deacongirl = Thanks for sharing your insights and what looks to be excellent reading. You have put some rusty gears in motion.
kathleen'smum = a motto of mine is "nothing is simple" and sadly it is usually true. Your love-fueled motivation will no doubt empower you to keep uncovering into what works best for your DD.
I have many times wondered if I could not have learned far better as a child out on the play field, where we could literally run around our lessons, using words and lesson objects we could handle and run and pass around.
Today, as then, it is a sort of torture for me to sit still unless I�m totally engaged. But today I have adult will power, yet at meetings or anything like that there is a bubbling anxiety inside of me, a tapping knee, and a desire to just flee and move around. That's where the medication works wonders. The only time this does not happen to me is when the subject matter or the speaker is absolutely engaging, and by that I mean the things they are saying or ways in which they are saying them are newer, richer or deeper than what already exists in my mind.
So imagine that reality inside a 5 or 6-yo child. They have almost no will power and certainly no insight into what's going on inside. They know they just want to escape the source of discomfort or confusion or anxiety--physically or into their imagination--and the typical adult response is to interpret these coping methods as negative behavior and return to trying to pound the round child into the square seat.
So I am assuming very little about my DD. Her tests reveal her to be gifted in some subjects, her home life is stable and secure, and yet almost every school night and often morning she gets stomach aches and seems to want to avoid school entirely even though she's very popular and outgoing. As parents we should consider every little clue and evaluate it and assume nothing.
Anyway, enough rambling; I need to go off and read more from the experts who think about this stuff for a living!
