Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment best way to tackle dyslexia

Hi aeh,

Wow - amazing explanations. Thanks very much.

"CTOPP: So basically his entire vocabulary of decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) is memorized, since he appears to have untestably negligible phonological awareness."

This sounds exhausting and limiting to me: But it also rings true based on how he "reads." He has a huge reading vocabulary, and can read - for example - complex Magic the Gathering cards quite fluently. Until he hits a word he doesn't know. Then it's all stop.

So I guess I'm back to wondering - is there anything here that would help us decide whether we should go with a private tutor or Lindamood Bell-like thing to support him in school - versus - do we need to pull him out of public school and look into a school for dyslexic learners? Or should we just start trying things and see how he responds? That sounds so hit or miss and time seems to be flying.

FYI - in parallel we are grappling with how we would home school. It's just something that would be very, very hard for us for a number of intractable reasons. But I'll bet lots of people at this sort of juncture say that ....

I'll take a dice roll at that. Based on reading various stuff the Eides have done (Dyslexic Advantage, +) and articles linked from their site.. The extreme listening comprehension maps to the heightened semantic ability associated with dyslexia along with that "seeing the forest" sort of mind. The opposite would be the tree and detail orientation which ranges into the autism spectrum.

Hi Polarbear,

Thank you for your thoughtful post. You are calming me down! And that is a brilliant idea to set up a post-post report meeting. ven with an outline, I never do seem to get all my questions remembered/asked when I'm in the throes of the meeting. Why can I do that just fine at work, but not in this context I wonder?

To your question - DS has all sorts of struggles at school. He is halting at best on any sort of work that requires writing. Last year in K, he was perpetually kept in at recess and lunch to finish work. (This continued even after there was a written plan that said NOT to do this). He has already been told by this year's teacher that he will soon be in the same boat. This quickly spirals into him being embarrassed. And he is naturally hyper-vigilant and quick to make a first strike if he thinks anybody is threatening or teasing him or ABOUT to threaten or tease him. Finally, all these problems are wildly exacerbated by noise, chaos or people getting in his space, which is basically the definition of a K/1 class room. So - many challenges.

I have read in a few places here about an accommodation of sitting near the teacher. I haven't asked for this simple but powerful step. DS always turns to trusted adults for security, and I can't wait to get this in place! Any others suggestions will be most welcome.

Thanks again to you all,
Sue

Mm-hm. Not an unreasonable scenario. Also, individuals with very strong working memory, but not necessarily the language-related ability to go with it, could very well perform like this. Some of them might fall on the spectrum, others may not. There are also visual supports, of a sort, provided for the WJIII Understanding Directions task. The task consists of a series of familiar-looking scenes with various details. The directions are something like, "If there are two trees in the picture, touch the balloon and the table, but first, touch the cat." A person with a good memory can use the visuals in the picture to help tag the steps of the directions. A person with an excellent auditory memory can just memorize them by rote and think about them afterward. There is no particular verbal logic to the directions, so they are not all that amenable to support with high verbal intelligence.

WIAT-III Listening Comprehension, OTOH, is designed to resemble naturalistic listening tasks. It consists of brief to moderate-length listening passages designed to resemble excerpts of conversations, advertising, or lectures (like a snippet of a Discovery Channel show). While it relies quite a bit on auditory working memory, as well, it is all meaningful, and consists, on the whole, of long enough passages that you can use contextual understanding. Some of the items also specifically require you to interpret the passages, rather than simply retain and reproduce details.

It IS exhausting and limiting. And a testament to his tremendous intelligence, that he is reading at grade level sheerly on the strength of his memory and verbal abilities.

Do not wait to remediate. The best approaches for dyslexics require them to engage in conscious re-training of their decoding strategies, which is increasingly difficult as they build sight vocabulary. Lindamood-Bell, Orton-Gillingham, Wilson, Barton, are all good strategies. He needs to learn phonological awareness from the ground up. Home programs, relatively easily implemented by parents, include Toe-by-Toe, All About Reading--both much cheaper than tutors certified in the name programs, and modeled on the same principles. My suggestion would be to look at LB, OG, or Wilson, for short/mid-term therapy, and to give you and him exposure to the approach as implemented by experienced professionals, and simultaneously supplement with TBT or AAR at home, in very short, daily sessions. Once you catch onto the approach, you may be able to continue at home, without the very pricey therapists. I'm more familiar with AAR than TBT; AAR goes up through high school-level decoding, in four self-paced levels. I know others here have excellent experiences with TBT, as well.

Oh my gosh, this stuff is so fascinating. And the tests are really sort of elegant in the way they look for strengths and weaknesses. Aside from being an incredibly stressful analysis of my child, this is a completely engrossing academic exercise! Like the ultimate puzzle.

And FYI - in the hope of catching something that would be DYS portfolio worthy, I just videoed DS reading the complex instructions on 4 of his Magic the Gathering cards. I shamelessly fibbed to him, and told him the videos were for his big cousin Brett, who also plays the game. Otherwise DS would never have done the reading for a video. Utterly fluent, except for the glaring points where he seamlessly substituted the wrong word without ever realizing it ("fare" for "far" and "Aera" for "Aura"). He really is reading Every. Single. Word. as a sight word.

AEH - I so admire the work you do and the eloquent way you have of explaining it. The kids you work with are fortunate. I hope their parents realize it ....

Interesting. My six-year-old son had the CELF-4 Concepts & Following Directions (scaled score 12) and Understanding Spoken Paragraphs (scaled score 6) sections, and the CASL (subtest scores from 77 (paragraph comprehension) to 126 (antonyms), with the others right around 100) and TNL (97). I don't think he has a particularly good working memory, but I don't have testing to support that opinion. Are those tests similar to the WJIII subtest, with visual supports that he could use?

Sorry for getting into the middle of your discussion with the opposite profile. I hope it's not too confusing.

ElizabethN - I seriously don't mind a bit. It's two sides of the same coin, right? Understanding your DS helps me understand mine better.

This is just horrible! I feel so for your ds. This happened to my ds too, but fortunately his teacher stopped after I threw a bit of a hissy fit about it. Not really a hissy fit, but I'm a relatively calm, quiet person in real life and when it happened and the teacher tried to explain that it was the right thing to do I became slightly louder than normal In a big way lol!


I wish I had time to look it up at the moment, but I don't - but - I think there is info on why this is a bad idea somewhere out there either at wrightslaw or another advocacy site. Are you asking for an IEP or a 504? If you are, you can add an accommodation that specifically states he will not lose recess/etc as a consequence of not completing work. I would also add an accommodation of either extended time for work (take a worksheet home and return it the same day if he can't finish it in class, or let him save and finish his work over the weekend etc. At the same time, I'd be *very* careful not to overload him with work that takes *TIME* away from his day. He's so danged smart, chances are he doesn't need to do the same repeated work that other kids do to learn a new concept. Right now it's important to focus on remediating the areas you can - but at the same time not letting the time it takes to do that suck up so many of his waking hours that he becomes frustrated.


I don't know if he'd be up for wearing these or not but it might be worth a try - do you have a pair of noise-cancelling headphones? My ds has a pair that he wears at home when his sisters are being crazy and he's trying to get his homework done. He's worn them in class a few times when he was writing just to drown out any distractions while he worked.

Re writing - for now, I'd scribe for him at home, whenever he has a writing assignment. I'd also let him start keyboarding at home just so he can become familiar with it. Request that he be allowed to either answer orally at school or scribe to an adult when he has a writing assignment.

Re the issues with noise/etc - one of my dd's had this to the extreme when she was your ds' age. We couldn't take her much of anywhere her sensitivity to it was so bad. There are so many different things that can cause a sensory over-response… it might be helpful to consider having your ds evaluated by a sensory OT, who would be able to make suggestions on simple "tricks" that can be used in the classroom to help ease his sensory anxiety in the classroom. This has nothing to do with your ds - you need to ask a professional lol! - but fwiw, our sensory OT had my dd sip water through a straw when she was bothered by distractions but was supposed to be doing "seat work", and she also had her wear a leo under her regular clothes because the sensation of it against her body helped her feel calmer. As I mentioned, those are things that were mentioned for my dd, not necessarily your ds (especially the leo lol!) - but the key is, they were just a few of literally thousands of different ideas our dd's sensory OT came up with to help dd cope when she was anxious over loud noises, classroom chaos, etc.

Best wishes,

polarbear