Wow, polarbear! Thanks a lot for taking so much to answer my concerns!
I don't know enough about your dd's specific challenges to know if this will work, but for our ds a large part of the key was repeat, repeat, repeat... and then repeat again. For instance, he seemed to be hopelessly disorganized about getting what he needed from school to home and back (books needed for homework were often forgotten at school, homework assignment list not recorded so he didn't know what he was supposed to be doing for homework once he was home, completed homework going into his backpack but getting completely lost between the backpack and school, things like that). What we did was for me to physically go inside the school each day at the end of the day to pick him up, we checked the homework list on his classroom board together, went through his locker to make sure he had everything he needed (verbally went through the entire list of his classes together - what did they do in class today, what was the homework, what did he need to bring home to complete it). I made sure that his locker was left neat and in order. I did this with him every single day for almost the full first year of middle school - and as you might guess, he hated it! But he also realized after a relatively short period of time that it was helpful. I promised him that once he was able to show me that he was doing the organizing etc instead of relying on me to lead, I'd step back and only come in once per week, and knowing that gave him the motivation and self-confidence that I believed it would work. It took a long time - most of the year, but he got to that point. We continued with once a week checks through the first part of the next year, and he eventually got to the point that he no longer needed my help.
How old is your son? I think our challenges are similar to yours, but to a smaller degree, because the school helps organize her homework and makes a lot of it accessible on the google drive system electronically. All kids have school google chrome laptops. As a result, she remembers herself without any reminders about 90% of her homework. I help with another 5%, but another 5% is missed/incomplete/turned in late. She is also pretty neat when it comes to her bedroom and her locker - something that came out from years of teaching her to do it and my personal OCD-lite, regarding house cleaning and general order in the house. One big challenge is not studying at all for tests, quizzes etc. Again due to good organization at school, there are a lot of electronic study tools available to them, so there is no one-on-one with books anymore, which is good for now, but could be a disaster-waiting-to-happen. Another challenge is difficulty with standardized testing, specifically with reading comprehension parts. For example, if you look at the subsections of her Iowa test, vocabulary section could be in 96-99%ile, but her reading comprehension scores in 55-75%ile, resulting in scores much lower than required for gifted program in the middle school. She loves to read and isn't dyslexic at all, but reading about things that are of no interest to her needs work and I would appreciate some pointers on how to teach critical reading skills to her. What do you think is behind that?
It's not uncommon for challenges such as this to seem to have a genetic component. One thing that's potentially an upside to this is that it's something you can share with your dd - you have an understanding of what it's like to live with her set of challenges. On the other hand, it's often so easy to see ourselves (parents) reflected in our children that we miss seeing something different. Prior to our ds' 2e diagnosis, my dh and I both tended to look at behaviors which were indicating challenges through the lens of our own lives - I was a perfectionistic in school (and life) for a long time, so when my ds wasn't completing assignments in a timely manner, I made the automatic leap to perfectionism - I was, he's mine, therefore he's got my whatever, case solved. When really we were missing something that neither of us (parents) had as a challenge.
I fully agree with that. It is easy to see similarities in your children, but difficult to see their individual challenges. For a while, after seeing somewhat lower standardized scores, we started thinking about things like regression to the mean in terms of IQ scores in children, but getting her IQ tested was very reassuring and encouraged me to reach out to your community to try to address her specific problems, instead of assuming that she just wasn't that gifted.
I would expect this is an accommodation you could request in a 504 plan - although my ds doesn't use this specific accommodation in school, he is allowed the use of assistive technology through his 504 plan. Electronics and phones in general aren't allowed at school due to the potential distraction, but they are commonly used as AT devices.
Do you think something like a Wobl watch requires some coordination with the school district? Should I let them know?
