Help with knowing what to do next
AnonMom
01/06/25 06:09 PM
Good morning! I'm feeling frustrated and conflicted about supporting my child this morning, and some googling brought me to this group so...here I am!
A (long) bit of background. My daughter is nine, and in fourth grade, and I believe has a super unique profile that I'm still trying to figure out how to support. Without going into too much detail, but for some context, my daughter was born prematurely and has a fairly serious chronic illness. Day-to-day she has relatively limited stamina and can get tired easily. She was late on basically all of her developmental milestones, particularly physical milestones, and struggled with speech articulation. Therefore, she received services from Birth to 3 since she was a few months old, and when she transitioned to public school at 3 she was automatically put onto an IEP, with speech as the primary focus.
Since she started school, we've never had particular concerns with her cognitive abilities. That said, she was notably late in learning to read - although I always kind of suspected she just didn't want to. She was put into intensive reading intervention in 1st grade and we were told she may take a few years to catch up because she was so far behind...but then a light bulb went off at some point and she finished 1st grade ahead of grade level for reading. Since then, she has always been in the 99th percentile on reading assessments, and is now a voracious reader. According to her teacher this year, she got the highest score on their beginning of year reading assessment.
Historically, she's always been described as a sweet, compliant, and cooperative student, but nothing off the charts. She presents as a bit spacy in class, but from K-2 was on grade level academically, except for reading where she began to pull ahead after the slow start mentioned above. To be honest, we've always been so focused on her medical issues that we were just thrilled she was about on par with where she should be at school, but we've never pushed her.
Fast forward to 3rd grade. At the beginning of the year (unbeknownst to us at the time) our district has all 3rd graders take the InView test to help filter kids for the gifted program, which begins in 4th grade. My understanding is that this is like an IQ test light that kids take on computers in class. My daughter's scores on this were a bit all over the place - ranging from 39th to 87th percentile on the subtests, with an overall score in about the 65th percentile. This result did not flag her for inclusion in the gifted program. The gifted teacher also observes kids in the classroom for inclusion, but she didn't get flagged there either (I kind of suspect that the teacher mostly focuses on kids with a high InView score, and my daughter is historically pretty quiet in class).
Toward the end of 3rd grade, we learned that she was going to be transitioned out of her IEP since she had met all of her speech goals. As part of the transition out of the IEP, the school told us that they wanted to rule out any cognitive issues that would necessitate additional support, so we gave the green light to any testing they wanted to do. It turned out that this included a Psychoeducational Evaluation from the (amazing) school psychologist, which in turn included an administration of the WISC-V.
The results here were unexpected and kind of threw us for a loop. The report was glowing as to my daughter's cognitive abilities, as well as the curiosity and creativity she showed during testing. I'm not sure if I'm summarizing this correctly, but she scored at or above the 99th percentile in Verbal Comprehension and Fluid Reasoning, and above the 90th percentile on Visual Spatial and Working Memory. The only notably lower score was in Processing Speed, which was at about the 65th percentile. The report noted that as to the Processing Speed, this may have been challenging to her "due to anumber of reasons such as possible fine motor challenges, or a greater desire to perform more accurately than quickly. Her performance was precise, but with average range pace."
This tracks with how she is in person - she moves at her own pace. Overall, both her GAI and Full Scale IQ were at 99%.
So - we went from basically just being happy that our medically complex child was managing at school, to realizing that she may actually be gifted and need more support. All of the sudden, our mindset shifted to wondering whether she's kind of spacey and disconnected at school because she is actually kind of...bored? In hindsight, she's mentioned being bored or school being "too easy" in the past, but I just kind of brushed off the comments figuring she was just not into it.
The school psychologist recommended our daughter be considered for the gifted program, but (very very long story short), she was not admitted, much to our frustration. Despite her background, she apparently doesn't meet the profile of a child the district thinks should be in the program. I don't think that the program would make that much of a difference, to be honest, but she would get pulled out of the classroom a few times a week for extra activities with other (presumably bright) students.
Now, she's in 4th grade and I'm beginning to get frustrated with how to support her at the school level. On state standardized testing from the end of 3rd grade, she got the highest possible score for ELA. and pretty high for math. Yet - she has started to be really resistant to doing schoolwork in class in a timely manner, outright refusing to do math practice. Bizarrely, we found out that she has not been reading the assigned book for her class book club - despite the fact that she reads for 2-3 hours a day for pleasure at home. We've tried to raise the issue with her at home about her resistance/motivation levels, but she gets frustrated and can't really explain to us what's going on. I really don't want to push her too hard, but I do want her to be happy and fulfilled at school. I don't want the situation at school to get to the point where she's frustrated or starts to lose confidence.
We are trying to get her into the gifted program again this year, but I'm a bit at a loss of how else to support her at the school level. She seems to be kind of disconnecting in class, and appears disorganized, and I'm not sure how to help or what supports to push for. Outside of school, she has started piano lessons which she loves, and the teacher (unprompted) told me that she appears to be gifted with music. We also recently started Mathnasium for math enrichment to help her gain some confidence and enthusiasm about math, which she also loves. We make weekly trips to the library for new books, and she gets 2-3 weekly kids magazines, which she devours as soon as she gets them. I'm hesitant to pile on more extracurriculars, and am just frustrated with how to better support her in the classroom, where she spends most of the day.
In conclusion - is there anything obvious I should be pushing for? Or, should we just continue to focus on enrichment outside of school and figure the school aspect will work itself out? I'm not trying to be a tiger mom or push my wonderful kiddo too hard, but I just don't want to look back and wish I'd done more to support her. Apologies for the novel, but would appreciate any input from other parents!
