Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment wppsi-iv asynchrony and potential eye sight issues

They learned basic phonics like letter sounds from preschool and Leapfrog type toys. So by the time they turned 3 they knew all the letters/letter sounds. We worked on rhyming words a little bit and so did preschool. What words rhyme with cat? man? They both understood that at age 3. I have heard it said that the kids who can rhyme early are the ones who read early. Rhyme at 3, read by 4. From there, they were ready to learn to blend sounds. Around their fourth birthday I wrote words on a piece of paper, like "man" to see if they could sound it out or even understood that concept. They both understood. Our public library has some of the BOB books on audio. DD was fascinated and listened to the first set by herself in her room. She has a CD player in there. I bought her another set or two, and she worked on those (she read them to me), then she was ready to tackle more advanced readers, like Henry and Mudge or Dr. Seuss books. She loved the challenge of it and I wasn't going to hold her back. I checked out some other audio books from the library, like easy chapter books, and she listened to them while following along in the book.

DS on the other hand had a bit of an attitude problem, but he is clearly the superior one with decoding. He could also blend and sound out around his fourth birthday but clearly couldn't care less. I printed out a list of Dolch sight words and was shocked that he could read almost all of them through the third grade level because I had never tried to teach him any sight words. I got out the couple sets of BOB books that DD had used 16 months earlier (they are 16 months apart in age) and he could easily read those to me. After a set or two of BOB books I moved onto some of the PD Eastman or Dr. Seuss books. He read to me maybe a couple times per month. I did not want to push him more than that because it wasn't worth battling him. He just kind of magically absorbed the reading process and moved up a level every single time he read something. His K teacher had him reading chapter books like "The Mouse and the Motorcycle". Not sure how she got him to do that. He is starting to get more interested in reading now that he is in first grade and does it for about a half hour a day without my nagging.

I should also add that DS was the poster child for eye abnormalities when he was last given the WISC. When he had the TBI, the sixth cranial nerve was paralyzed and his right eye was stuck and wouldn't move for several months. So he had severe double vision whenever he didn't have an eye patch. Shortly before he did the WISC we had stopped the patching but his eyes still weren't completely aligned and he couldn't track his eye all the way to the right. Even now a year later he still can't track his eyes on command. If you put a pencil in front of his face and move it slowly back and forth and tell him to watch it, one eye will go one way and the other will go the other way.
He did fine on the WISC though other than block design. 18 on Matrix Reasoning and 19 on Picture Concepts. So I have a hard time believing it when docs claim that subtest scatter may be due to vision issues. He also did fine on a visual perception test over the summer and scored overall like a 10 year old

I see. Thank you so much for sharing, Blackcat! This is going to be a long road of learning for me. We are not really doing academic stuff at home. His preschool is play based and works on SEL a lot, but not very academic either. If he is indeed extremely bright like DH, then this will explain why he doesn't read yet. They did work on rhyming at school at around age 3-4, and DS did great, and then they worked on writing the name, etc. But not much nor extensive work for teaching reading. But he has really great SEL progress, and he is also great at gross and fine motor skills and sensory - the school works on all these which I think is a great foundation, I agree with their priorities, esp as DS used to have sensory over excitabilities.

I just found a coworker who has a similar child, similar milestones. I work at an unusual place with this kind of talent concentration.

I bought him a 100 pcs puzzles this weekend.. The most complex one he's done so far is 24 pcs (I haven't bought new puzzles for a while since he wasn't interested for so long). He completed it independently in reasonable time, as long as we sit with him and make sure he doesn't run away to his legos Yet another step function.. So it seems to be a matter of interest instead of eyes issues, and someone was right when telling me that maybe he just didn't like it. Nevertheless, I don't feel like forcing it to him to practice more with puzzles, if he doesn't like it, then he can catch up with fluid reasoning at some other time.

We also don't want to change our education and parenting philosophy. We believe in real world experiences and love getting him to use his hands a lot; and that's the kind of schools we are looking at for K and elementary as well. We know with this path he is likely to be a later bloomer in academic, but we are ok with that, there are many years ahead of him.

I am just thinking out aloud here, but thanks everyone for the support, sharing and everything really! I have learned a lot from you all and hope to continue to do so

So, I talked to Davidson's consultant, and we decided to not apply at this time, and wait until we are ready to get him into academics. The application has requirements in academics, as in more formal academics than we would like him to do at this point. Our school does not emphasize academics at this point, and we do not want to emphasize academics at home either, and the K-8 schools in our top list are all play based as well. We will have to look at support elsewhere in the meantime, probably from the parenting lists at our workplace. It might take a few years before we will look into Davidson again, if he is truly highly gifted, as we don't want to change our parenting and schooling philosophy in order to accelerate, but that might be time well spent as well to get to know him better. We hope to find support in this forum too from other parents who also do a lot of hands on projects with the children.