Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Testing insight--any idea what this might be?

I'm not sure if this has already been suggested, but I ran this question past my DH, and to him, it was 'obviously a strength in the auditory learning system.' He suggested teaching your son to whisper to himself so that he could get abstract symbols from the visual into the auditory system.

If this is the case, I would recommend some family listening to audio books to see if your son enjoys fiction more in that mode.

It also reminded me of the suggestion to build a series of PVC tubes into a device that you hold in your hand, and place next to your mouth and ear so that you can read aloud very quietly and check your written work for musicality. That might be a sanity saver for you if you are homeschooling next year.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Hmmm, the thing is that he is *not* good at getting info from listening. Unless he repeats what he is told, it goes in one ear and out the other. It's not just that he learns better by saying things out loud--I think that's true of everyone--it's that he can't learn *at all* unless he says things out loud.

Case in point: he was asking me questions about syllables today. To help him understand why words break where they do, I mentioned vowels. I listed them for him several times and "lectured" about it using several real-world examples. It was a classic aural learner presentation. Then--with this post in mind--I asked him if A was a vowel. He had no idea, and that was seconds after the lecture.

So I had him repeat the vowels back to me and then let it drop. We did nothing with the info--no application at all. I let it sit for an hour while we both did other things. After an hour of not using the info, I asked him the vowels, and he remembered most of them.

He cannot digest information that he hears unless he is able to repeat back what he has heard. But that's not how most aural learning is structured. One cannot repeat everything a lecturer has said.

Audio books--even TV shows--have never been a hit with him. Too much listening. That he dislikes TV is something I never understood. But I think all the talking overwhelms him. Even when we read a book aloud to him, he is easily distracted, interrupts a lot. He likes the books, but he doesn't listen well when read to.

I think the PVC idea is GENIUS! Thanks! I will rig one up and send it to his school for homeschoolers next year. I was wondering how to advocate for him to get to say things aloud. That might help.

In the example above, did you specifically go over identification of vowels in the course of the explaination? Did you check if he knew which ones are vowels before you started your explaination? I'm having difficulty following the example, but I do think you are on to something. Some people are willing to try and follow a big explaination when they lack one of the building block pieces, and hope to fill it in later, others throw a fit if they can't follow everything logically from their current knowledge base. I'm one of the former, more of a bird's eye viewer of things, while my DH is totally the latter.

Maybe he is someone who learns by talking - which would explain why he interrupts when being read to. Over the years I've heard some people talking about Briggs Myers Type Indicator Extraverts say:

An Extravert isn't thinking unless their mouth is moving.

I find this to be true of me (if you include typing as well, that is)
I find it a little strange to 'have a discussion' with my Intravert husband, because by the time he starts talking, he will have a fully formed opinion, while I just won't until I've 'tried on' a few positions and spoken from a few varying perspectives. I sort of make up my mind 'as I talk.'

I've also heard Howard Gardner's information -
from Wiki:

I've heard this group described as 'needing frequest breaks to talk to someone about what they are learning in order to process their thoughts.'

Glad you like the PVC idea - it's from Ruth Culham


6 + 1 Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide: Grades 3 & Up: Everything You Need to Teach and Assess Student Writing with This Powerful Model

I really enjoyed that book.

I'm wondering if you have to plan for your son to be able to have more 'give and take' in his casual learning. My son certianly seemed like an extravert as a child, and I'm that way, so when I used to teach him stuff casually, it always sounded like a 'call and response' church service.

DS: Mom why is X?
Me: Why do you think?
DS: Because Y and Z and also M.
Me: Why do you think X is realated to Y (and so on, to a degree that will probably make the intraverts squirm...)

It might be worth a try, just to see, if next time your son asks a question, you start with asking him lots of questions about what he already knows, and then when you get to having to provide new information, starting with leading questions that provide an analogy to what you are about to introduce.

HTH,
Grinity

He did not know vowels beforehand.

Step 1) I specifically named the list of vowels at least 3 times in the course of my short (2 minute) explanation and offered examples in words for each vowel. He didn't get any of it. he used random guessing to try to ID the vowels.

Step 2) I had him repeat the vowels back to me once. Just once. I dd not check to see if he got it beyond his repeating the vowels back to me in a list. We did no further practice or work with vowels for a full hour.

Step 3) An hour later, I asked him to name the vowels, and he named A, E, O and sometimes Y as vowels. He also knew that he was missing a couple. When I randomly named a bunch of letters, asking "is I a vowel? Is T a vowel?" he was able to say correctly "yes, that's a vowel" or "no, that wasn't on the list."

Listening alone is a weakness. He has to repeat things.

I am a big fan of questioning as a teaching tool. I'm practically Socratic in the way I work with kids most of the time (unless I get on a subject that I like to drone on about. I do that sometimes. DS8 eats it up; DS6 walks away.). For some reason, questioning doesn't usually work for DS6. He replies "I don't know" and that's the end of it as far as he's concerned. I prod, I say "give it a guess at least!" but he'll have none of it. Either he knows the answer or he doesn't. I have always chalked this up to his perfectionism. But answering questions is certainly not his learning method of choice, sadly. I'm not sure if that's related to his other issues or not.

We had been thinking that he might be a visual learner with a visual processing disorder, but that seems odd. If you had a visual processing disorder, wouldn't you favor auditory or kinesthetic learning? Why would you favor your weak area?

But if he's a visual learner whose *auditory* processing problem is *interfering* with his visual learning, well, that explains a lot. And auditory problems can interfere with reading, which I would have expected to be a favorite source of info for him.

I do think he is a visual/kinesthetic learner--note his strengths in math, chess and piano, not to mention his 4-leaf-clover spotting and his PRI strength on the WISC--but because he has this weird auditory processing problem, he has trouble "hearing what he sees" when it comes to taking in verbal information.

It fits.

It seems to be giving him trouble with reading, silent or on-paper problem-solving, and anything said aloud to him and not repeated by him. He must say it out loud--not just hear it said by someone else--to understand. Unfortunately, that makes relatively ineffective nearly every standard way of conveying information to a child!

I'm not sure yet what we need to do to help him. I'm not sure we're even at that stage yet. I suspect we need some tests specific to auditory processing problems to try to be a bit more sure about what we're seeing. As much sense as all this makes to me, I'm no expert. Maybe I'm just clutching at straws and it's something else entirely. I think we need a pro to take a look.

I get the testing report at the end of the week, and the psychologist and I will put our heads together then to try to figure out what's next. I suspect I'll be making an appointment with either the neuropsychologist or someone else specializing in auditory learning issues.