Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Quick answer - motivation issue

This is an issue for me so I thought I would start new topic.

I had posted long ago about linear, non linear and was quickly directed to visual spatial. Just putting that in because if anyone sees this, it may help.

So DD very early on would get answers popping into her head, like simple math but at early 2 age. And she can sight read, but I don't know when it happens. But other things pop up, but not on command. (she will be 4 9/28)

When asked to read, though she is fully capable of reading phonetically, she hates the work. She loves when answers pop into her head.

Having talked to people, they have told me that it is a characteristic of visual spatial PG and when they have to work at something early in their life, they can get a lot of noise and confusion until they can organize it in their heads.

I would very much like to hear from other people that may have had this experience and any solutions to help with the motivation.

Reason, I anticipate your questions since I have been on this board long enough. When we did the screen for the gifted preschool, the psychologist, who will also give her the SBV this October for Hunter, told us that she needs to work on this. She doesn't like the easy (boring) questions and she also has the bad habit of not doing the work when she has to "stop, breathe, think" and do the work. Because of an "addiction" to the answers just coming to her.

She scores very high as it is, but my biggest concern is the long term bad habits that can happen with underachievers. My own experience biases my concern.

Thanks, Ren

Ren, not sure if this helps, It was strongly sugested to us to praise effort over results. Results are easy. It is effort that will help you succeed. We have been trying this for some time. It dosn't always work. One thing was finding something difficult, new, and fun. When they solve that then moving on. For each child fun can be different. We used games like traffic jam, or puzzeles. In math we tried new concepts, multi step problems, in reading we would alternate by chapter, I would read, he would read. We tried to avoid repation, and in Math we have tried to avoid perfection before moving on. It seems to have helped. But our DS6 still wants lots of time with us when he does things.

Hi Ren,

I also have a visual spatial girl, but I think this applies to any learner.

Basically, the work she is doing needs to be hard enough to be challenging, but not too hard that she can't do it. They need to experience success in order to want to try again.

We also did the you read one chapter, I read one chapter (you can do alternate pages instead of chapters at this age). This is really a great technique.

Also, my dd8 still loves it when I read to her, even though she is capable of reading way above grade/age level. What I do is get two kinds of books. One half is at her grade level and the other half is either much more advanced or something we can discuss. I read the second set to her.

Ren - I can totally relate to this. Both my kids are like this. My daughter is just a few months older than yours. She reads random words when she feels like it. Sometimes she pretends she doesn't even know letters. A couple days ago we were somewhere and she read the word "Enchanted" as a sight word. It was in regular text within other text.

Thus far I've used activities as ways for them to work on these skills. So they get used to learning to build on experience and practice. Music lessons have been great for my son. My daughter will be starting Suzuki violin next month. This year my son took Unicycling, which sounds so odd, but he learned quite a bit about not letting your team or your coach down and sticking with something when it's not very fun. Most of these kids spent about 3 months against the wall on a bike, not going more than 10 feet. So I think you can teach these lessons in unusual places.

And I'm also going to admit, that I sometimes set up incremental reward systems to get through piano with DS. Stickers work really well for my daughter. When DS was starting to read we kept track of books he read aloud (he still hates to read aloud). When he got to a certain number of books we did something special.

I do think these are really hard skills to get to a preschooler, and it is still a long arduous journey with my 7 year old. I'm thinking homeschooling for us is going to help a lot. We just don't have the GT options here that you have.

Anyway - good luck!

I do try to praise and encourage the effort as well. Good point Edwin!

Thank you everyone. Have been praising the effort and practice for a while. That has become habitual.

It was interesting that she had trouble with the tricycle steering and somewhat with the scooter, though she made more effort here, but when we got the bicycle (with training wheels) she tried hard and mastered very quickly. The reverse stopping, the steering. It took two tries and she was turning in a circle at the end of the boardwalk to come back.

There were also some other physically demanding things that she pushed herself, like a big climber in the playground when she was 15 months old. She struggled and climbed with the bigger kids. Or won't go out with the boogie board since tiny wipeout but has a floatie ring and goes way out and rides big waves, then surfs in with the ring, had a big wipeout but it didn't matter. Why one and not the other?

And I admit, I have a reward thing going. She was going to get 2 puppies at 6, she gets them earlier if all goes smoothly with the princess test (SBV for Hunter and the OLSAT for the citywide schools) so she has to practice "stopping, breathing and thinking" and not rushing when she doesn't like the exercise.

I had to laugh yesterday, we do Brain Quest 5-6 when she sits on the toilet at night (her request) and she had to find things starting with B. She said bullrushes, and then said there were 2 sets of bullrushes in the picture (I told her there were 8 things altogether) but Brain Quest did not identify the bullrushes as things starting with B. So, obviously she isn't going to do badly on the test, but the habits now will matter later on.

Thanks again.

Ren

And what happens if the "princess" testing does not go smoothly ???

I am not sure if I am going to make her wait until 6. We were at the arcade yesterday and she took her remaining $2 out of her piggy bank to get these pixie things out of a vending machine and got 2 of the same. She was disapointed and our first thought was to get another one for her, but we didn't.

When I say smoothly, trying her best, which means "stop, breathe and think". I think that is a reasonable request. Since we have used this tester before, I think we will get good feeback. And she actually likes doing the test with this psychologist. She is well known in NYC and interacts well with kids.

And, I will fold anyway on this, I know.

Ren

reading we would alternate by chapter, I would read, he would read -

hey, we did this too!! DS8 is very visual spatial as far as I can tell and this would get us through a story more quickly and keep his interest up. I recommend it. Now he is reading at 2+ grades above level.

Our DS4 is the same with the not wanting to work hard if something doesn't come to him right away. We do the you read a page/i read a page too, and he scans the pages first to see which one might have a word he doesn't know, then he chooses the other page to read. He doesn't like sounding out words either. When he comes to a word he doesn't know, he'll try a few guesses based on what letters are in the word, but he doesn't try to figure it out by sounding out the word.

We have to remember to praise the effort too - that seems to help. I remember to praise the effort more on physical stuff, because DS is so very cautious, but i need to work at my praising the effort on the academic stuff too. DS4 also goes through phases when he doesn't want any help (especially with lego stuff), which is nice.

The reason my son wouldn't read very much at 4 was because his eyes got tired and lost focus after a very short time and I didn't know there was a problem until he was 7. At his 4 yr old checkup, he showed two doctors how he could name all the words in the first several sentences in a book (probably somewhere between 3rd & 4th grade level) that he hadn't seen before when I spelled out the words for him, but he wouldn't just read it for them. Ages 5-7, he seemed to be able to read at a high level but would only read maybe a paragraph if that much and then he wanted me to do the reading, unless it was double spaced and larger print. At age 5, he read one-page reports (always double-spaced) to go along with his letter of the week show & tell in Kindergarten that usually came up around 6th-8th Flesch Kincade grade level on Microsoft Word. He read a report on his GPS that came up 12th grade level but he missed a few words on that one when he read it to the class.

He said reading gave him a headache. When he had his first vision exam, they didn't think he had a vision problem because he could see everything on the eye chart, but I knew something was not right because I thought if he could already read well that he would be reading more by himself instead of wanting me to read to him all the time. His developmental pediatrician was the first to notice the vision focusing problem and sent us to a developmental optometrist who confirmed that my son did have a problem. Even though my son couldn't have practiced reading very much because of this vision problem, at age 7, he was able to read a paragraph from an article in Time magazine, but he kept losing his place and skipping lines. He did not make any errors or lose his place in his reading when he had a finger underneath the words as he read. About a year after he had vision therapy, he willingly read entire Wikipedia articles out loud to me.

I really think playing computer and video games are what motivated my son to keep reading even though he had a vision focusing problem that made reading more difficult for him and gave him a headache. Also, I think being in a musical theater group with kids of all ages where he had to read lines and song lyrics with older kids helped.

He used to love Brain Quest and we always had to get the ones several grade levels ahead of his age. We sometimes took Brain Quest with us when we went to a fast food restaurant and somebody would usually ask me where we got it because my son got so excited over answering some of the questions and he was obviously having fun with it. Some of his older gifted friends are involved in Quiz Bowl at the public school and I feel kind of sad that he can't do this with them, but we watch Cash Cab and Who Wants to be a Millionaire and sometimes Jeopardy together and he enjoys that. I think trivia games for trivia loving kids is a great motivation for learning. My son got his first Trivial Pursuit game at 4 and he liked to ask me the questions. He discovered that I wasn't as smart as he thought I was when he got that game. I used to call him "... Smarty Pants" so he called me "Lori Genius." I lost my status as Lori Genius when he got that game. I couldn't get away with making up some of the answers that I didn't know when he asked me questions all day long. The answers were on the back of the card.

One of the few books that he would sometimes read to other people was a coloring book with jokes in it that we bought at a dollar store. He never wanted to color in it though. I never could motivate him to color in the lines and this was a problem at our public school where coloring is still required in 6th grade, according to one of my son's public schooled friends. The Kindergarten teacher wanted my son to go to a transitional first grade after Kindergarten (a year in between Kindergarten and First Grade) even though he was reading at a very high level and doing math above grade level, because he wouldn't color in the lines, but I am doing my "duty as a parent" as another teacher at the school called it, by homeschooling my son.

You can also use, "Slow is Smooth, and Smooth is Fast"

I think I wasn't explicite why this was an issue. The tester told us to work on this. She told us she would score high enough to get into the second round of Hunter but this was a behavior she needs to work on.

I think I made it sound like I just wanted her to score well for my own amibions. I think this more of an issue for the OLSAT where the correlation with the SB is only 50%.

Ren

Forgive me for saying so Wren, but I have trouble with the idea that a three year old has academic habits that she must "work on". She may be precocious, but she is three after all.

I agree Lorel, and I'm really surprised someone who tests preschoolers would even suggest it.

Lori H. mentions the "Flesch-Kincaid Reading Test", which I'd never heard of. Do others have any experience with this? There's a reasonable description of it at Wikipedia, and out of curiosity I decided to test one of the Bob books that DS4 has been reading. It showed up as Grade Level 2.7, but that seems ridiculously high to me. Or do I just not have a very good sense for what's read at the various grade levels?

BB

Perhaps the tester was alluding to the environment at Hunter, as in, if she is going to attend this school...here are some things they expect.

Might be more of a personality issue? DD8 could thrive in an environment like that at three or four. DD6 wouldn't fare so well....because of personality not level of intelligence.

I guess time will tell if it's a good fit. I would guess there are brilliant children in New York who would qualify intellectually to attend Hunter, but don't, and grow up to be immensely successful.

Try this one BB

http://members.tripod.com/~gleigh/readtst.htm

It's the Shonell It seems pretty accurate but tests for fluency not comprehension. For my kids and the very bright kids I know, comprehension lags fluency and catches up later.

One way you can gauge comprehension is to ask questions at the end of a book. Or have your child write down every word they don't understand or know. DD8 and I have been having fun with this. But she doesn't like to write them down! She likes to belt them out at me and has me write them down!


But, it's become a game and she has fun. Then we look up definitions and she re-reads the sentence.

Okay, you can't click on that link but if you copy and paste in your browser, it'll take you right to it.

Thanks, 'Neato! I'll check out the Schonell test.

By the way, I think I solved the problem about the Bob book. The Flesch-Kincaid algorithm is heavily sensitive to the average number of syllables per word. I got a spurious result because the book I was looking at happened to have a few two-syllable names, each of which was used a number of times. In a book with relatively few words, that bumped the grade level much higher than it should have been.

BB

Try this test.

http://www.readingkey.com/athena/en/trialTest.php

I think it's quite good. It doesn't test comprehension though.

Thanks LMom! That one is much more detailed. I think you can feel better about your child's reading level with your test.

Did you think anything was a little off with the percentage rankings?

Thanks LMom! That looks like a pretty accurate test. When DS is up for it, we'll check it out.

BB

Please don't fold on this one, Wren, dear! If she can learn that you take her actions seriously enough to have consequences - what a great lesson. After all, she isn't being harmed by having to wait until age 6 for a dog.

Sure, you may regret that you made that particular goal, but if you have to suffer a bit waiting until she is six, perhaps it will be a good 'learning experience' for you too!

I do back down when I was being silly if it would hurt my kid, but never for convience. It's ok for you not to be perfect!

Smiles,
Grinity

I think it's fine, if it doesn't become your whole lives, which I know you - it won't. I say, that if a little hothousing up front can get her into an academic placement that will work - a big if I know - then I say "Go for it!"

I also think that some 3 year olds are precocious enough to get into bad habits. Some kids seem to be born 'addicted' to the easy answer. Character building happens from birth, and academics is just another area where one gets to practice building character. Just remember to praise every tiny little effort - no matter how small it may be - with a kid who is up against this.

Grinity

I think the ranking is completely off. May be it shows that people tend to give it to bright kids, or they may not use it correctly or may be there is a problem with the program. Lots of the results end with gr.0, which most likely means that people don't bother to do the 2nd part of the test or that they didn't do it correctly.

I look only at the grade level. We do it every few months and I save the results for future references. I've been using it with both of the boys. Having done the test a few times in the last few years I think the very first section should be a little bit longer since my feeling is that a word or two extra words in the first level makes for a huge difference in the overall score even though I don't feel the kids made adequate progress.

Does anybody know about a good spelling test I could use to measure DS5 progress? While I am typing this DS5 is creating his own crossword puzzle which includes words like oxygen, hydrogen, teenager, raspberries, submarine.

I totally agree praising effort or finding an activity for your child that would be challenging for them is all a very good thing.

I'm still a bit alarmed about that kind of tone when referring to preschoolers from a tester. I guess in my ideal world, 4 year olds could have a bad day, or show their true colors, and get a meaningful and appropriate school placement. Call me a crazy idealist!

Thanks for the readingkey link! DS had a lot of fun with that going for speed.

It was great for DD6! She gained a lot of confidence when I told her what her reading grade level was!

Confidence is something we have been working on with her, so thanks!

That was a cool reading test (the reading key one), but I'm wondering how accurate it is? I have a hard time believing DS4 is at 5th grade level? we only did the first part, because he asked me what the test was for after he did that part, and I just said, oh, just seeing what kind of books we can get you. He ran off after that.

Okay. You're a crazy idealist.

<snicker>

But if you are, then so am I. I feel the same way.

To be honest, even testing 3-4yos for admission to a school seems nutty to me. They're not the most reliable of test subjects at that age!

But if that's the system, and if you think the school will be a good fit, then I guess you do what you have to do...I'd just want to be darn sure it's going to be a good fit for my particular child and not just a status symbol thing if I were going that route. I think going too academic at that young age isn't always the best move. I know that wouldn't ahve suited either of my kids at that age. But then again, for some other kids it might be the *ideal* choice of school. <shrug> Case by case is the only way to go.

Yeah - what Kriston said!

I definitely would say it's got to be a case by case situation. I'm guessing there are many highly to profoundly gifted children that wouldn't pass that screening at 4, and go on to do extremely well.

Oh, fer sure! All it takes is a child spinning tales in her head, or a child more interested in the way the table legs join the tabletop, or a child silently multiplying to figure out how many floor tiles there are in the room. Those kids aren't likely to cooperate with testing, but at 3, they might all well be HG+ and good candidates for a school like Hunter.

I guess you hope the kid has a good day and make sure to find a backup school!

ROFL! Exactly. And those would be my kids!

We used the Schonell to assess DS6 and the result matched up perfectly with his age equivalent from the WJIII achievement in Word-Letter ID. And as someone else mentioned, his comprehension lags his decoding ability quite a bit (about 1yr 8months difference).

For my DS6, I think that his aversion to hard work is something that he picked up starting at about 4 when he realized that it was really easy to impress his preschool teachers by just showing off things he learned without really doing anything. I didn't realize how ingrained it was until we started homeschooling and I bumped his work up to his actual ability level. We had constant fights when he had to think about the answer for more than a second. It's slowly getting better and it's been really great to see him take on true challenges, but I don't know that our solution for him at 6 would have been effective at 4. I'm not sure I would have done anything differently even knowing how hard it is on him now. At 4, I was too busy trying to get him to stop challenging *me* to worry if he was challenging himself, lol.

Sorry for mixing up two threads in one post


I don't know how accurate it is. I think you really need to start asking for the word meaning at the 4ht+ grade level as they suggested. All I know is that DS5 scored noticeable lower on WJ-III than on this test, but then he also scored lower than the reading level my friend teacher gave me a long time ago. I think he didn't do as well on the reading part of WJ-III as he could have.