but for more unusually gifted kids the pull outs don't provide much unless that child is with older kids.

It's great that you have gifted teacher-friends, but if they are constantly around MG kids, they might not have 100% reliable advice for your own child, who his OT and Speech teachers believe is 'very gifted.' 2E issues are very tough to deal with, this is cutting edge stuff. In other words, don't expect that if you can get him into the gifted program at school that the school will be able to 'take it from there.' Although that does happen. Think more about what his actual needs are and how they can be met.

I think it's very important at age 5 to introduce the idea that "in our family" Mom gives you her own learning assignments that refect your readiness level, M-F, with few exceptions, no matter what the school is or isn't doing! We've got a great thread on hothousing if this idea scares you. Maybe only 10 or 15 minutes a day, but you want to give him the idea that working at learning is normal. This is one of those 'do as I say' and not as I did, areas. If he hasn't memorized his Addition Facts, work those in, maybe verbally, and then go on to Multiplication Facts. It it isn't fun for him, mix in work that will be. It might seem difficult to do it now, but as he gets older, he'll be even pickier about what he does and doesn't like doing if he hasn't gotten the idea that 'he must.'

If I had it to do over again, I would have insisted that DS eat (or at least taste) vegtables at every meal. Such a free spirit I was!

Grins,
Grinity

Belle, your ds sounds a bit like my ds, who also just turned 5, has SPD and is still in speech therapy. As for OT for SPD, he's done for now - we did a short but intensive program at the Star Center last fall in combination with listening therapy. They strongly believe in doing OT for SPD in an intensive fashion (more than once per week). So my first thought would be to make sure you're getting the kind of OT he needs for sensory - I think it's not easy to find the right OT, who really knows what they're doing (as opposed to just "thinking" they know what they're doing; not just brushing, for example). It seems that slowly there are more OT places springing up that are well-versed in SPD than there used to be. Secondly, I would incorporate some sort of sensory diet if you haven't already done so. (uh, speaking of do as I say and not as I do LOL - I'm trying to do this. I also have a dd with SPD).

And as you indicate, it sounds like fine motor issues (as a component of SPD) were affecting his score. This is one reason I'm waiting on testing ds privately; I don't want to waste the money if I don't think the score will accurately represent his IQ (that, and the fact that we're not applying to any particular program at the moment - he's currently in what seems to be an excellent situation in a montessori school, and his teacher is very flexible in working with both his strengths and his weaknesses. he'll have the same teacher/classroom for K next year). But he's more than a grade level ahead in math from what his teacher tells me, indeed not far off from his 7 y.o. sister who is also 2E.

But what really, really, really jumps out at me from your post, and perhaps you've already investigated this angle since you do discuss vision processing, is the vision stuff. Has he been evaluated by a behavioral optometrist? http://www.covd.org/ We've had to go this route for DD7, and she's almost done with vision therapy, finally... It has helped tremendously. If he can't block out the other text on the page from what he's trying to read, he could easily have a problem with eye teaming like my dd, and fortunately that would be very fixable. The vision therapy was very hard for dd in the beginning - it took forever to get through the daily exercises - but then we stopped in order to have time for the intensive OT for SPD (which started out as 3x per week - we were pretty busy!), and when we re-started the vision therapy, the difference was huge - it was so much easier for dd to get through the vision exercises. The vision therapist was shocked. The OT had told us that by working on dd's vestibular and proprioceptive SPD issues, it would ultimately affect things like ocular motor control, but I found it hard to believe until I saw the results. Anyhow, from what you describe about your ds, it sounds like his eyes are indeed not focusing on the same point at the same time, only in a more extreme way than for my dd. (by the way, dd's vision issue was NOT picked up by the regular checkup at the pediatric opthamologist; but a few weeks after that appt, we did IQ testing and the testers commented that the way she did the block design indicated a vision issue.)

As for school services, I think you need to define for yourself what exactly it is that you want. The vast majority of school districts do not provide OT for SPD. My ds will be getting OT for fine motor/handwriting - we're in the middle of the IEP process right now - but that's such a narrow thing. The OT who services the school has been so helpful about recommending things to do at home, sensory diet, etc., to help his sensory issues in general as well as core body strength, which apparently will ultimately help with ds's fine motor issues. As for speech therapy, that's more of a cut and dried thing - we had a tough time with the eval process this past month (ds did not want to speak to the speech therapist who was trying to do the eval) and the special ed team was freaking out about so-called "social/emotional" issues that I don't believe he has (I think they were trying to pathologize his introversion, long story) but eventually he talked to her and he tested within normal limits on language so it's only articulation that needs work, which he'll be getting (duh, I could have told them that. but then they act all surprised.) And as for gifted programming, what are the choices? Our district has both pull out services (which IMO happens to be lame) and a full time gifted program, but neither starts until second grade, and neither seems well-suited for a 2E kid. I was flipping through the full time gifted program's handbook on line the other day and was rather surprised to see it written that it's only for one type of gifted kid, and has all kinds of stringent requirements for keeping achievement 2 grade levels ahead in all areas, etc. or else. (I know my kids are 2E so things are different, but even regular gifted kids can be asynchronous, geez). Our school district will offer special ed services, but to my knowledge there's nothing they really do for 2E kids. I did find a state document on 2E, but it also requires that the learning issue be an official Learning Disability under federal law, and I'm not sure whether my kids' learning issues would qualify; not that we've tried yet. Fortunately we're happy with the montessori situation for now - it's a public charter, so ds can get speech and OT services during the school day next year - but it's something I am constantly re-evaluating.

I think your gut feeling is probably right, that the conditions on the day of his testing on the SB5 were far less than ideal, and that the score is probably not accurate. Was the tester experienced at testing gifted kids? how about 2E kids? these are questions I would want to find out the answers to, before you do any further testing. And I think there's some kind of required time lag before you can do the same test again (a year). When we had our dd tested at the Gifted Development Center, they chose the WISC IV, but at the time I hadn't read enough about tests to ask why that was the particular one they wanted to use. Not surprisingly, there were differences between scores among sections; I suspect that's what they were looking for - they ended up calculating the GAI and I think they see the other sections (working memory and processing speed) as more diagnostic of learning issues. It was our first exposure to this new world of giftedness with learning issues, and so we learned an awful lot. But it sounds like you already know an awful lot. So your district has some kind of gifted programming that starts in K? And you were doing the testing for that purpose?

Obviously these are stream of consciousness thoughts. I'm sure I'll have to come back and edit this later.

Thank you SO much to everyone who replied - you have no idea how nice it is has been to find this board and read SO many posts that have been on same topics that I have been wanting help in! So I apologize for rambling posts!

Since we know we will not be able to retake the SB until next year, several people have suggested taking the WPPSI since this one seems to be the one that our county prefers anyways. I think I will go into this with a different outlook - instead of driving him several hours to a location and then expecting him to still be focused on a test, we found someone locally. We will go in for many "hi" visits where my son can walk through the office and say hi to the psychologist well before any testing is done so he can become more comfortable with the setting and we will discuss options about breaking up the testing time so that hopefully we can get an accurate look.

The thing I think is most frustrating is that when my son is in a comfortable setting sensory wise - he is this amazing little boy who just can't seem to get enough of wanting to know everything about everything. He is the child that I have listened to running around the playground yelling at his friends to look up and see the cumulionumbus clouds because he saw on the weather channel that morning that a front was moving through and wouldn't it be cool if a super cell formed. Last week he came home with a drawing that to anyone else looked like a bunch of different colored lines all on top of each other...when I asked him what it was, he explained to me that he did it in the art center and it was a picture of the layers of the earth and he pointed out and told me the names of the crust, the mantle and the core. Last year he came home with a picture he had drawn showing his idea of what the continents might have looked like if they were on different plates and had drifted in different directions (he is in love with plate tectonics). His last year OT told us that she was just blown away by him with his abilities (along with some others that have worked with him)- but he was SO at peace with her and in her class setting where we brought him for services. He is a night and day child when he is out of his sensory comfort zone. If his sensory needs are not being met, he is still way ahead of his classmates but his patience level drops and he gets frustrated more. When his sensory needs are being met he is amazing. Take at home - he just turned 5, when he was about 4.5 he started watching the really cool show CyberChase and became fascinated with the show that talked about negative numbers and he began to set up his own games that involve negatives..he drew a chalk number line that went down our street, that went from 20 to negative 20 and then he rode his bike/scooter up and down the number line yelling out answers to his own math problems he came up with. He is in love with weather and storm chasing and he covers his whole playroom floor with block buildings and then creates his own "tornados" as they destroy the buildings and then using his ten zillion charts he has all over his walls (his playroom looks like a science lab with the periodic table, weather formation graphs, in depth charts of the solar system...) to help him determine the wind speeds of each "tornado" and charts what scale it was on the fujita scale. He was for some reason, totally fascinated with the story of the Titanic when he was 4 - he built an entire scenario in our living room out of legos of the titanic, the docking locations in Europe and it's planned final destination in America, the Carpethia, the iceburg and then using his maps, tried to grid out on the floor the exact striking point of the Titanic and the iceburg and then reinacted the whole scene including using a chart from a Titanic book that showed one of the final SOS messages taped out in Morse Code which he tried to duplicate by banging 2 sticks together...when he was 4! Kind of gave us an idea that we were dealing with something a little different here :-) This is him on a daily basis! These actions along with many, many more have lead a lot of people to believe that his SB score was just not accurate.

As a K teacher, we knew from the start that with his numerous ear infections, that speech was going to be a problem so he started Speech Therapy at 2 and had an IEP with the school system for both Speech and OT at age 3. We got the Sensory Disorder diagnosed very early and he began private Sensory Based therapy at the same time...so he got both Public and private OT for the past 2 years and we are very happy that we were proactive in getting that started as soon as possible. The thing that makes me get upset is that sometimes when people meet him, they automatically think he was like locked up in his room since birth and we force feed this stuff to him...when the complete opposite is true - he taught himself the numbers and letters/sounds/reading...if he asked us questions, we would help him find the answers, I remember him wanting to get on and explore websites on the computer when he was 3 - we literally had word cards with his favorite words/topics written on them - he would go to the computer, pick what topic he wanted and then would pull up the Yahoo search engine himself, he knew exactly where to go and would type in the topic himself copying it off the word card and then would spend hours exploring solar system videos or model train videos...

There are two main reasons behind testing him...one is because we are very concerned about his placement next year for Kindergarten. When a fellow K teacher friend of mine gave him the required end of the year K assessments for my county about 5 months ago (out of curiousity)and the DIBELS literacy assessment he scored off the charts - we didn't go as far as the DIBELS test allowed but where we stopped, it was showing him in mid second grade reading levels and this was when he was just over 4.5 yrs old. He is SO into math, and Math is not my strong point and he kept asking for new activities in math so, several months ago, we took him to a recommended tutoring center who gave him an assessment to see a starting point for him - he came up showing that he had mastered many 2nd and 3rd grade math concepts and they were just amazed at how excited he was about doing more math "games"....but their tutoring costs were insane so we didn't go down that street. My biggest fear is that because he is a perfectionist, he is not a self-motivated learner unless it is in an area that he is in love with, and he has his sensory disorder...everyone who knows him has stated that if he is placed in a regular K classroom he will become a basket case. How do you handle a kid who is reading chapter books, wants to learn how to make his own measurement scale to measure earthquakes and volcanic eruptions but tell him oh, sorry honey, today you have to complete these workbook pages and sing the alphabet song in circle time? We were told that when he entered K next year, he would be assessed around Nov. time and then we would need to wait for scheduling to do the whole IEP/team meeting and that the ball would not get rolling on any plan of action until at least Feb. of his K year. I have been in the education system for years and I know just how slow the whole process is. But, we were told that if we came in armed with our own private test scores that there would be a very likely chance that he would qualify for one of the TK-1 programs in the county which has much smaller class sizes (perfect for his sensory issues) and that the teachers in this program have much more flexibility with making individualized instruction in order to keep the kids challenged...and that he might have the chance to move right into the classroom as soon as school started. The other reason for looking at testing is that we are really wanting to get an honest, accurate look at his strengths and weaknesses - we think he is a very visual-spatial learner who may also have some visual issues and if we have a grasp on this now, we can work together with who ever his teacher is next year to start out from the gate with some ideas to help him succeed.

Right now he is in a Montessori preschool where he has attended since he was 2...we are in a very much retired area of the state so we are limited on school choices and this is one of the best Montessori schools we have been able to find....and we have been considering him staying there for next year as he would be the only K student in his classroom. His 2-3 yr old class teacher was amazing with him and he adored her and vice versa - she followed his sensory diet like the holy grail and she never had any issues with him at all - he was focused, happy, kept her busy with trying to keep him enriched! ...when he moved up into the montessori 3-5 year old class things have been very bumpy. His teacher is very wishy washy and some days she seems to get him and some days she has no clue. It took her a long time to get on board with his sensory issues and I still think she believes we are nuts. We have given her specific sensory diet activities to do with him daily and we have come to realize that she helps him with them when she remembers - which is not very often....he is not a behavior problem at school but he has the typical sensory issues with transition problems. With his spatial issues he tends to bang into everyone and everything and he is a very tall child (and the oldest - the next child down from him is a full year younger and the rest are all 3) so he has been kind of labeled as the "pain" by other children because they think he is doing it on purpose. His biggest problem is that he is bored silly out of his mind with his main teacher. She believes that he should not be allowed to explore new areas until he has completely mastered things such as being able to carry and hold his work tray without tripping, being able to sit perfectly still in his chair while doing a lesson,...things that frustrate us because why in the world would you hold a child back from learning if he has a disorder that affects his ability to properly carry a tray??? That is like telling a person in a wheelchair who has problems moving it around a room - oops - sorry you can't learn that lesson because you keep bumping into the tables? The assistant teacher is an angel and knows our son and she goes out of her way to make sure that his needs are met which causes some friction between her and the lead teacher. The lead is one of those teachers that believes that a child should not move on until all the steps are completed...so what if he knows all his numbers, he must complete lessons a,b,c, and d in the correct order, even if he already knows how to do them before he can move onto a new concept. My son has known his numbers since he was 2- he was counting well past 100, counting by 5, 10's by 3 yrs old and he is in love with math, patterns, and numbers...he is DYING to do the bead chain activities in his class- I met with his teacher today for conferences and I told her again (for like the 10th time) that he wants to do the bead chain activities and several people at the center believe he is beyond ready for it...her response was that she was really hoping to hold off on it until he was in Kindergarten because that was when she usually introduced it but we ended the meeting with that she would start him on the lessons next week. She said that she knew he was more than ready for the lessons but that if she allowed him to go do the "older" lessons that she would have to allow the other children to try them as well. She told him time and time again months ago, when he had completed a concept and he asked about going on to a new one - that that lesson was for the 5 year olds and since he wasn't 5, he wasn't ready for it. Which just burns me because that is SO against the whole Montessori approach...nothing is supposed to be split up into age groups but she has a whole section of the classroom (which all happens to be what my little guy is dying to get his hands on) and for weeks and weeks I kept hearing from him when he wasn't able to do something as perfectly as he had wanted to that "I can't do it because I am not 5 year old smart". I quickly put an end to that whole mess!

So we are stuck with trying to figure out what to do with next year. If we are able to get accurate test scores that can show all of the things that everyone keeps seeing then he could possibly qualify for the TK-1 program where he may be able to soar - or we could attempt to stay where we are at his Montessori school. So we are pulling our hair out at the moment :-) Thanks for letting me ramble - it is so good to get things out that many of my friends just don't understand!

Belle and snowgirl, I'm with you. Sensory issues are barely understood by so many. At least in our PS, they get them. Ironically, it was DS's Montesorri preschool teacher who first told us about sensory stuff, saying that her son was very similar and recommending the book, The Highly Sensitive Child, by Elaine Aron. His first preschool missed it entirely, and when he went back there for K and 1st, still did not accept it. (In fact, the music teacher would not let him participate in the school choir - IN FIRST GRADE AT AGE 6! - b/c he would not wear the uniform of a turtleneck and regular pants. I even told her that we didn't care if he didn't perform, just went to practices, as it was the first after school activity he was willing to try. And of course, I also told her I could bring a doctor's note, have her speak to the OT, etc.)

In any event, we moved him to PS where the teachers are better trained. In our recent meeting with the school, we were told that they would not give an IEP for sensory issues. Still, in his weekly OT session at school, he does mostly sensory-related activities, not fine motor/writing. He's had a home OT since K, and she has been wonderful, focusing mostly on focusing (not a typo) and writing. Since she comes to our house, DS has never had the advantage of the OT gym until this year. He loves the obstacle courses they have, and in particular, the "kid-crusher."

So, even though your school district doesn't necessarily recognize SPD in the IEP, I think you can mention it and push for OT. The OT will do what's best in his or her opinion, which you'd have to think will include SPD related OT.

Belle - Ugh, I'd definitely want a nice long chat with that montessori teacher. Like any school, it's hit or miss when it comes to teachers. We are super lucky that my DS5 with the issues (his twin brother has far fewer issues and has a very different teacher) has a brand new teacher who is willing to try whatever it takes. Just the other day (I think I posted about this on another thread) I was trying to explain the visual-spatial concept and how complex is easy vs. simple is hard, and she totally got it, and related a story about how ds had a hard time with some simpler works, but then she let him try the more complex work that they lead up to, and not only could he do it, but then he went back to the simpler works and had a much better understanding of them (which makes total sense under the VSL theory of whole vs. part and needing the big framework in which they can store the info). I am planning to give her some articles from the visual-spatial website. OMG, I would be furious about the math - for my ds that's his huge strength since he has such a hard time with speech (being understood). He still does bead chain even though he's done more complex stuff beyond that, but OMG if she hadn't even let him try bead chain I'd scream (besides, I thought it's normal for bead chain to be introduced before K?). His teacher told me that part of the montessori training was to let them try things beyond their level, or something like that. If I were in your shoes, if the teacher won't cooperate, I'd consider having a chat with the principle about this (even if it means hunting down written info on the montessori method). I mean, what is the point of montessori if the child can't move at his own pace. Ugh, I'd be furious. (still, I need to have chats with my other two kids' teachers about some of this stuff, but their actions have not been so blatant like your ds's teacher).

I really gotta run, but I also want to emphasize the vision issue - getting an evaluation, or at least a screening, with a behavioral optometrist, might be very important (I admit it's hard to do at this age - my dd's eval was more involved than my ds's eval because, besides the fact that she was older at the time, he was determined to be non-verbal during the eval, my introverted-sensory-speech boy)

questions - my feeling is that the OT gym is, for many kids (depending on their form of SPD, but especially those with any motor issues), an invaluable part of the OT. My friend's dd got some sort of OT at home for SPD, and my friend thinks it's all hocus-pocus and her dd didn't benefit much if at all, but it doesn't seem like she was getting the right kind of OT.

You are lucky that you learned about SPD so early. My son will be 10 in a few months and just recently started OT for the first time. I had not even heard of SPD when my son was 5 and in Kindergarten and apparently his doctors didn't know anything about it either. I spent countless hours on the internet trying to figure out the reason for some of my son's differences. I read about overexcitabilities and my son seemed to have all of those, so I thought maybe that was it.

We live in a small town that my son thinks is so much like "Camazotz" from "A Wrinkle in Time" that he refused to read the rest of the book. He felt very different from his classmates when he went in reading at a 5th grade level and also doing math with negative numbers (an older boy in his musical theater class had told him about negative numbers when he was four and he came up with his own way of doing subtraction using those negative numbers so that he didn't have to borrow. For example, something like 26 - 8 he would say 6 - 8 is a -2 and -2 and 20 is 18. When we told the Kindergarten teacher about this on the first day of school, she looked at us like we were kind of weird. When she found out that he could read very well and he wanted to read reports or a few paragraphs from his science enclyclopedia to go along with his letter of the week show & tell, she let him but she didn't want him to pick out books from outside the Kindergarten book area. She didn't want him to feel "different." I remember she told me that kids at the K age are very accepting of differences but as he got older they might not be. I felt that she was trying to tell me we needed to somehow make him be like the other kids.

The Kindergarten teacher did not tell me when the special ed teacher told her that she noticed red flags for sensory and motor issues. The special ed teacher, who I later met when her son joined my son's theater group, told the teacher she thought he needed to be referred for testing to see if he needed OT. We didn't know about it until a year after we were told by a teacher and the principal that we needed to homeschool. The Kindergarten teacher even thought he should be held back in transitional first grade the next year to work on coloring in the lines and that it didn't matter that he wouldn't learn anything because he was already so advanced. We talked to someone in our State Dept. of Education's gifted coordinators office about this and we were told that there was no requirement for OT to be provided unless a child is failing and my son who was reading at a 5th grade level and doing some multiplication was definitely not failing, so he would not have been eligible for OT anyway.

My son also liked mazes and he would sometimes do online puzzles without a problem, but 3D puzzles were difficult for him because of his fine motor issues so he never did them. This is one of the things the OT said to work on. My son is not that good at 3D puzzles even on a good day. He is still slow at manipulating the puzzle pieces. I don't think my son is any less gifted than his highly gifted half-brother, who does not have a sensory or motor issues, just because he can't do 3D puzzles quickly. I wonder if he is even more gifted to be able to do the things he did in spite of his disability. My son is gifted in all the areas where is really counts. His inability to manipulate puzzle pieces quickly has not had any effect on academics that I can see, so I don't understand at all why this would be used to identify giftedness. But I'm not an expert. I'm just a homeschool mom with only a two year accounting degree doing my best to educate my "different" child who learns very differently from me. I never knew there was more than one way to solve math problems until my son came up with his own ways of doing things.

Many times my son has made me question my own intelligence and even my adult daughter had the same reaction recently. But I can do puzzles! Am I really smarter than he is because I can do 3D puzzles better than he can? I know that I am not as smart as he is and any gifted expert who would say that I am because of my ability with 3D puzzles is mistaken. I did not start reading at 2 without being taught or come up with different ways of doing math and I certainly didn't have the advanced vocabulary and comprehension that he does.

My son has never had an IQ test. All he had was the WIAT a few years ago and based on his WIAT scores the educational psychologist testing him told us what he thought he would probably score on an IQ test. He said my son would have to be tested over more than one day to get an accurate score because of some of his issues. I think my son could take two similar tests on two different days and get very different results, especially if he is not feeling well or is anxious about something. One example of this was a test that involved visual memory and my son scored below average on this which was very unusual--he tested high on this before. At home, I had him read some difficult to spell words from a medical reference book and without warning I put my hand over the words and asked him to spell them. He either spelled them correctly or was off by just one letter. There is absolutely no way a kid that recently memorized the spelling of thousands of words for a spelling bee and was able to spell even harder words after seeing them once has a problem with visual memory, yet on this piece of paper it looks like he has a problem. This is one reason I have put off having his IQ tested. I am hoping that sensory integration therapy will help with some of these issues.

My son had vision therapy a few years ago also, and even the piano teacher noticed the difference, but his OT still wonders if he still has some vision issues. In fact, she mentioned something about the "Where's Waldo" at our last OT visit. But the strange thing is sometimes he is good at finding hidden pictures and he used to enjoy doing this--at home. Very, very confusing!

I wish I could be of more help, but as you can see I am still a little confused about all of this myself and I am still trying to find answers.

Lori, I am so sorry about your experiences. It was actually the K teacher who told me that DS needed an OT. My response: "what's an OT?"

fyi re testing, the psych who administered the WIAT, WISC, and ADD/ADHD screening tests last year did them over a period of days. Also, I was allowed to remain in the room as long as I didn't say a word. Towards the end, when he began to tire of the whole thing, he sat in my lap as he completed the last few tests. Again, we were not testing for GT issues - just to find out what was going on in school. But accommodating his comfort level certainly helped him sit through the tests (especially since so many of them involved the dreaded schoolwork he hated so much - i.e., anything requiring writing).

Someone else on this board posted that the tester actually evaluated her young daughter at home. That would be great. Definitely something to look into if you're concerned the environment could negatively impact the results.