Maybe he's not gifted afterall? ... that was my inner thought couple days ago about DS4.10! We haven't done ANY school work since the end of preschool and with Kindergarten in couple weeks, I figured we might start with a little refresher. So I powered up the computer, signed into Dreambox Learning ... and ... was HORRIFIED that my child couldn't tell me what 3 + 4 was!!! My thoughts were "OMG! He doesn't know! He figured out these basic problems on his own 2 years ago and now he doesn't know? He's just like any of his NT friends! He's not gifted at all! Who am I kidding!" ... I was there to guide him through 2 of the problems and then I left and let him play. Came back 10 minutes later and my child was easily doing addition and subtraction to 20 without a second thought and just kept saying ... "Oh, this is easy! I know all this!" And there he was, my child was back! I guess he let any academics completely slip off his mind back in May and I totally fell for it! lol

Please, tell me I'm not the only parent who's had this happen to them???

If your child is anything like I was, he probably hates to respond on cue as expected. He is likely bored with these types of questioning, and rather than respond like a well-trained seal, wants to do it on his own time. He probably is gifted, but rebellious. As a PG child, I was the most unmotivated student but responded well as an autodidactic learner =] Perhaps your child is the same

Nope, you're not the only one (but I sure hope we're not the only two!) DS was better in arithmetic in kindergarten than he was at the end of first grade. I don't know exactly why, but I think the constant repetition of "easy" math either made him forget what he already knew, or made him lose confidence in his math abilities.

And FWIW, DS barely passed any of his timed subtraction tests this past year (in 2nd grade), even though he was accelerated to 4th grade math. He despises timed tests, and basically shuts down and answers only a few questions. I know he knows how to subtract, he just can't always do it on command when he feels pressured.

It just sounds like he'd got a bit rusty and he just needed a little while to get back up to speed.

Oh MK, even in this early phase of DS' development, I can sympathize! It can be a real parental rollercoaster, can't it? He first spoke extremely early and in sentences for a week, then went silent for a few months, by which point I had deluded myself into thinking it was a fluke. As you know from my recent posts, it wasn't. He's also recently started skipping "4" when he counts, I think just to irk his father. He went through similar phases of fake knowledge suppression whenever he's gotten bored with the material, and is still on a kick of defining everything by what it isn't (e.g. blue is "not-red-not-green-not-yellow..." You get the idea...)

Hang in there. Trust your instincts.

Thanks! Glad I'm not alone! lol I'm sure he did get a little rusty since we haven't done any math at all for awhile. But I did have a good reason for it too. I didn't like how his math skills suffered in preschool where when he went in last fall, he did all math in his head real fast and by the end of the year he kept telling me the only way to do it was counting one by one on his fingers? Because that's what they were taught. So now he's back to the pre-preschool abilities when he didn't need anything but his brain! I did notice one thing though. When he has a math problem, he keeps looking at it and saying it's too hard and he doesn't know but then when I get firm with him and tell him "you know this. Just give him the answer!" then he gives me the correct answer right away. So maybe it's still some sort of hiding he did in pre-school? But I am really glad to see him grasping the concepts really quick once he got into it. Within an hour he was done with Kindergarten curriculum and onto a lot of 1st grade stuff. Hopefully he's done "forgetting"!

aquinas - DS3.3 was like that with reading! First he learned to read simple words. Then acted like he forgot it all for couple months, then started reading short sentences, then went into hiding again just to start reading long sentences and paragraphs couple months later! I have to learn to NOT fall for this anymore! lol

Thanks MK, that's reassuring. It's so easy to be duped, though! I find myself spiralling through this kind of thinking:

1. he's just a baby
2. give him space to play, let's take a break from academic play
3. he seems so...different
4. that's maternal bias speaking
5. OMG! What did he just do?! I'm never doubting him again.

Lather, rinse, repeat. It's very Dilbert-esque. DH and I joke that he's a benevolent, if mischevious, Stewie from Family Guy.

I still don't really believe mine are gifted.

I love when I come across these kinds of posts and realise its not just me!

YES-- DD14 has been like this since birth.

When you ask her to repeat the behavior/what she just told you, she gets this sly expression... and refuses.

Aughhhh.

She could do all kinds of physical things from birth, but then STOPPED doing them. Seriously-- she could roll over and did so in the bassinet before we ever took her home, was holding her head up and looking around the delivery room during her first minutes, etc.

Her entire development has followed that same pattern. It's maddening-- and we finally realized when she was about 8 that, um... it probably not valid to compare our 8yo DD's relative competence at cognitive tasks... to a pair of PhD scientists (her parents). We didn't have any other real yardstick of what "normative" looked like, since we didn't spend time with other people's kids.

So we figured that when it took her three hours to put together a PowerPoint presentation the first time...well, clearly she's not THAT bright.

I'm caught in a cognitive dissonance loop with this lesson.

Just yesterday, I was mentioning to my mother that I thought DS was experiencing a speech regression because, you know, he hadn't made my eyes bulge or my stomach turn in a few days with something he said. Thankfully, after a quick suck-back-and-reload sequence I realized how ridiculous I sounded, with my mother's help, of course.

All of that simply to say it's easy to become inured to a process of second-guessing when the standard is totally non-normative. I'm 100% guilty of setting adult-level expectations for DS' reasoning...because his rational responses let me get away with it. I need to keep muttering a mantra like, "He's one" to myself to keep things in perspective.

Just a quick follow up. I think I figured out what's been causing the recent change of going from "this is too easy and too boring! I know all this!" to "I can't do this! It's too hard!". He was put on Singulair for asthma two months ago and that's about when a lot of issues started popping up. Super irritable, angry, cries for no reason, waking up screaming at night, not to mention lack of focus pretty much all the time, and all these seem to be a frequent side effects of Singulair! He's always had a lot of sensory problems so I wouldn't even think much of all the other stuff if it wasn't for the concentration and difficulty doing things he never used to have problems with. So we're taking him off Singulair and will see if we get our boy back! He's been without it for just one day and already seemed calmer and more alert and witty today

Me too. But with the maths ds6 will seem completely thick for the first 3 questions then comes right.

Our ds was on Rhinocort for a couple of years and Zyrtec for a few years and both made him irritable and fidgety. Much calmer and more able to focus without.

At one point, my two sons and I were on Singulair and we also noticed similar side effects in two of us. I was one of the two, and felt like I was PMSing all the time - weepy and irritable. One son wasn't affected at all, but the effects were so strong on the other two of us that I never felt comfortable using Singulair after that. We are lucky that our asthma/allergies were mild and we found other options, but it's scary to see how potent the side effects can be. As someone who experienced personally how much Singular changed my mood, I think you're right to take him off of it if you have noticed changes. Good luck!

I hope you've found the cause to your son's change, and I hope he's able to do okay without the medication.

Oh, that's great that you were able to isolate a trigger. Have you ever tried Pulmicort (if it's an appropriate alternative)? I had success with it as a child with no noticeable side-effects.

Me too!!!!!!
We have been so busy that we haven't done much of anything "technically" academic since school got out. We have had plenty of learning opportunities and academics in disguise, but very little brick and mortar school type stuff.
We had signed up for EPGY and some other sites in the hopes of eliminating some academic loss over the summer, but haven't had time to really get either girl on the computer. We finally had some free time the other day and I was shocked at how long it took both girls to get back into the swing of things with what I thought was pretty simple stuff. I watched DD9 try to remember what 6X8 is. She took her time and figured it out, but if speed was needed (like for timed math tests at school) she would not have done very well. I checked the feedback portion after she was done and she did really well, but I guess we need to find more time to let them get on the computer.
Things like this make me sometimes doubt their abilities, so I'm also glad to know I'm not the only one!

It really was the meds! 48hours without them and all day today, I had an absolutely amazing and smart kid on my hands! Would talk nonstop but he has always been like that and today whatever came out of his mouth once again was the good old super bright kid! And none of the defiance of the past 2 months. While the last two months I would constantly hear "no! I don't want to! I can't! I'm angry! You're making me angry! No way!" ... the most common answer today was plain and simple and HAPPY "ok!"

The downside though, I took the boys to a local kids gym and his asthma was bothering him (exercise induced) a lot more than it had while he was on Singulair. So we have to find another safe way of getting that under control but not THIS medicine! Fortunately he doesn't normally have asthma. It's mainly exercise induced and allergen induced. So if we keep track of all the allergens that bother him, we might be ok just with a simple inhaler. I did read that Singulair can also be used just for exercise induced asthma 2 hours prior to exercise so we might just use it for the days he'll have gym at school or when we know he'd be exercising more than usual. At least the horrible side effects seem to go away within a day or two!

I'm not sure what the active ingrediant is in singulair as we don't have that proprietry name but there should be an alternative of some sort. I think I have had more than one type of drug for asthma.

They have mood and behavior changes listed amongst the serious side effects to contact the doctor immediately. Top psychiatric effects include agitation, aggressive behavior, and hostility.

It was pretty hard to pinpoint all these effects in a kid with a ton of sensory issues especially because he started the meds the week preschool ended so a lot went on at first. But this last week or two I knew for sure things were off. Our allergist office closed down the week after we got the meds so we have to find a new doctor. I was hoping that wouldn't be necessary until a follow up next year . But I'll talk about this at least with our family doctor when we go in.

Mk13, you might want to look at the inactive ingredients too - our dd who has food allergies had the same type of reaction on singular, when she was around 4-5 years old, and the culprit wasn't the singular,MIT was something. In the inactive ingredients. She's also our sensory-challenged kid and some of what looked sensory was related to allergies.

I'm so glad you found the trigger - and I hope you're able t find someg else for his asthma.

Best wishes,
polarbear