Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Asperger Traits & Spelling Bees

My son went to his cub scout group's Blue & Gold Banquet yesterday and he enjoyed doing the skits with the other Webelos in front of an audience, and of course, he enjoyed the food, but as usual he ended up spending most of his time talking to his friend who is four years older and who happens to be in my son's musical theater group. He is the brother of one of the boys in my son's cub scout group. The brothers are both gifted but the gifted boy my son's age just doesn't share my son's interests, except for Yu-Gi-Oh. My son says his own interest in Yu-Gi-Oh waxes and wanes and he said it waxes so slowly that you could even call it "turtle wax" but he does occasionally enjoy playing Yu-Gi-Oh with the boy his age.

The older gifted brother is just more like my son in some ways except the older boy is very coordinated and picks up complicated dance routines effortlessly. Neither he, nor my son, are interested in sports. They are more interested in books and video games and music and musical theater. But not even the older brother seems interested in the classics and he doesn't have the same level of interest in vocabulary and good metaphor and analyzing books that he reads. He reads mostly fiction. My son is also more interested in science and history than this boys is, but still he seems more like my son than any of the other boys we have met. He even tried out for the spelling bee several years ago and this is one reason my son decided to try it.

We mentioned to my son's friend that we just found out my son was one of two winners from our region who will be competing in our state's Pee Wee Spelling Bee. I know that some people thought the boy who won the national spelling bee last year had to have Aspergers, and I think my son's friend watched the spelling bee which is why I think he said what he said next.

My son's friend told us that he noticed that my son was similar in some ways to a boy that he knows in middle school that has Aspergers because my son used to flap his hands when excited, especially after leveling up on a video game. My son doesn't do this in public any more though.

But the developmental pediatrician says my son does not have Asperger's. He has good social skills around people he has something in common with. My son does have motor dyspraxia and sensory integration issues and hypotonia. Because he is not around kids his age (musical theater class is with kids up to age 19 and he tends to hang out with the kids three and four years older) he tends to talk more like an older teenager or adult.

I noticed at a recent reunion with five of my husband's brothers and sisters, that my son has no trouble talking to them. One of my husband's siblings is a geology professor, another is an oil company executive, another works for a law firm and speaks several different languages fluently, and they all appear to be very coordinated as well as verbally gifted. The husband of one of my son's cousins is finishing up law school and did drama in school and he seemed to enjoy talking to my son about theater and video games and he and his wife said they would like to watch my son if he made it to the spelling bee. My son obviously felt very comfortable around these relatives and seemed to fit right in.

One of my sisters-in-law said she wondered if my son's physical delays caused him to be more advanced mentally, like someone who is blind having a more advanced sense of hearing or smell than most people.

I do notice people watching my son and listening to him, but
I think my son will fit in some day. He just doesn't fit in very well at moment with kids his age partly because of physical differences that we hope occupational therapy will help. I don't think he should have to dumb down his speech so he appears less different around kids his age. I will not make him watch cartoons as the developmental pediatrician suggested. There is nothing wrong with being different.

Some time ago, I attended a parenting lecture where a continuum was shown that depicted the left versus right brain characteristics. Whole brain function was, I guess, ideal. To the far left side was Asperger's and to the far right was ADHD. I have no idea whether there is any validity to this model. Even if it is correct, it is obviously overly simplified. Each of my (right-brained, by other descriptors) GT kids has been suspected of having either ADD or ADHD. I believe many left-brained GT kids are assumed to have Asperger�s. In your son�s case, I think he is just being stereo-typed because he is gifted, has uncommon mannerisms, sophisticated interests and can spell really well
Is your son upset about what his friend said to him?

I agree. People sometimes think that a huge vocabulary is a sign of Asperger. I must say that I really liked the last year winner. He seemed like a really cool PG kid. I loved what he said about math and spelling. LOL. To me he didn't seem Asperger at all.

My son competed in the state spelling bee yesterday at a university. This was his very first time to compete in front of other kids and judges and I was a little worried about his lack of experience, but he felt confident and seemed to look forward to it. He had only had to do a written test to qualify for the state bee and he was a regional winner based on his written test.

There were other boys at the competition that looked a little like my son. Most of them looked like smart kids that probably spent a lot of time reading or on the computer instead of doing sports. I don't think any of these kids had Asperger's and the kids I listened to also used a high level vocabulary, but they didn't seem as talkative as my son.

I thought his musical theater experience might help him, but he said it didn't. He said this was totally different.

He has never forgotten lines in his musical theater class, even when he started at age 4 and always seemed comfortable on stage, but then he had plenty of rehearsals. This time he was on a stage that he had never been on before, at a big university, with 40 other regional winners. He wasn't playing a part in a play, it was just him stepping up to the microphone, in front of a lot of people including a group of judges. All eyes were on him as he spelled his words and there was dead silence in the auditorium.

He made it through the first round and about 10 other kids didn't. I could tell he was getting very nervous when he stepped up to the microphone during the next round for his second word. He said the first couple of letters correctly and then stopped and when he spelled the rest of the word he repeated one of the letters he said before, making it wrong. He told me afterwards that he didn't know what happened. It was a word that he knew. He couldn't believe that he did it. He was a little embarrassed, but he didn't cry as a few of the kids did. He seemed okay at the luncheon for all the spellers afterwards. One of the speakers talked about how he missed an easy word the first time he did a spelling bee because he concentrated on all the hard words and thought he knew all the words in the book so he didn't go back and review the easy words before the spelling bee. He said it was a good lesson and he came back the next year and won. My son knew almost all of the words that were given to the remaining contestants to spell and whispered them to my husband and me before the contestant spelled them.

So last night was when he really started thinking about the spelling bee. Now he says he wishes he could have that part of his memory erased--the part where he missed that "easy" word. He says he wasted part of his childhood learning all of those thousands of words when he could have been doing something else.

Then he started talking like he thought he should go back and try it again next year, now that he has the experience, and knows what it will take to prepare for a spelling bee.

I told him it was up to him, but I thought he would be better off trying some other kind of competition for a change. I wish we had some kind of quiz bowl competition for homeschoolers in our area, but we don't. He loves trivia questions over different subjects. I think this would be much more fun to try to prepare for.

Lori-

I think the first time with any new experience is bound to be the hardest. Now that your son has done the bee once, maybe it would be a good idea to let him try it again. Good for him for trying- I don't think I would have had the courage to do it at his age.

Yesterday I attended a talk on the brain science of reading. It was really interesting to hear about the different areas of the brain that are engaged while reading. Good readers use the spoken language portion of the brain in addition to the area that involves symbol recognition. Poor readers use only the latter, and so are at a distinct disadvantage. They can't sound things out easily and can easily mix up words that involve the same letters like tack and cat, or words that have the same general "shape". It was really interesting. I'm thinking that since oral spelling is slightly different than written spelling, it requires different regions of the brain to be engaged. So someone who spells quite well on paper will not necessarily spell as well orally. I often "write" words in the air when I am unsure of spelling myself.

Thanks everyone. He is feeling better about it now and wants to try again next year. There was an article in the paper the next day about the spelling bee. It didn't say much about the Pee Wee level (up to 4th grade) that my son competed in, but the boy who won the older kid's bee (the one that goes on to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.) won after spelling the word "ambrosial" in the 8th round. This boy said he knew all of the words he got, but didn't know some of the words the other kids had to spell, so my son realizes that some of it is luck too. I asked my son to spell the word "ambrosial" and he was able to spell it correctly and said he was suprised that such an easy word would be on the older kid's word lists. It also helped when he learned that the second-place winner was a 5th grader. When I told him that she would probably be there again next year, he just laughed and said "Competition, baby!"

So I guess he is not permanently emotionally scarred from the experience. He thinks he experienced "stage fright" and he needs to work on staying calm.

We are hoping that sensory integration therapy will help with learning to stay calm and focused during something like this. He was so excited before the spelling bee that he was shaking his hands a lot as if he were trying to shake out the nervous energy and skipping down the hall instead of walking calmly like the other kids. On stage, while sitting on the front row waiting for his turn, he just tapped his feet a lot. I did talk to his occupational therapist about this today. She said he could try doing push-ups against a wall out in the hall. My son said he thought people would think he was kind of strange if they saw him doing this and I agree. I don't know what would be a good way to get rid of this "excess energy" in public.

Speaking of occupational therapy, I finally got a written report on the results of his visual-motor and visual processing skills. When he was tested over two years ago, his visual motor integration was very low but visual perceptual was higher than average. This time visual motor integration was still low and the visual perceptual was average to well above average except for one thing that makes no sense at all. This time his visual memory scored below average! Talk about a quirky kid. He was identifying letters and numbers before age 2 and reading at 2 1/2 without being taught and tested grade levels ahead in reading and comprehension at age 7 and he can pick out misspelled words easily and I have seen absolutely no evidence of any kind of problem with visual memory. He is one of the first in his acting class with kids up to age 19 to memorize script and learned to spell thousands of new words in a matter of months, yet there it is on test results that he suddenly has a problem with visual memory. The report also mentions that he was obviously anxious throughout the assessment so maybe that had something to do with it.

I talked to the OT about this and she said she thought it had something to do with the sensory integration problems and she told me about someone she worked with that had to go running every morning to get his brain working properly.

He will turn 10 in May.

I have the Spell It spelling bee booklet that the older kids used last year and I saw some of the same words that were in the booklet for the younger kids, but there were harder words also. My son looked at it and he didn't think he would have a problem learning them. The thing is, they can take words from the dictionary that are not in the booklet if they need to do this in order to come up with a winner. The kids who read a lot, which is probably all of the kids that make it to the state bee, and have a very good visual memory would probably have a better chance at winning the spelling bee.

I don't think I could spell anything correctly if I had to do it in front of a lot of people. One poor girl, during a practice round at the state bee spelled the word "down" d-o-n-e, but it didn't count and she went on to do several rounds. It had to have been because of stage fright or something. She was obviously embarrassed by her mistake, but she pulled herself together when they told her it didn't count and she was still in the competition.

I will have to find a way to let my son practice spelling words in front of groups of people if he makes it that far next year. I was very surprised that he won the regional written test which was written, considering that he has some handwriting difficulties.

I got nervous and missed the first round word in our school spelling bee: which. I spelled it witch, and THE TEACHER GAVE ME ANOTHER TRY, if you can imagine! So unfair. I knew it, and I spelled it wrong the second time because I couldn't bear to stay in unfairly.

For weeks afterward, other kids said, "I can't believe you went out of the spelling bee so early!"

Spelling bees are hard!

OK, I'll chime in with my experience. I got to regionals in 6th grade. I forget how many rounds I went through, maybe about half. Then my dress got caught in the folding chair and I tore it getting loose. It wasn't a big tear, about an inch or so. I was mortified, then I choked on my word. I can't even remember the word I missed but I can remember what dress I was wearing. I did the school bee again but my heart was never in it after that.

Oh, how awful, OHG!

I'm getting the sense that for a fair number of people, spelling bees have very little to do with spelling and lots to do with getting past embarrassment. What a shame.

I'd have kicked heiney on a written test, BTW. To this day, I can spell virtually any word if I can write it down. I never learned all those visualization tricks the high-finishing kids use nowadays. I'll bet I'd have gotten past the first round if I'd used one of those!

...and managed to avoid ripping my dress. Oh!