Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Never thought I would end up here. Hello & help!

(Before you even start reading this, I have kind of thrown all of my concerns and frustrations and worries at you all, and I am sorry. I feel so completely blindsided and underqualified and completely without anyone who understands what is going on. Please forgive me for having done such a lousy job of coming into your group.)

Hi! Thank you for letting me take part in your community. I have a daughter heading for 7th grade and she has started a journey that I never would have expected, and I feel lost. I am hoping that some of you can offer btdt advice and direction. This will be a bit long, but if you hang with me, I would appreciate it. You should know that my DD is truly the "GT" type student in that she would solve global warming by splicing bat DNA with people DNA to give us all wings, thus making cars an outdated mode of transportation. She is a very "outside the box" thinker and I imagine that she is headed toward some kind of research science some day.

"A" went to small private prep school from K - 4th grade & had wonderful grades, super strong student, loved to learn, teachers pet type kid. We moved cross country and she entered 5th grade in public school (and finished 6th grade in the same school). Here she qualified easily for GT program and is flourishing. She is HIGHLY motivated, was "GT student of the year", gets along very well w her peers, has qualified for 8th grade band even though she will only be going into 7th grade, went to State in Math & Science team competition, etc etc etc. And (now this will be freaky later) has had the most AR points from her grade for the last 2 years (about 150 kids in her grade at this school).

She also has the worst handwriting and has literally called me from school to spell her middle name for her. It is an unusual name, but still, it is hers. She literally cannot spell ANYTHING. She also has a terrible time getting reports written, and I had always blamed this on her brain just being in 12 different places at once and her not being able to focus enough on what was going on - like she gets so excited about the next point that she can't make this one. I had also noticed that her speech about a subject would be vast and very mature, but her writing style did not match what she spouted off with no difficulty. Her teachers here had encouraged her to type reports, had not counted off for spelling on things that were hand written, and because she was in the GT program offered lots of "differing projects" and she would avoid written reports most of the time (so I wasn't clear on how bad things were). She is a math whiz, but when she does math it looks as if someone sneezed math all over the paper. She gets the correct answer, but there are times that I don't know how the teacher even finds the answer.

So, she will be leaving "GT" at Jr. High and will be entering "AP Track" by taking pre-AP classes. Her GT teacher lovingly pulled me aside near the end of the year to tell me that I had to do something because the Pre-AP history teacher would fail "A" based totally on her spelling and neatness. She told me that I either had to pull her from the class or have her tested for something (the teacher wasn't sure what was going on w DD, but felt sure there was something). I did some research and realized that she has dysgraphia! More amazing to me than that, I also have it, so does my brother, and I believe that my grandfather (who helped develop the radars for the first moon launches) had dysgraphia. THERE IS A NAME FOR THIS! HOORAY! I was very blessed that the GT coordinator for our district set me up with an AMAZING tester in our district and testing was done within a couple of weeks. DD did indeed show enough markers to be dysgraphic!

Still with me? Cause this is where things start to seem weird. The tester said that it is common practice to test for dyslexia when they test for dysgraphia as they tend to run together, and DD has such awful spelling issues. DD is an AVID, almost obsessive reader. She was reading at over a 12 grade reading level at the beginning of 6th grade. I have to get on to her to put down books at the dinner table. I gave the go ahead to test for whatever she felt was important. As it turns out, DD has enough markers in place to be dyslexic!!! I am floored.

So, this summer we have been learning together what is going on. DD is reading out loud to me. I realize now that she sight reads every word she sees. She uses (in real time) contextual clues about the subject to select words when she doesn't recognize the word. For example, recently she was reading aloud to me from a book that was discussing "General Beauregard". She said "General Brigadier" every time she met the word. She also does this weird thing where she regularly reworks sentences (again in real time) so that she gets the meaning, but she rephrases them completely using totally different words. And, when she reads, she skips short words like "a, and, the" etc. She hates reading out loud because "it is so slow".

I have been working with her on a phonics workbook, and while she can struggle through the drills, when it comes time to apply what she has learned, it is like she is testing in Chinese. She just doesn't "GET" anything about decoding words at all. Not even a little.

We have a meeting in August to get 504 stuff in place, but the school has basically said that she is working at such a high level that they don't even know what to offer to her as far as dyslexia classes. I would love to get your thoughts on 504 stuff, any suggestions about anything that she might be working on at home, coping strategies, resources. Just anything at all. Also, does this sound completely messed up to anyone else? I don't understand how someone that is dyslexic can be such a strong reader, or someone who changes up all the sentences can be grasping what she is reading.

If you made it to the end of this, bless you! I expected my biggest problem with this one to be getting her to care if she brushed her hair and put on matching socks (she does do that - even geeky smart girls start to care about looks a bit when the hormones start). I have always known that her brain works differently than most of ours, I just didn't have a clue that there would be things that she couldn't do and I wouldn't notice it until now. Thank you.

I have a ds14 who is dyslexic, CAPD, and has mildish ADD. He reads everything he can get his hands on, but has horrible spelling. His comprehension is excellent, although he too misses small words when reading out loud, and his pronounciation might be off.

The same word can be written 3 different ways on a page. He types all his essays and uses a computer for all tests other than math tests. His reading comprehension and writing skills are a real strength, but he is really bad at writing down homework or remembering assignments.

We did 18 months of phonics tutoring at age 6 and 7 - it brought up his reading from mid-kindergartern to chapter books. I would get this type of tutoring for your daughter.

Does she type her essays etc? It really helps to make them readable to others and fixes most of the spelling mistakes. My son managed to type "latter" for "later" all through one English paper, but the teacher was fairly understanding. You may want to obtain a speech to voice software like WordQ or Dragon Naturally Speaking so your daughter can get her thoughts down on paper without the dysgraphia getting in the way. I used to scribe for my son when he was little, and it helped alot. She may be able to get assistive technology for school and time and a half on tests - this really helps my son.

Good luck

Welcome!

MY 9 year old daughter also tested this year as both dyslexic and dysgraphic despite reading at a high school level or beyond.

We do have an IEP in place now, done 11 days before the end of the 4th grade. She had then 10 days of services as a result. The IEP was done despite the fact that even her weakest skills -- sentence construction and spelling are near grade level. Intervention services are to meet the need of the student, so in practice it shouldn't matter if there isn't an existing pull out working at her level. Pull out must be created. However, the law is now written in such a way that schools can indeed turn away students with learning disabilities if they are working at grade level despite the disabilities. You might want to continue to push for services on an IEP.

If you don't manage that (and it's a long shot), I think your 504 can address a lot of what we have in the IEP outside of the Orton Gillingham tutoring. DD has a series of 20 accommodations, including extra time on tests (this is important as DD will have to learn to do the construction of her thought in series with her construction of the writing, something kids are expected to do in parallel), elimination of the need to transfer information (no copying from the board or spelling words out of a book or math problems from a textbook or math answers into a computer), no grading of spelling or writing when it's not a part of the assignment (can't mark her wrong for identifying A*B = B*A as the 'comtive porpty'), type assignment instead of hand write them, and a few more. The goal with the accommodations are to remove the barriers DD has experienced to being able to communicate her thoughts in writing, and to allow her to develop her skills independently instead of being held back by her weakest links.

Also, if you don't get any services, I'd strongly recommend getting her some outside of school. A writing-intensive GT track in high school sounds tortuous to someone who struggles so much. My DD started tutoring in late winter, and it has help immensely in giving her some additional tools in structuring her writing and understanding words. Because she's getting OG at school, her tutoring has been focused instead on using word roots to work on spelling, a nice compliment for a kid who has such a huge vocabulary. (The program is called something like Word Journeys)

Good luck getting your DD the help she needs. You might also want to poke around in the archives of this forum to find other people's experiences and accommodations for kids with very similar profiles. There are 3-4 of us here on a regular basis now.

Oh, and I'm intensely curious based on the dramatic similarities -- does your daughter hear a voice when reading? My DD goes from seeing print to knowing the message without hearing her voice. This leads to very fast reading, high comprehension, but no sense for how a sentence should flow. This makes her writing bizarre at best.

I just went and asked DD about this - it is a question that I never even considered - and she said that the only time that she reads where she hears a "voice" is when she has to go back and read a particularly difficult sentence (usually one with odd structure). Other wise she says she just "absorbs" the words. She does have a huge vocabulary and almost speed reads. I guess this makes some level of sense as to why my DD reworks sentences when she reads out loud. She must be processing the info and then turning back into "speech"? Every day I discover that her brain just works so differently than most brains seem to.

Thanks to all of you for the welcome. Our school has been very willing to test her (despite her GT status, which I understand causes big problems in some schools), but I don't expect a lick of help as far as any type of classes. She is working at grade level on everything (no idea how she could be grade level for spelling), but there was a HUGE difference in her scores using math scores as her "normal". She did have below grade level scores on some of the individual sections of the testing, but for most of her problem areas she was "low grade level". (I don't know all the lingo yet - sorry). She is a straight A student & has high standardize testing scores.

So, if I can't expect much help from the school as far as getting her decoding words, where do I even start outside of them? I don't even know what direction to turn. And she is signed up for Spanish this year - anyone have any experience in foreign language with kids like this?

This whole thing has just been amazing to me. We have always known that "A's" brain works differently than most peoples - she passes for normal most of the time, but she thinks in totally different patterns.

You're supposed to "hear" what you read? I always thought my DH was the one with the problem because he can't comprehend what he reads without "hearing" it and thus reads at about 1/2 the speed I do. But my reading is like your daughters - I see the print, know the message, I don't hear anything.

My eldest is diagnosed dyslexic and learning to read at all was agognising for her. Because of that my 2nd was exposed to lots of phonics from a young age (she was 2 when DD1 was being drilled at 6) and I think that's helped her. But reading about all these kids who read exactly like she does - skipping the small words, guestimating what is there with astonishing accuracy through context, etc makes me realise #2 may have some mild dyslexia going on too... Arrghh. Watching her learn to read it really felt like she was pulling the words out of my head rather than reading, sometimes I wasn't even sure that she was looking at the page and yet she would come up with a 90-95% accurate reading of a sentence she had not seen before and could not guess from a picture... But any of those tests of reading age based on reading a list of words would always rate her far lower than her actual reading ability with a book in front of her...

OP I am sorry I haven't added any useful advice for you... Actually I can say that going back at 9yrs old and doing "Reading Eggs", designed for 4-6 yr olds did seem to fill some gaps for my DD. She was jealous that I bought her sister a subscription and did it too just to be contrary, but I think it was good for her. She whizzed through it all of course but she did hear/see lots of useful rhymes and ways of remembering phonics rules along the way. Your DD is doubtless much more advanced than mine and older so that probably wouldn't work. But some way of going back to basics might be surprisingly useful.

Actually, in teaching my eldest to read, slowly and agonizingly over the course of 3+ years, I learned a whole lot about phonics that I had never ever known myself. I remember hearing about "sight words" and thinking "huh? ALL words are sight words" and the only rule I remember learning at school was "i after e, except after c". I was utterly astonished about all the useful rules that a site like starfall.com had to offer. "When two vowels go a walking, the first vowel does the talking" for example, I had NO IDEA... So even as an adult going back to basics was, well not useful, but revealing for me. I don't think it's changed anything at all for me coming to it so late, but it sure explained a lot!

On foreign languages: I've read that learning another spoken language is torture for kids with dyslexia. However, I'm starting to suspect that these kids with very high verbal abilities that are strong readers, are of a different type of language learner. I suspect that I would have had the same profile as my DD at age 9. (I do hear a voice while reading, though.) I found that taking Spanish in high school was pretty easy, and the fact that every letter is pronounced actually helped my spelling in English. I still will think of the Spanish pronunciation to get the vowels right (I just did it for 'pronunciation' for instance). I speak Spanish and Turkish fluently now, the first learned in school and the second through immersion. Both have advantages of regular grammar and vowel sounds.

As for getting help, I'd ask the tester what type of help is recommended and at what level intensity. There are a lot of programs out there serving a wide variety of needs, and lots of reading tutors. DD will be getting the adult version of Wilson tutoring (an Orton Gillingham derivative) because that's where her vocabulary is.

EDIT: One concrete recommendation from the neuropsych was to have DD listen to audiobooks of well-written books. We've taken to having books on the CD player in the car when we go on longer car trips. No idea if it's helping, but we're certainly enjoying it!

MumOfThree, this issue of a voice is interesting. It was suggested by the neuropsych who did DD's testing. DD describes reading as stepping into the page and experiencing the events. She has weak listening skills. I very clearly hear the words I read. Each and every poster on this board has a particular voice, and I suspect it would really throw me to actually hear any of you in person. Daniel Radcliffe, by the way, is the WRONG voice for Harry Potter.

For the record, I don't hear a voice when I read, but I do when I write.

If your dd is getting a 504 plan, she will only get accomodations, not instruction. You should ask for an assistive tech evaluation. Your dd could use a laptop or a portable keyboard with word prediction software. It will help with spelling and handwriting.

How is her punctuation and grammar? If you think she needs remediation, she's going to need an outside tutor or an IEP instead of a 504 plan.

Count us in as well. There have been a few other threads along this line in the last year or so, so dig through the history if the other folks don't show up here - one was labeled Stealth Dyslexia and the other was Full Assessment - LD.

Much of our history is there, but the short version for us is DD10 now entering 6th grade (skipped 2nd) has very similar issues. Voracious reader - 3-4 grade levels above current grade, but reading out loud is a struggle. Pretty good memory holds spelling word for the weekly spelling test, but no longer than that. Our school has been less than cooperative in othe areas, and she was technically not only at grade level, but near the top of her class and the writing struggles she had were chalked up mostly to poor attitude, personality and behavior (not that I would necessarily disagree with that assessment, but it's a little hard to tease out which comes first in this situation as the bad attitude now appears to be directly related to the dyslexia difficulties). So we went with private testing.

As mentioned elsewhere, we only managed to get a 504 through the school, since she is not functioning below grade level, the IEP was not considered an option. Our accomodations are basically the same as others - mostly more time, but also requested small group testing, keyboarding where possible. I'm considering adding the transcription software this year, but we are still trying to get a handle on what works best so far.

We did beginning Spanish through virtual school in 4th grade (2010-2011) and she made it, but really disliked it. Although as mentioned earlier the phonics rules are much more consistent in Spanish - she just couldn't get them to stick and couldn't keep straight the English rules from the Spanish rules. Now I did have several years of Spanish in high school and college, but am far from a fluent speaker, but was able to reinforce pronunciation and provide another voice and perspective. I also think the natural language learning abilities of the younger student kicked in and she did much better with pronounciation than spelling. She will probably not be able to move on to the next level in middle/high school, and will likely repeat the beginning level, but I tink that will be a feature of both the virtual school experience and the time between the classes. This class also was one of the first things she really had to stretch on, since it is a middle school targeted course and she was only 8.

No one else noticed anything was wrong. I kinda thought something was a little off since about 1st grade, but kept putting it off, thinking it would resolve developmentally. Couldn't really believe that my high performing reader was dyslexic, but couldn't figure out what it was, so we tested and that's exactly what it was. You are not alone.

I know what you mean. It sounds to me like she's compensating. Like my son, who scored in the 0.5th percentile (as in, 99.5% scored higher than he did!) in receptive language skills (12th percentile in expressive) and yet he reads English above grade level, without having had formal instruction (he's in French Immersion).

Somewhere else, somehow, they compensate.

My son has a language processing disorder (expressive and receptive) and tends to memorize words rather than decode them. He too is a math whiz, and has trouble making his work clear on the paper. He struggles with handwriting (although it's gotten a bit better).

He also "skips" words when he reads out loud - he wants to speed through the text.

It's interesting, because I've noticed a trend in both languages... the little words such as in/on/it/at or le/la/du/des/les etc cause him more problems than larger words like "excitement" or "nourriture." I think this is because the larger words are more "chunky" and memorable, whereas the little words all seem the same to him.

His speech is funny, although it's getting better. It's hard to describe - it's like it's stiff and jerky, kind of, and he still mispronounces words he shouldn't (he's 8). He's had FOUR normal hearing tests. In addition to the language disorder, I'm certain he has CAPD (we're waiting for testing).

He's also been diagnosed with ADHD combined type, which our pediatrician is skeptical about ("I see ADHD kids all the time and he's different.") ...he's more aware, more focused, more present. On the other hand he also sometimes seems like he's not listening AT ALL and yet he knows what's going on. I don't know. Who knows. Maybe he has it, maybe he doesn't. I have my doubts, so we're not medicating him.

Anyway, I could go on and on (lol) but I just wanted to say... I know how you feel! Sometimes they just don't make sense... they manage to function and compensate in spite of these barriers... it can be so confusing at times.