polarbear and amazedmom, can you tell me more about this? What else do you see with kids like this?
geofizz, I have a head cold today... and honestly can't think of anything at the moment! lol! Under normal circumstances, I'm sure I could write a novel... so I'll come back to it later. I do remember that way back when ds was in 3rd/4th grade I had a very short list of questions that you can ask a person, and the way they answer reveals whether they are a visual thinker or not... I was just wishing the other day that I could remember it! Basically you ask a few questions and then after the person answers ask a few more about how they arrived at their answers. Once ds was older, around 10 or so, and very self-aware, I was able to talk to him and ask specifically how he thinks through a problem, and that's how I learned that he sees in pictures and movies. The movie description is really... well... different than the way I think!
We're also seeing writing struggles and generalized troubles verbalizing in my 2nd grader. The less specific the assignment, the worse it is. Journal time is torture. A highly structured assignment is easier.
This is what writing was like for our ds (and still is most of the time). I'll try to come back in a bit and list some of the things we did that helped. VERY briefly - things we did at home included playing games with ds where we brainstormed (whoever won the turn had to add a "whatever" to our brainstorming list), scribing for him and encouraging him when he was stuck, making outlines with him, using Inspiration (graphic organizing software - the younger kid version is called "Kidspiration"). Most important REPETITION repeat repeat repeat the same type of simple writing task/assignment until he could do it - ideally before moving on. This was really tough because all the way through school each year each teacher has been determined to teach as many different styles and types of writing as possible so it seems like every assignment is different from the last.
I have a ton of tips from his speech therapy work, will try to add those later.
In parallel to this, DS has been hampered in moving forward in math because he struggles to explain how he got an answer. "Because that's the answer" evidently isn't acceptable.
Same thing happened here, although our ds was also prevented from moving forward in math because he couldn't write his math facts down quickly (argh). Anyway, those word problems used to drive *me* nuts! And it was never simply "explain" - ds' school curriculum was into "explain in three different ways". I can't tell you how many ripped crumpled math papers I had to rescue and beg ds to attempt again. His early elementary teachers would probably just freak if they saw him today, accelerated two years in math and doing very very well. I'm sure they thought he was dimmer than a burnt out lightbulb (I know his 2nd grade teacher thought that - she basically told us so...)
I'm curious about the pictoral imaging of stories and events idea as a possible partial explanation for what we're seeing in his writing struggles.
The way the Eides explain it is that there is so much rich detail in the pictures it's complicated and slow to figure out how to translate it to words. My ds, otoh, says that with the open-ended writing assignments, he has NO pictures.. when he has a picture he can write fairly well... although it's slow, but that's more related to his DCD (I think).
We did not see a dip in processing speed, though. A more complete neuropsych exam to complement out existing WISC and WJ will come in a month.
I don't think the dip in processing speed relates to expressive language (which is what causes our ds to have difficulty with generating ideas for written expression. The dips that people see in processing speed (ime) are usually related to a physical/neurological condition that's impacting the physical acts of copying/handwriting/eye coordination/etc. The reason those types of challenges show up as dips in processing speed are that the tests rely on marks made with a pencil, visual discrimination, and being able to perform the tasks quickly (the processing speed tests are timed).
The tests that ds had that pointed to difficulty with generating thoughts for written expression were:
WJ-III - one of the writing subtests, can't remember which one - will have to check, maybe "writing samples"?
TOWL-4 - test of written language, the student is shown a picture and told to write about it. DS couldn't figure out for the life of him what to write.
CELF-4 - part of a speech-language eval
pbear
