Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional ideas for helping with processing speed?

Howler,

You raise a really good issue. I do think that maturity is a big part of his lack of productivity--but he also really seems to have a lot of trouble doing any kind of writing work, even if it's about something that interests him. Writing tasks go much more easily if he chooses the topic, but even then, he struggles. Maybe it is just that writing is inherently harder than speaking, but if your only interface with him was writing, you would not have a clue about how well he can express himself. Perhaps part of that is because he is verbally precocious, but my sense is that numerous other kids in his class who are not as verbally precocious as he is write better. Furthermore, there have been plenty of times that he has been motivated to, say, finish his writing work and he hasn't managed to do it--and has been really upset because the upshot was that it wound up interfering with a play date (for instance). One time he wanted to stay back from play practice, which he loves, because he really did not want to take the writing home, which he knew he'd have to do if he didn't get it done in school. Yet he couldn't manage to get it done in the ample amount of time (for most kids) that he had for it.

In other words, I really think he has some kind of challenge associated with writing-related productivity in addition to the motivation/interest component.

Anyway, you put your finger on one of my biggest parenting conundrums: How much of his school "issues" have to do with motivation and how much have to do with something else? There are times when he just hunkers down and writes. The quality is still not good (or anyway, it's not remotely commensurate with how he thinks and talks), but it does get done. Other times, tears.

And of course there is this processing speed issue, at least as measured by the WISC, which is probably true qualitatively if not quantitatively. (Ie., maybe he's not really in the fifth percentile, but he does take a long time to think about things sometimes, even if the product of his thinking winds up being extremely sophisticated.) Of course, other times he just "knows" things in a heartbeat--he immediately grasped base 7 numbers, sat up in bed when he was three and said "when you are right in the middle of the merry-go-round, you don't feel any force," and so on. (I love it that most everyone here probably has similar stories!)

One thing that I've found with my DD-- who is NOT a natural writer, whereas I am...

is that she MUST follow a "process" that organizes and forces her to work within a framework. She cannot ad-lib her written work. Well, of course, she can do it a sentence or two at a time NOW (she's almost 14), but certainly not in elementary school.

The problem with her output was that she was so gosh darned stubborn about this fact of her existence. She kept trying to skip the outlining/prewriting/organizing steps of the process. Oy. Why? Because writing just TOOK so much longer than anything else, that's why.

I always knew. Always. So that is where my remark about handing stuff back to her comes from. I've even been known to simply hold the rough draft and tell her "Okay-- now go follow the writing process. For real this time."

It was a brutal 5 or so years, but I seem to have prevailed.

Yes, in your case, evelyn, I'd say that this sounds like more going on. Because I could always get work out of DD if she was actually movitated. It was just that sometimes the motivational strategy had to be pretty extreme to move her. Having to methodically follow a plodding process felt so awful to her-- made her feel "slow" and "stupid" in ways that she found intolerable-- that pretty much any punishment/natural consequence was fine in comparison.

My DS sounds very similar. Despite having an amazing vocabulary and imagination, he struggled to get his thoughts down on paper throughout the 1st and 2nd grades. We tried all sorts of story webs (early outlines), etc., but nothing seemed to work until we tried IEW (Institute for Excellence in Writing). -- By the way, he is a movies in my head kid.

Anyway, IEW helped him tremendously. It gave him a step-by-step method to get his thoughts narrowed down and onto paper. And, now that he's been using it a couple of years, he has found he can skip several steps without impacting his writing speed or ability.

Thanks, blessed! I will look into IEW. Never heard of it before. Hopefully there's a "how do I even approach thinking about this" step!

The first step in IEW is to take a sentence you read and pick three/four key words from the sentence and write them on a line. Then the child speaks the words back to a parent in the form of a sentence. Next the child writes what they just spoke to the parent. -- Most kids will say the sentence back substituting their words in-between the key words. (My DS could memorize and repeat exactly and that is okay, despite the goal of using your own words eventually.)

The second step is to perform the same task on a simple paragraph (5 sentences). Now it becomes a little more challenging to just memorize, which is good because they start creating their own sentences around their key word outlines.

When they have this down well, they can start to create key word outlines for their own original works. At first, the child can just start talking and the parent can help them pick out the key words from their sentences and write them down. As you look at the outline together, the child can decide which sentences fit and which should go. Next the child can begin the writing process using the key word outline you helped to get down on paper. At this point it is really quite easy to write because the main messages are right in front of the child.

Eventually, they learn to write their own key word outlines and begin to add quality adjectives, strong verbs, and -ly words (adverbs). From there, they learn alliteration, metaphors, etc.

I've used this same program with my two children who have learning disabilities and it works wonderfully for them as well.

Thanks for explaining more about IEW! Definitely seems worth pursuing for us.

In the meantime, my son seems to have gotten it together a bit on the writing front. It has apparently registered on him that if he doesn't do it in school, it comes home--and he really doesn't like that. So for the past week or so, he's been doing his writing in school.

It is so hard to figure out what is going on with him, given that he can suddenly get it together (to some extent--because the writing is still quite weak) when sufficiently motivated.

We also laid out clear motivations about school productivity and ASKED him how he was going to make that happen. He came up with a plan that didn't seem to address the challenge at all--yet he is doing somewhat better on the productivity front too.

Hi Evelyn,

I finally remembered to come back to this - sorry it's taken me so long!!! And... fwiw, I probably won't have time to read through the rest of it tonight, but will get as far as I can and finish up on Monday.


I'd want a follow-up test on the VMI rather than just making a conclusion based on observations (the Beery VMI that my kids have had sorts out at least two different types of Visual Motor challenges.. I think... it's been a few years since we've had it! But I distinctly remember at least two parts to it). However - even though I'd want the follow-up testing, I'd be sure to think through the psych's observations. Using the non-dominant hand to guide the hand that is writing happens frequently in kids with dysgraphia - but otoh, my dysgraphic did this quite a bit, and his issue is fine motor, not visual-motor.


One thing it *might* mean (and there are probably 300 things or more that it could mean, so this is just one possibility) - is that he had difficulty focusing his eyes on the symbols. My dd who has vision issues was assessed for intake into a reading program when she was around 7 years old, and part of the assessment was to copy a short paragraph off of the board. The person administering the test said that dd looked up for every single individual letter, which she'd never seen any child do before. I'm sure, now that I know about her vision challenge, that the reason she did this had nothing to do with a reading challenge, and most likely happened because it took so much effort to make her eyes focus together.


I'll be back to look at this - not enough time to think it through tonight


I would go back and ask your friend to explain her interpretation to you again, so that you understand and remember what she tells you. If it doesn't cost an arm and a leg it *might* be worth making a follow-up appointment with the neuropsych to give you a chance to ask more follow-up questions about the testing. If you don't have confidence it would yield you any useful info, I wouldn't bother - but fwiw, I've done this second follow-up with our neuropsych every time my kids have had an eval simply because that typical post-testing parent/neuropsych meeting where you are discussing the report for the first time is so full of new info coming at you quickly that it's next to impossible to expect to have all your questions answered at that point in time - it usually takes me at least another week just for my questions to bubble to the surface


My dd, that I mentioned above, had a year of vision therapy starting when she was 7. VT really helped her a ton (she had tracking issues as well as double vision). Yet starting last summer, when she was 10... we realized she was starting to have issues with her vision again... so you might want a follow-up vision exam by whoever did the VT to be sure he hasn't lost any ground with his vision (especially since you have the low coding subtest score and the note about how he looked back and forth at every symbol on the subtest).


That's my ds' issue as well - he scores very well on "writing tests" where he is simply asked to diagnose grammar issues, or asked to put together a sentence in correct order etc. His challenge is in generating ideas to put into writing. None of us (myself, my ds, or his speech therapist) have a clue really what's going on... but he basically says that when he is asked to write about an open-ended prompt, he simply has no idea what he is supposed to do/write, and he has no ideas in his head to pull from. When I re-read that last sentence, it sounds like something any of us might say from time to time, but it's much more severe than a simple writer's "cramp" or whatever. He really has *no* idea whatsoever what to write.

I'm going to read on further on Monday and finish up my reply - tomorrow I'm off on a road trip

Hope some of this helped!

polarbear

Blessed, Do you know of any place where the IEW basics are spelled out? The materials are not cheap and I'd like to learn more about what I'm signing up for before making the purchase. I realize you just gave a sense of the program--but any website or other source that provides more info?

Polarbear, Thanks so much for coming back and weighing in with more thoughts! (Hope your road trip was good too.)

Your description (in the last long paragraph of the post immediately above) also describes my son's writing situation. EXCEPT when he doesn't seem to have trouble. We're planning to dig in with numerous new ideas this summer. If either one of us has any insights about what the heck is going on with our children, I hope we can both benefit!

Thanks for the prod to follow up with vision testing. Last time we checked, it was fine (except, as I said, I bet there's still somewhat of a tracking issue--but he can read music reasonably well and is now a strong reader of books, so what gives? Then again, maybe he struggles to read the music and then memorizes quickly...)

Yes--a VMI test does seem in the cards. Score was supposedly in the 90th percentile two years ago (Beery-Buktenica), which seems weirdly high, but the special ed person at the school said at the time, "he won't have trouble writing." He usually does not control the pencil with his non-dominant hand. The neuropsych person is the only person who has ever witnessed this so I don't know what was going on. I double checked with the teachers when I read that in the report--and they have never seen the behavior.

News here is that we just had an in-depth visual processing workup done to try to sort out that low WISC processing score. It turns out--and this rings true to me--that DS's visual processing per se is actually very strong (high 90th percentiles). But his VMI (or maybe just fine motor skills period--don't yet have the report and didn't think to ask) are so weak that any time there's a timed test that involves writing, he bombs. Also, because he is not great at keeping his mind on things that don't interest him, he can just completely check out of a test in the middle. Yesterday I was in the room, behind him, during the testing, and at some point he said "Oh wait--I was thinking about math."

So now we are thinking that OT and learning to touch type are in order for the summer. We were already planning to do the typing thing, but I was not fully convinced about his writing issues until I saw how painfully long it took him to write a single sentence yesterday. He was clearly concentrating and trying very hard to do his best. It took him something like 6 minutes.

He also apparently has some gross motor issues that make his body want to open his hand when he turns his head (as in, toward a piece of paper he's about to write on). So his brain has to do extra work to even keep the pencil in his hand. It was pretty interesting to see extra parts of his body move when the examiner moved one part. Apparently those reflexes should have disappeared long ago, but they haven't. It's remediable, so that's good.

Polarbear, thank you so much for encouraging me to get to the bottom of this! The results of this testing ring much more true to me than just "processing speed issue." I would definitely characterize him as a deep, not fast, thinker--but his scores were SO low. The new viewpoint makes a lot more sense.

The other issues remain: (1) extracting information from his brain for writing tasks (even if the actual writing part is removed)--but it turns out he has not been taught standard tools like graphic organizers, so we will play around with that kind of thing this summer, and (2) remaining focused on what he's supposed to stay focused on when it doesn't particularly interest him. The examiner yesterday also said that DS does not fit an ADD profile and thought it was more a maturity issue. I am reading all kinds of books about how to help your kid strengthen executive functioning, but if anyone has ideas about practical things we can do over the summer to help him learn how to stay on task during his school day, I am all ears! I suspect that this will wind up being the long-term issue that needs lots of attention.

It feels really good to start getting some believable answers rather than blanket statements about a test that involves multiple skills!