(Before you even start reading this, I have kind of thrown all of my concerns and frustrations and worries at you all, and I am sorry. I feel so completely blindsided and underqualified and completely without anyone who understands what is going on. Please forgive me for having done such a lousy job of coming into your group.)
Hi! Thank you for letting me take part in your community. I have a daughter heading for 7th grade and she has started a journey that I never would have expected, and I feel lost. I am hoping that some of you can offer btdt advice and direction. This will be a bit long, but if you hang with me, I would appreciate it. You should know that my DD is truly the "GT" type student in that she would solve global warming by splicing bat DNA with people DNA to give us all wings, thus making cars an outdated mode of transportation. She is a very "outside the box" thinker and I imagine that she is headed toward some kind of research science some day.
"A" went to small private prep school from K - 4th grade & had wonderful grades, super strong student, loved to learn, teachers pet type kid. We moved cross country and she entered 5th grade in public school (and finished 6th grade in the same school). Here she qualified easily for GT program and is flourishing. She is HIGHLY motivated, was "GT student of the year", gets along very well w her peers, has qualified for 8th grade band even though she will only be going into 7th grade, went to State in Math & Science team competition, etc etc etc. And (now this will be freaky later) has had the most AR points from her grade for the last 2 years (about 150 kids in her grade at this school).
She also has the worst handwriting and has literally called me from school to spell her middle name for her. It is an unusual name, but still, it is hers. She literally cannot spell ANYTHING. She also has a terrible time getting reports written, and I had always blamed this on her brain just being in 12 different places at once and her not being able to focus enough on what was going on - like she gets so excited about the next point that she can't make this one. I had also noticed that her speech about a subject would be vast and very mature, but her writing style did not match what she spouted off with no difficulty. Her teachers here had encouraged her to type reports, had not counted off for spelling on things that were hand written, and because she was in the GT program offered lots of "differing projects" and she would avoid written reports most of the time (so I wasn't clear on how bad things were). She is a math whiz, but when she does math it looks as if someone sneezed math all over the paper. She gets the correct answer, but there are times that I don't know how the teacher even finds the answer.
So, she will be leaving "GT" at Jr. High and will be entering "AP Track" by taking pre-AP classes. Her GT teacher lovingly pulled me aside near the end of the year to tell me that I had to do something because the Pre-AP history teacher would fail "A" based totally on her spelling and neatness. She told me that I either had to pull her from the class or have her tested for something (the teacher wasn't sure what was going on w DD, but felt sure there was something). I did some research and realized that she has dysgraphia! More amazing to me than that, I also have it, so does my brother, and I believe that my grandfather (who helped develop the radars for the first moon launches) had dysgraphia. THERE IS A NAME FOR THIS! HOORAY! I was very blessed that the GT coordinator for our district set me up with an AMAZING tester in our district and testing was done within a couple of weeks. DD did indeed show enough markers to be dysgraphic!
Still with me? Cause this is where things start to seem weird. The tester said that it is common practice to test for dyslexia when they test for dysgraphia as they tend to run together, and DD has such awful spelling issues. DD is an AVID, almost obsessive reader. She was reading at over a 12 grade reading level at the beginning of 6th grade. I have to get on to her to put down books at the dinner table. I gave the go ahead to test for whatever she felt was important. As it turns out, DD has enough markers in place to be dyslexic!!! I am floored.
So, this summer we have been learning together what is going on. DD is reading out loud to me. I realize now that she sight reads every word she sees. She uses (in real time) contextual clues about the subject to select words when she doesn't recognize the word. For example, recently she was reading aloud to me from a book that was discussing "General Beauregard". She said "General Brigadier" every time she met the word. She also does this weird thing where she regularly reworks sentences (again in real time) so that she gets the meaning, but she rephrases them completely using totally different words. And, when she reads, she skips short words like "a, and, the" etc. She hates reading out loud because "it is so slow".
I have been working with her on a phonics workbook, and while she can struggle through the drills, when it comes time to apply what she has learned, it is like she is testing in Chinese. She just doesn't "GET" anything about decoding words at all. Not even a little.
We have a meeting in August to get 504 stuff in place, but the school has basically said that she is working at such a high level that they don't even know what to offer to her as far as dyslexia classes. I would love to get your thoughts on 504 stuff, any suggestions about anything that she might be working on at home, coping strategies, resources. Just anything at all. Also, does this sound completely messed up to anyone else? I don't understand how someone that is dyslexic can be such a strong reader, or someone who changes up all the sentences can be grasping what she is reading.
If you made it to the end of this, bless you! I expected my biggest problem with this one to be getting her to care if she brushed her hair and put on matching socks (she does do that - even geeky smart girls start to care about looks a bit when the hormones start). I have always known that her brain works differently than most of ours, I just didn't have a clue that there would be things that she couldn't do and I wouldn't notice it until now. Thank you.
