I had my son evaluated at our university Speech and Language center recently. His early speech development was rocky and required a lot of therapy. He got discharged last year for being too smart (my interpretation, clearly), but I continued working on speech based on what I picked up on in the 15 months watching speech therapy sessions.

In the last year, his language skills have gotten really spiky. My reading on Dr Google points to either a language processing problem or a form of dyslexia. Both of these explain part of what I'm seeing, but huge parts of each language processing disorders and dyslexia *don't* fit him.

In our meeting with the clinician immediately after the testing, I left with the sense that they were so wowed by his math score that they couldn't focus on anything else.

I got the report last night. The clinical supervisor is out until Tuesday. The scores vary by 5 standard deviations on the K-TEA II, and the report contains no comment on this. Some of the variation is likely that he hasn't yet been in school despite being nearly 6, and therefore not exposed to things like writing.

DS is 5 years 9 months, starting kindergarten today.

Can someone back out grade level equivalents for these scores based on my (limited) info? I'm trying to tease out "old for grade" vs "not ok, maybe dyslexia"

{Snip}

His Language Processing Test: Elementary 3rd ed scores (administered after the above, including the hour and 10 minutes on math)

{snipped for internet memories}

Any "over the internet diagnosis I bet you're looking at this" ideas?

There is an expression 'twice exceptional' or 'multi exceptional' that refers to kids with spiky profiles that include them with the gifted catagory in some areas and the disability (or 'realtive disabilty) catagory in other areas. If this fits your child, that may explain why 'huge parts of each disorder...don't fit him.' There are stories wild things such as a highly gifted child who was able to 'cover up' his deafness until mid elementary school.

breath

Do you have IQ test scores? If not I think that they would help.

So this shows that K-TEA is an acheivement test. Do you know if they gave him the 'PreK-K' 30 minute test or the 'Grades 1-2' 50 minute test? It may be that at his age, his Math ability is less unusual - or it may be that his Math ability is very very unusual. If he seems to have picked it up all on his own, or you had no idea that he knew stuff, that nudges you in the direction of thinking that his ability to self-teach if very unusally high. If you've been quizzing him daily (not that there is anything wrong with that) then you are maybe looking at a more 'pleasantly gifted' kind of situation.

But if you have supporting IQ scores,and live in the USA, I would recommend you start filling out an application to Davidson Young Scholar's Program, because that Math Score is 160, and he would only need a Math Score of 145 on K-TEA and supporting IQ scores in a single subsection to qualify. For most purposes a score of 130 is the level of unusualness to qualify for most gifted programs. And yes, the age/grade thing is possibly clouding the picture, so try to keep all this info in the 'hum, interesting' catagory of your mind.

If it helps, I define giftedness as a 'special educational need' not as anything much else. You simply want to know if he's is likely to get much out of a classroom program designed to meet the needs of his grademates. You also want to know why he 'doesn't fit' this disability catagories. This could be playing a role. Of course, you are posting on a 'gifted board' so what else would we be thinking? ((wink))

Hope that helps,
Get an IQ test if you don't have one in the last 2 years, not a WPPSI, get a WISC-IV.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

No. Not yet. I'm weighing what and when to do that. I've avoided testing with my kids unless there was something demanding it. At this point, I was focused on his inability to rhyme and limited phonological awareness relative to his reading skills.



He had the comprehensive form, but I don't know which form. The report doesn't say.

My daughter did this too -- I can't judge based on the amount of time. I think the K-TEA part took upwards of 2 hours, an hour and ten minutes on the math since he never hit the ceiling.


Some families maintain a literature-rich household, my house is evidently mathematically rich. He self teaches, he absorbs from the ether, he quizzes us, he checks out math story books from the library, but he also asks to be taught. He showed subtracting with borrowing on the computation part of the test much to my dismay. Turns out my husband had been playing with him on a white board while waiting with him for something else the week before the testing. He said it was maybe 5-10 minutes and two examples. Same thing with fractions - the knowledge he showed on the test was something that we'd read about in a story book.



I've checked DYS out because I am thinking we're going to need some advocacy help. The letter of recommendation is going to be the sticking point. He fails to communicate what he's thinking in a classroom setting, so his teachers have all missed that there's anything unusual about him.

Gifted qualification at our school, including single subject acceleration, requires "all around" gifted for both IQ and achievement. So if he's reading at or even just above grade level, he can't be accelerated in math. There also seems to be a huge selection bias against boys, with less than 1/3 of the kids qualifying for services in each grade are boys.

My daughter was accelerated 1 year in math into a compressed curriculum, so she's currently at a double acceleration. The conversations with the school were tense at best even with her gifted qualification.

I wasn't planning to worry about math ability for kindergarten. Our intervention specialist told me that math would be only 10 minutes a day. With the 138/160 scores in hand, I got the classroom schedule with 30 minutes per day. That makes me anxious.

Wait, upon rereading, I interpret this differently. He had the comprehensive form. I read the info from the website as meaning if you have a preK-K kid you're testing, expect it to take ~30 minutes, 50 minutes if it's a grade 1 or 2 student, etc.

Right?!? I mean, this test included listening comprehension about the origin of phases from old English, the math included stuff my daughter didn't hit until 4th grade "everyday" math.

It's hard to know - I think private testing is in order because his profile seems so spikey. If he is showing unusual giftedness in one particular area, that has to part of what is making his challenge areas present so oddly. It would be ideal if there is a local tester who is both familiar with unusually gifted kids and familiar with kids with learning challenges.

Even if your child is identified 'gifted' in limited areas, and the school has zero interest in meeting his learning needs in those areas, I still think it's a good idea to get the identification because it makes a parent more likely to look into community resources for gifted - state association or university sponsered saturday or summer classes, for example.

I think of those places because that's where we got our letters of recommendation for DYS - we also had the situation where the teacher 'just didn't see anything unusual.' Chess clubs, Math circle, game nights, aviation clubs, 4H, or any other fun activity are also likely sources of letter-writers. Some familys end up hiring a Math mentor. Some of the parents of your daughter's friends who get her giftedness might also be willing to sit with your son for a few minutes, teach him what math they know, and then write a letter.

Smiles,
Grinity

I love the way you put this. I'd suspect, based on this description, particularly that part where he heard about fractions in a story book and was able to apply them on the test, that he is unusally gifted in Math. He may be quite ordinary in every other respect - or his disability may be much greater than anyone has suspected and his gifts in other areas plus his disabilities are 'cancelling each other out' as far as observers can detect - but not as far as he experiences the world.

Lots to think about, yes?
Grinity

Ahhh, I'd understood it needed to be a more formal relationship. I've got parents of friends who see it handily. You just have to shut up the background noise of a classroom, wait for a response, and listen & parse his response.

Honestly, I think that his verbal skill are also quite extraordinary, but that there's been a bottle neck in the reading development, somehow amplified or exacerbated by his speech development issues. However, at this point, I can't hand over the KTEA scores as proof of ability in that area (the state says can be used for both cognitive and achievement?!?)

His expressions, turns of phase, vocabulary, and things he chooses to talk about are highly unusual.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if kindergarten is useless after October when whatever remaining phonological piece falls into place. However, it's possible that it never will, and he'll continue to memorize his way through books and reading levels until he gets to a brick wall. I started down this path because I suspected he'd completely snow the teachers by memorizing his way through school all the way up to the point when he can't anymore.

Thanks, much appreciated.

I'm still curious if anyone reading along at home has a clue as to how the translate those lower scores to grade level equivalents.

I am not an expert, but have you looked into stealth dyslexia? From my (in-expert) understanding dyslexia is, in most people, primarly an auditory/phonemic problem. It's about the inability to hear the phonemes and map them with symbols. And it seems MUCH harder to pick up in very gifted child, particularly a younger child.

From the little bit we know about your son from reading this thread I am guessing that his speech development and reading development issues are directly linked and professional awareness of the severity is being confounded by his cognitive ability.

My eldest is not at all at your DS level of giftedness, and she has other issues going on, though we are struggling to pin point what exactly. But retrospectively I am certain that dyslexia, CAPD and being at least mildly, probably moderately, gifted have combined to present a deeply confusing picture.

At 7 yrs old her language and general knowledge was advanced for her age, but after 2 years in school we were still struggling with recognition of both the sound and name of each letter. Forget reading. Two and half yrs later she has the word recognition of a 12.5 yr old and even higher reading comprehension. When she gives a verbal presentation that she wrote herself, her delivery is well above average for her peers. When she reads aloud from a book it's like listening to sound salad. With great effort I can pick out individual words and tell that she is in fact decoding correctly and I can tell that she comprehends and even enjoys what she's read - but I can't understand a word of it because I am so busy trying to just figure out what each words actually is. I feel like I am hearing what she must have been experiencing all this time and I am astonished she ever learned to read at all, let alone make 7yrs reading progress in 2.5 yrs.

My own dyslexia was picked up by accident in adulthood when my compensation strategies were so solid that it was irrelevant to me to know, though it explained a lot. My DH was never diagnosed but I am sure he ALSO has dyslexia, but of a different form, his sister absolutely does. I think my eldest DD has inherited BOTH of our quirks. The book "Disorganised Children" has a really interesting section on Dyslexia that talks about the idea that there are multiple kinds of dyslexia, presumably of differing genetic origin, thus explaining the varying presentations, varying ways of successfully remediating, varying degrees of severity - and that you might get more than one "type". This was the great "A-ha" moment for me thinking about my DD and our family tree.

One thing I will say is that it was only when painstakingly teaching my eldest to read that I learned any phonetics at all. I remember being taught the e on the end of a word is silent (but not that it changes the vowel sound) and I remember the rule "i before e, except after c". And that is it. When I had a child at school and people started talking about "sight words" I remember being SO confused and thinking "Yeah but there are SO few rules and nearly every word breaks them so aren't ALL words sight words?". Um, apparently not! I was a late reader, but once I had learned the entire language as sight words, or enough of it to map the few words left I didn't know somewhat easily then my literacy took off. Actually a lot like my DDs - I was in remedial english in yr3 and top of my grade by yr5. And I didn't ever hit a brick wall, not with reading anyway.

The point of my story is not to suggest you don't need to figure out what is going on, or suggest that what happened to me was a great outcome. But just that in actual fact he might not ever hit that brick wall you are worried about using the memorisation approach (assuming you mean memorising words), at least with reading. Left to his own devices he may well learn to read completely differently to other people and still take off and have no problems once his own personal map is fully developed. But if he was my kid I would be digging until I had answers.

There are some posters on this board who know WAY more about dyslexia than me and have shared some really awesome links to articles on current theories of dyslexia. So try doing a search here for dyslexia.

Mo3, thank you for that story. The sound salad sounds a bit like what I've wondered what he hears, but maybe in an atypical way? He's also described having to replay what he hears in his head, picture the message, then respond. What I didn't mention was that he spent 4 months when 1 and again 4 months when 2 nearly deaf with viral ear infections. We're dealing with the complicated interaction of missing most of his environment in his first two years, which compounded the things we're seeing. His auditory skills have therefore been playing catch up.

I talked to the clinician on the phone for an hour yesterday:

She didn't have the report in front of her, nor did she have access to the KTEA manual (she was calling from home).

This is one of the few places in the state that specializes in language processing. They were confident he doesn't have a language processing disorder.

They can diagnose dyslexia there, but they don't seem to use a differential abilities diagnosis, they were focused on age appropriate skills. She was confident that the lower scores were a consequence of not yet having been in school (his preschool did no writing beyond the first name) and he could give a $h!t about writing, so it hasn't exactly been a focus 'round these parts. I'm going to use the fact that the clinician doesn't have the manual available until the quarter starts again (end Sept) as my in to go sit with the new vice principal (former intervention services specialist) to get the grade level equivalents. Whooopsie, look at those math scores.

I'm still moderately skeptical. He wasn't given the nonsense word decoding part of the KTEA because it's not normed for a kid under 6. (I note the DIBELS does...) Same with the nonsense rhyming.

The 3 hour KTEA was the comprehensive, and the online times for each grade are indeed an estimate of the time it takes to complete the test. He went through the preK-K stuff, through the grade 1-2 stuff, etc.

He answered 8 questions (I think? I'm trying to remember the raw scores they showed me) beyond the point where he tipped into the 160 range. The clinician says that his verbal and obviously his mathematical abilities are clearly highly gifted. He needs to be in school to round out the skills.

I guess I'm going to give it some time and continue my watch-like-a-hawk mode. I also have to put in a phone call to the local guy that does 2E testing, doesn't take insurance, but has a multi-month wait list.

I suggest you mentally file away now to look into Silverman's articles on teaching spelling to Visual Spatial Learners for when your son starts needing to spell. If he is having to picture what he hears in order to process it then this spelling approach is probably going to be exactly what he needs to learn to spell. You may find reading what she has to say on Visual Spatial learners interesting in general.

Wow, thanks. That's my whole family right there.

Spelling is our nemesis. (Wanna know how many tries it took for me to get 'nemesis' right?)

Good stuff all the way to the bottom for my family with the Golon articles:
http://www.visualspatial.org/articles.php

Lots to think about and process.

That is a different page to the one I found the articles on, but it looks like most of the articles that really spoke to me were by Allie Golon. I laughed until I cried when I saw the title "How to get your children out the door - WITH THEIR SHOES". My eldest lost every pair of shoes she owned in a single term of yr1, even her gumboots. She was at a fairly alternative school where she only wore them in and out of the gate anyway, so I sent her barefoot until I was due to buy the next seasons shoes at the end of term...

This rings a bell. In my case, I had developed a large vocabulary (spoken and written) from rote memory - like mentioned above, I thought all words were sight words. In first grade I had trouble with writing and various aspects of phonological awareness, such as not being able to split words into syllables or syllables into letters, such that I was behind the kindergarten students (I was moved from a first grade class to a mostly-kindergarten class). My basic phonological awareness only caught up when I was roughly ten or eleven, when my dad found a copy of Hamlet, and there were still aspects of phonics that were a complete mystery to me in the sixth grade, despite having reading comprehension scores at the college level.

Incidentally, while I wasn't late to speak, I had unusual language mostly repeating phrases from TV, and when my dad gave me options for what kind of lunch meat, my delay in understanding the speech was such that I would just repeat back something he said (often the last thing) even when I didn't know what it was. After a few times of him telling me "You said you wanted X" after I started complaining I didn't get what I wanted, I learned to be less picky. My parents had no clue until WAY later that I had language difficulties apart from the syllable problems mentioned in one of the regularly scheduled parent-teacher conferences, when in high school and I had developed the skills to communicate the problems I had processing language. So that is a time advantage you have.

Whether it's a learning disability or something else, it's definitely something to keep an eye on to make sure the school doesn't ignore it, or worse blame him for being lazy and choosing not to cooperate with the assignment because he's "obviously smarter than that". First grade was one of my least favorite school years for a reason, when days often culminated with my thinking I'm just lazy and stupid and crying, fighting with my parents. It's fairly likely that he'll get frustrated by the math in the classroom - at one point I walked out of the classroom after arguing with the teacher why I shouldn't have to show my work in adding two numbers every single time after I've demonstrated I understand the process and continue to get the right answers, but temperaments differ, and he may handle it better. Still, it's easier to learn to play nice with the system and remain interested in a subject when you get outside enrichment to actually learn things about the topic (in case he can't access gifted programming for math).

And while the rote memorization fo words can last long and be surprisingly effective, it does wear off more quickly than other systems - my spelling began to degrade between 8th and 10th grade, a few years after a huge word learning spike, the worst offenders being double consonant words like "obsess" (AKA obbsess and obssess and obsses) and "resurrect" (AKA ressurrect and ressurect), and the a/e words like "relevant". Those tirp everyone up at some point, though, and I did develop a significant amount of phonological awareness by the end of elementary school, so that's probably an important factor in maintaining spelling/vocab. The inefficient way of handling this data is probably also contributed to my deep, abiding hatred for rote memorization tasks in the classroom setting. So the resources can be more intense to get to a similar result, and learning phonological awareness early probably is a good initial investment to free up thinking space, instead of continually filling up the RAM to the max and causing language to crash or come close to it.

I would also second MumofTHree's recommendation (argh! another one!*) about learning spelling in a visual spatial way, although I am not familiar with those particular articles. I learned my spelling lists by visualizing the page we got beforehand, and doing this, I learned enough words to read independently and learn new words beore they appeared on the list, and so did well on pre-tests even though I didn't ace those nearly as often (even in third grade up until about seventh or eighth grade, it was vastly more efficient to ask my dad how to spell a given word or what a particular written word was than to use a dictionary, and did terrible at our 3rd grade in-class lesson on how to use a dictionary to look words up).

And it is a good thing that you're paying attention to this and the potential to do better in language isn't getting squandered - after all, I had similar problems and basically majored in creative writing while in high school, some college English professors commenting that my writing is publishable (good thing they don't follow my internet posts, LOL). Where there's a will there's a way, so they say.

*Another easily confused word, that is, not another recommendation*

LOL That's my daughter, who tried to leave the house two mornings in a row, when the outside temperature was <10F without a shirt. We consider shoes advanced skills around here.

I gave up on waiting for Smart but Scattered from the library and went out and bought it.


DS can break words -> syllables -> sounds and can take sounds -> syllables -> words as long as it's not in print. If I say it for him, he can put it together. He knows all his letter sounds (and can read more letter sounds in a fixed amount of time on random letters than my DD9 can.) There is a gap between text-> sound and then hearing the sound he makes to make it a word.

Watching him thinking about rhymes makes it apparent to me there there is also a gap there in how he hears the sounds. At this point, he's been tested twice (KTEA as above and KRAL on the first day of school) to produce rhymes, which is did just fine. However, they were on real, common words. I'd be willing to put money on his inability to identify or produce rhymes to nonsense words. We've worked on this since last fall when I discovered he didn't understand rhyming, so he's a veritable rhyming dictionary without much gut feeling of what rhyming really is: he's just memorized the word families.



YES. This is DS. It is positively infuriating to his parents.




I'm paying close attention to this because I feel that we did not respond appropriately until we had a lot of repair work to do for DD. By that point, she had been very effectively taught that you don't learn anything at school.

Gifted math programming starts in 4th grade in our district. Our school has about 1 3rd grader per year (out of ~120 kids per grade) placed into the year (that trend only valid for the last 3 years when Principal Cookie Cutter retired.)


Funny, my mom described to me last night about how she taught spelling to 7th graders in the 70s. It was practically word-for-word the method in those articles. I'm using Sequential Spelling on DD9 right now in an attempt to undo several years of inappropriate-to-her-spelling instruction. It's not V/S according to those articles. I'll test drive those methods on her 4th grade spelling lists as soon as they start coming home.

LOL add 'inappropriate' to the list.

Thanks ladies. I haven't gotten the answers I came here asking, but I've gotten a boat load of information.

I remember being told by our special Ed teacher that most dyslexics can't rhyme, so DD probably wasn't dyslexic. But I have a habit of talking in nonsense rhyme to my babies and have played rhyming games from when they could talk. Just a silly parenting quirk in my case, that may have been remedial.

Hmmm, my reading says that dyslexia is an umbrella of many sub-types, where some affect the phonological processing more than others. So it might just be that her form of dyslexia doesn't present with the rhyming problem?

I'm waffling - DS hasn't been in school. We do things "right" in terms of reading to our kids, including lots of poetry, but DS might just need a more systematic approach to teaching the phonological awareness skills.

We're giving it time, but in the mean time I'm making an appointment with the kindergarten teacher and the vice principal to discuss the report.

Sigh. This is a good example of a situation in which trying to avoid doing too much testing is leaving us with data that is very difficult to interpret. It's also a good example of a situation in which getting testing done by people who spend most of their time in situations in which "average" would be wonderful means that they get bedazzled by the few high scores and figure nothing's really wrong.

It is really hard to tell from this whether you're looking at a kid with a language-based LD, stealth dyslexia, ADHD, Asperger's, nothing really wrong but splinter skills that are confusing people into expecting that everything should be that good, or something else. I could defend any or all of those hypotheses based upon the data, but couldn't prove anything with what we've got here.

You need some broad-based cognitive testing to put this data into perspective. Given that they did the K-TEA for achievement, it might be a good idea to use the K-ABC for the cognitive test. It's conormed with the K-TEA, so it will be more possible to compare data and say, "Are these differences statistically significant? Are they unusual in the population? Do they match up with the problems we see in real life for this kid?" It also has some nice options at this age for out-of-level administration of subtests for gifted kids, too.

But my bet is that if you do only the IQ test, you're still not necessarily going to have a good basis for resolving between those hypotheses -- neuropsych screening at least will help, and if the Asperger's thing has any possibilities (note that it is typically extremely subtle at this age with GT kids), my experience has been that projectives are the place where that becomes the most clear one way or the other.

Dyslexia is a broad umbrella -- *many* dyslexics have difficulty with phonological processing, but there are many other subtypes. Also, note that rhyming is the easiest phonological processing task we have, so saying "dyslexics can't rhyme" is a massive oversimplification -- may serve the pressure put on the special ed teacher to avoid referring kids, but doesn't match the real world.

Thank you for that Aimee.

We have an appointment with a psychologist in October through Children's that may lead to the neuropsych exam. This process was launched by our ped who was kinda clueless on DS, but could see what I was talking about.... I'm the one that started the process that lead to the testing above by getting his hearing fully checked. The audiologist noted some things that looked like language processing problems, and so we were sent to the Speech and Language clinic with those observations, and a few more I tacked on about the rhyming issue.

I have an appointment with the kindergarten teacher in two weeks. I asked that she take some time to get to know DS before we met, but I'd like to go over the test scores with her. I'll talk about dyslexia with her at that point, but I also need to talk to her about the math. I tried to get in with our new assistant principal (who I'm told will be my ally), but she passed me off to the school psych (who I know is not my ally). The district is also under the gun on the dyslexia front with a new parent group making the administration circle the wagons. I'm being somewhat cautious on that front as a result.

Asperger's isn't really a consideration at this point. There are really no indicators of it with this kid, and a few things I'm told are specifically contra-indicators. He understands what others are thinking and may or may not understand, and he can verbalize his reasoning. He's aware of other people's moods. He's flexible with new routines and sudden changes in plans. He can tolerate a variety of levels of stimuli; he varies his interests and play over days to weeks. He likes playdates and can play well; he gets puns and jokes. He doesn't really flip out, and when he does, it's easily resolved.

Alright, so I just googled a bit and read through a bunch of "Asperger's checklists." Not my kid. The -->only<-- thing that sort of fits is "unusual interests" or "unusual play interests." He's a 5 year old that plays chess and does Sudoku. He's really interested in things like rocks, the Earth's interior and Earth's history (see my user name: it's part of the home environment). None are at all obsessive (OK, our sitter would think the chess is obsessive, but that's mostly a reaction to her trial-by-fire need to learn to play herself.)

Edit: Upon rereading, it's interesting to me: Note I didn't list math as a particular interest. We talk about math and mathematical ideas, we all watched the Nova on fractals. He lobbies for candy in the grocery store by calculating for me *how cheap* it could be (but mommy, it's only 20 cents an ounce!) He did beg for math homework last spring, which led to him working through a Singapore book when printing worksheets off online was putting too much wear and tear on my printer. The Singapore book was shelved for much of the summer, and I noted yesterday that it was back out again.

What you haven't listed here is "hasn't had the opportunity to learn it yet." This kid is on his third day of kindergarten, and while I know that this board appears populated by parents of kids who intuit reading, there's a reason why reading and writing are taught in schools, right?

Nothing beyond letters and letter sounds were taught in preK. No writing. I have actually been suspecting that he'll figure out the rhyming when he starts in with inventive spelling in another few weeks. This is why I was looking for information on what grade level expectations might be based on his "old for grade" status.

I have a little information (and confirmation that he has unusual math ability) and I'm watching like a hawk.

We are going to give DS a chance to learn in school while I get things more figured out and watch him learn through a more formal setting. I'm working on a temporary hypothesis that he's got a bottle neck that will be opened by formal education.

I'm not rejecting the ideas of dyslexia or something else leading to learning difficulties at this point, but I'm also not rejecting the idea what he just needs a chance to learn in a more structured manner.

That's under "nothing really wrong but splinter skills confusing people into expecting that everything should be that good."

Geo, did the SLP report give you any information on the speech delay or current characteristics of his speech? That's an element that's not off "in comparison to the splinter skills," but even "in comparison to typically developing kids."

Or were they too dazzled to think about that any more?

DeeDee

Sigh. I think I understand why he got discharged from speech when he did last year still with the errors he was making. The SLP understood everything he said during the testing.

I understand about 80%. The difference in his speech between a clinical setting and home is huge. DS talks about more complicated things, faster, and with mumble set to High. He did not do this during the testing. We're to go back in two years if his /r/ still isn't in place.

Most other adults who know DS also report understanding everything. He does not talk to them about the same sorts of things he talks about at home, nor with the same complexity. His last babysitter, DH, and myself then are the only people who report such problems. I'm now tasked with keeping notes on it, and it does seem to be a lot of mumbling, coupled with poor grammar, and unusual choice of topics or words.

She did not observe other speech quirks the audiologist and interprets the description of "thinking too much." While I might add that to the list of 'wowed by the scores' DS did verbalize a lot of what he was thinking, in a few places giving two to three options of what he could have answered, or in describing a multi-step way to his answer.

The 'thinking too much' hypothesis explains about half of the slow responses we see. The others really looks to me as what we've started to call "taking the scenic route" through the brain.

In other news, I asked my grade level equivalent question to the school psychologist. He has failed to answer that question still, but he has started the process of scheduling an educational team meeting. That could be the first step to getting DS accelerated in math, and it can be the first step for more testing. Either way, it's a forum for me to bring forward strengths and weaknesses.

I'm also taking notes on issues to discuss in the trip to the psychologist, and working to justify to DH the need for private testing ($1800).

What is the odd grammar like? Age-appropriately odd, or odder?

We still get "caughten" and "catched" once in a while at my house from little DS, but not whole sentence structures that are garbled. I don't know if mine is a good basis for comparison, though.

DeeDee

Yeah, it's age appropriate, things like your example. Sometimes he says a sentence inside out, but rarely. He now uses all the appropriate "supporting" words like 'a' and 'the' that he hadn't been doing even after he was discharged from speech.

I struggle to understand this more than they did in the clinical setting I suspect because I'm rarely sitting in a quiet room seated directly opposite him, watching his every move. I suspect he also knows he mumbles a lot and that people can't understand him, so he speaks more clearly to strangers.

The school psychologist blew me off. He won't tell me the agenda for the meeting: "Talk to your classroom teacher." Grrrrr. Dude, you're the one that called the meeting...

Can you nicely pretend that your ears aren't working when he mumbles, and ask him to "repeat it clearly"?

Our kids both went through a whining phase; we simply couldn't hear them when they whined, and it was a blessedly short phase as a result.


Uh-oh. That is... bizarre. Can you get the school's person in charge of IAT meetings (the EIS or equivalent) on the phone? I don't think they'd call a meeting to berate you for having your kid tested, but failure to answer basic questions seems like trouble to me.

Good luck--
DeeDee

"Repeat it clearly" leads to him dramatically simplifying what he's said. Instead of me missing some of the details of "We lined up in the room and then Mrs. A. walked us out of the room into the hall, we turned north, went through the cafeteria - oh and we saw Mr. F on the way and he said 'good morning kindergarteners' and then we went into a room next to the cafeteria. It was the art room. But we get a different teacher for that, nor Mrs. A. .... ..... ...."

A request to say that kind of thing clearly becomes:

"We went to art."

Once we have an EIS, I'll be calling her. I think she starts next week.

How sweet that he'll dumb it down for you. :-)

DeeDee

Note that grade equivalents are kinda dumb things and not well-respected by psychometrics geeks. If a schoolie wants them and will listen to them, okay, I guess (I've put them in reports a few times for that purpose) but it's best to base arguments in better statistical grounding, or to give up on the statistics altogether and base the arguments in terms of how the kid's actual skills match up to the actual skills expectations of the actual curriculum.