I laughed until I cried when I saw the title "How to get your children out the door - WITH THEIR SHOES".
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.
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).
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.
... 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.
YES. This is DS. It is positively infuriating to his parents.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
*Another easily confused word, that is, not another recommendation*
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.
