Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional gifted child with possible dyslexia

Ok, that's reassuring actually. Based on your description, I think his phonological processing skills are good/very good. He can break down words orally much more easily than when he is attempting to read. In fact, he loves to play with words in that way - we were reading a Batman story the other day and he said "Poison Ivy said 'divine'. Get it?" It took me a second. Is that a good example of phonological processing? I'm really quite new to all of this, so it's all unfamiliar.

Not exactly, though that is an excellent example of word play. The kind of skill I am talking about would be more like this:

One day we were on a road trip involving many hills, which our toddler enjoyed greatly, yelling (endlessly!) "whee" every time we went down a decline, and "ew" every time we went up an incline (there were many, many hills). This is an example of one kind of higher-level phonological processing skill, namely phoneme manipulation. (Specifically, phoneme reversal.) The DC understood that going up was the reverse of going down, and, analogously, reversed the phonemes of "whee" (/w/- /ee/) to make "ew" (/ee/ - /w/).

Other forms of phoneme manipulation include reversing longer sequences of phonemes (stop -> pots, ball -> lob), elision, or deleting a phoneme (crash -> cash, act -> at), substitution (bread -> broad, crash -> clash).

Here's a good lay resource on phonological awareness, including some activities you can try:

http://www.readingrockets.org/reading-topics/phonemic-awareness

And a chart listing the approximate ages at which children typically develop various phonological awareness skills:

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/development-phonological-skills

When you consider the typical ages of skills, combined with high ability and higher reading level, is it just developmental asynchrony at play, if a child is slower with phoneme awareness but advanced in oral and verbal skills?

What would you suggest for DD-almost8 who's enjoying reading books at S-U levels (and P-R, too, but is drawn to higher), yet when asked to spell bridge, sounds out 'buh ir idge' as syllables, and says 'b-i-r-i-g-e?'

Certainly, asynchrony is a consideration, if the phonemic awareness skills are on target for age. But that can actually be a reason for direct instruction in phonemic awareness, especially as it applies to reading, so that children don't develop bad habits for decoding, which may come back later to bite them. A child with exceptional memory may easily learn thousands of words by sight, which provides access to quite a bit of text. Unfortunately, that will not help them when they are ultimately confronted with low-incidence or specialized vocabulary, for which they have no oral vocabulary context, and are then forced to decode using phonetic or morphological skills.

In your DD's case, she should have almost all of the phonemic awareness skills by this age. I would suggest trying to teach her some of them explicitly, to see if she truly doesn't have the underlying skill, or if she is unclear on the task. For instance, does she understand and transfer the skill, if you follow her attempt by modeling, "/b/-/r/-/i/-/j/" as the phonemes? Only once she is able to do that does it make sense to instruct her in the various graphemes (spellings) for each phoneme. I believe I referenced All About Reading above. Its sister product, the stand-alone OG spelling curriculum, All About Spelling, addresses phonemic awareness skills from the encoding side. (Actually, Logic of English does, too, but, as an integrated language arts curriculum, interweaves it with reading.)

My biggest regret is not paying enough attention to this. It was easy to see that DD could read, and so we discounted her clear hatred of reading, the daily fight over the reader brought home from school, as just her being, well, stubborn. For no particular reason. But really, why would she?

So my two cents worth is, pay attention to your gut. I've learned the key question with 2E kids is not so much "can they?", but rather, "should it really be this hard?"

If reading makes your kid miserable, they're trying to tell you something. For my own part, I wish I had been listening a lot sooner.

That's so helpful, aeh. Thank you!

I'll have to try again, but he seems to be doing ok. I started with a bit of phoneme segmentation and sound deletion last night and he was doing fairly well. Mind you, DS4 was jumping in and giving many of the answers before he did. At least, we know DS4 is doing well with phonological processing!

Thanks, Platypus. What is your DC's LD? And how long did it take to have it diagnosed?

As for DS6, it's hard to tell whether it could be a LD or whether it's his extreme perfectionism kicking in - he's not instantly good at it and so he doesn't want to do it. But yes, I'm definitely keeping a close eye on it. Given his love for books and learning, it just doesn't compute. We're having him privately tested in May, so we should have more answers at that point.

Thanks! I love this forum. You can't explain to just anyone that you're concerned that your child is only reading slightly above level. I suspect most other DC being discussed in this forum are well beyond his level (he's probably only MG), but it's still much more comfortable to ask these questions here.

This could have described my DS when he was 6 (though "hate" may be a bit strong, as he preferred me to read to him so that he could follow along). So maybe it's possible that your DS simply finds the decoding process frustratingly slow?

We had learned that DS was HG+ this time last year. While he had a huge vocabulary, he wasn't reading much, if at all, above grade level. He was big into recognizing whole words by sight but not really into breaking words down and sounding them out (he was doing a lot of context guessing by first letter), and so we were a little concerned that we were possibly dealing with a stealth dyslexic. Aeh gave me some great advice around that time, saying that it was hard to know at his age whether he was dyslexic or that his path to learning to read was simply a little different from most people's. I suspect that the latter ended up being more true, for he suddenly just "got it" about a month later and was reading at the 4th grade level by summer. He has no trouble decomposing new words now and is a voracious reader on his own. We're still on the lookout for potential hidden issues, but we've been able to put them on the back burner for now.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that, it's good to be engaged and concerned, but it may just work out over time by itself.

Thanks for the advice. Yes, it could be that he's just frustrated that it takes a while to learn to read. He doesn't like to have to work at anything because he thinks that he should just be good at something as soon as he tries it. He was like that about learning to swim and ride his bike, too. I just find it peculiar that he could have us read books to him all day and yet, he isn't motivated to learn to read so that he could do it by himself.

He has such an intense personality that it's sometimes hard to know what might be a real issue and what might be some idea that he's gotten into his head...

I wouldn't be quick to assume that the behavior you are seeing is perfectionism - do you see perfectionistic tendencies in other, completely non-related, activities? If you do, them maybe it's truly just perfectionism, but behaviors due to LDs/challenges can often *look* like perfectionism - continuing to watch is definitely the thing to do.


Again, this might be what's truly happening, or it might be that he's frustrated because it is taking him awhile to learn some types of things due to a challenge that you can't see at this point in time.


Our ds was like this - I am not sure if his non-motivation to learn to read was due to his LDs (DCD, dysgraphia, expressive learning disorder), or if it was simply because he loved the attention and close time with a parent while reading aloud. We also read (ok, I read) larger, longer, more complicated books to him when I was reading than he was capable of reading to himself, so he loved being read to for the mental stimulation - up until he suddenly (almost overnight) turned into a voracious reader who has never looked back.

I also would suggest - keep reading out loud to him! We were told back in elementary school that the very very *VERY* best thing you can do for your child re learning and reading is to read aloud *to* them - no matter how old they are or how competent a reader they are.

Best wishes,

polarbear