Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion I miss Kriston....

...hope she's OK.

me too

She's fine... Super busy, getting her house ready for sale and moving. I'll tell her she needs to pop herself in here!

Aw! You're so nice! Thanks for letting me know that people are worrying about me, Shari.

I'm fine.

I am even still around. I read the forums regularly, but I haven't had anything to contribute lately.

As Shari said, we're getting our house ready to sell, so I've been mudding drywall and putting together furniture. Plus we're homeschooling as usual and I'm still trying to find time to write. It's a little crazy!

But I still do check in. You can always PM me if you want to talk. I'm here.

How are you two doing?

Hi, Kriston! I'm glad you're fine--I've missed your perspective on several threads the last few months, and hoped that all was well with you. Moving house with little kids...oy...that's a lot of work, especially added on top of the usual load.

All is well chez Marx.

Take care of yourself--

mm

Things are going well with us too and I'm glad to hear you're busy with good stuff!

Actually, the other thing keeping us busy is testing for DS6's LD. I had planned to post about that once I knew something. Well, after today, I know something!

We've had two appointments so far with two different experts, and today's was really helpful. A language pathology expert (???) checked his receptive language and his ability to produce. There's *clearly* a weak spot in his ability to process what he hears and put his answers to questions about it into words.

His vocab and ability to respond physically to what he hears (by pointing to a picture when told to, for example), are far beyond his years. But ask him to answer a question about a story that he just heard, and he's lost. He also had some trouble saying words he knew when shown a picture. "Tip of the tongue syndrome" she called it, jokingly.

Producing language is clearly problematic for him. She doesn't recommend therapy, but she has some tips to help him. He needs to practice answering questions when someone reads to him. Of course we do some of this, but we need to do more. Among other things.

We don't have an official diagnosis yet, and really we don't know what this means. We have several more evaluations still to come. But something weird is going on, and it's clear to someone who knows what she's talking about and will be in a report. That's a good step for us at this point.

I've missed you too, Kriston!

Some of the old-timey readers (that are pretty easy) dated 1940's-50's are good for having questions after short stories. You can usually find them in antique stores and such. I rarely find them in used book stores. Did she say anything about expressive language disorder? I think we've talked about this before, but am unsure, since my son has ELD. That is a problem for him right now as well, but practicing with questions is helping. I haven't spoken to you in a while; but we recently discovered that DS5 also has visual tracking issues and some vestibular issues where he hadn't integrated primary reflexes yet...both causing him major issues. What a relief THAT was to hear!!! I knew that something was up. One more step towards clarity.:)

It's so good to hear that you are doing well and getting some answers!

Hi Kriston,

Glad all is well.

I have pretty bad tip-of-the-tongue... took a famous people recognition test once and scored a painful 32% (despite recognizing most of them I can not drag out the names). And crosswords, forget it. That's word retrieval difficulty. Separate from memory. Doesn't get in the way too much unless I'm trying to teach people anything technical -- so I stay away from teaching. It's also separate from recognition memory (multiple choice tests are no problem for me).

And then I have a very bright 11 year old nephew who can take 5 minutes to tell you a simple two sentence story, takes so much patience to listen to him talk around what he's trying to say. But once in a while it flows out and all of a sudden he sounds glib, usually those easy moments are off-the-cuff moments when he says something without thinking about it, a rude comment to his brother for example. I call his issue stammering, you just don't hear him stammer because it happens higher up before he starts a sentence. He consistently writes me completely easy reading letters with complex thoughts -- almost like the act of writing helps him organize his output.

How does your DS do with true false questions about a story you've read him? Ie is he understanding the story but just can't tell you the storyline? Or is he also having trouble understanding?

Either way it will be interesting to see when your DS is comfortable writing or typing how he comes out in print.

Polly

ELD specifically relates initially to the kid's brain not having set up the proper filing system in their heads, like other kids do naturally. So, simple things are sorted into categories initially to help them set up a system from which to pull information. And there's today's lesson.;) My DS can give very quick/witty responses as well; but explaining something he just read gets the response "I don't know." He does great on multiple choice questions about stories; but he cannot recant it unless he's read it a bunch of times. True/False is difficult as well if there is a small difference in the statement about a story.