I feel sick (DD Test)....

[Mere2]

DD7 is 2/3 rds of the way through the WISC IV. She has not done the verbal part yet (extremely shy and will not talk to strangers.) We have been having great problems in hs for the last 3 months and have been hs for 12 months now.

I knew DD was bright maybe gifted, however she was having extreme trouble in learning how to read (can read now but refuses to - says its to hard.) Combined with the "emotional" problems that we have been having, I decided to do testing, mainly to see if there are any LDs.

Yesterday and today she hit the ceiling in a couple of the subtests. I know most parents would feel proud, however I just feel so sick. I feel like I have let her down somehow - how can she be so underperforming (reading/ writing etc)and be so intelligent. How have I contributed towards her refusal to learn? What am I doing so wrong!!! She is only 7yrs old and she has no love of learning.

Do I try and find a school for her? I dont feel like I am successful at hs her...yet I also know that no school is going to meet her needs. Intellectually I know that she needs alot more than I have obviously provided her...but I also know I have done my best.

So what do I do? :confused:

The clinical psych (highly recommended in the professional world) is really excited by DD results; she said its very unusal to have a consistently high scores in the subtests that she has done.

If we had to, I know we could just manage to send DD to a top private school....but am I better of trying to find a tutor for her at home? See if someone else could do a better job at hs her than me?

I am so confused.....

Fi who needs to :chillpill: but cant.

[KAR120C]

The simple fact that you've gone to a professional to help when you know something is wrong is exactly right! And it's what I would have suggested had you not done it. The job of the psychologist is much more than just the testing - s/he should have concrete suggestions of what you can do, or ideas of what might be getting in the way.

My bet would be that the answers you get will be things you should try at home. If she has LDs on top of her strengths, it's definitely more complicated, but not impossible. But the more complicated, the more likely I'd think the individualization you can do at home will be ideal. Now if there is a perfect school at hand I wouldn't rule them out altogether, but unless either it is really adaptable, or if there is an insurmountable obstacle in your relationship or in your home life, that wouldn't be my first choice, especially young.

High test scores do not guarantee academic success. In fact I wouldn't even go so far as to say they always help. And if you're dealing with a combination of some very high areas and some areas of difficulty, I think the extremes can make things more difficult than a nice even average result would (if that makes any sense! lol... not enough coffee this morning yet)

Don't make any decisions yet, but maybe start writing down your specific concerns to discuss with the psychologist. When you have the data and your observations together, that's exactly what you're paying this person to help you figure out.

[EKS]

It is very possible that your daughter is gifted *and* learning disabled. My son is HG+ but he also has dyslexia and ADHD. It made learning how to read very difficult and now (at age 13) it makes writing very difficult. Google "twice exceptional" and you'll be able to find out more.

If she does have learning disabilities (and is gifted) then a top private school, or any school really, unless it is specifically for 2E kids, is probably not going to be a good placement.

Have you gotten her evaluated by a developmental optometrist? A developmental vision exam will also look at things like tracking in addition to acuity. Many times trouble learning to read is caused by eye movement issues. My son needed vision therapy but it was only part of the answer.

When my son was 7, except for reading lessons, I read everything aloud to him. Do you do things like history and science in addition to reading? When my son was younger I required no output from him for history and science and he enjoyed them immensely.

As for the reading, it could be that a tutor is the way to go, but check over on the Special Needs board first; the folks over there are the reason my son can read so well today.

[Karin]

You've had 2 good replies so far. DON'T beat yourself up with guilt. It's great that you're doing the testing. And she's only 7, still young enough to be able to help with any special needs. My gifted ds had trouble with reading until he was 8. He had one eye slightly weaker than the other (according to the doctor, but they were a number of lines apart on the test). Within 2 weeks of patching, his reading started a dramatic improvement. But what I hadn't realized until he was nearly 4 was that he needed glasses. From birth, pretty much. I did beat myself up over that for a while but that didn't help anything, so I forgave myself and moved forward.

So, it could be something simple like that, or like the other vision things listed. Or something else. If there is an LD, I strongly recommend checking the Special Needs forum here. I used to frequent the Special Needs boards (the old ones) since my ds had low muscle tone, late fine motor development and the reading issues. I got great suggestions, such as HWT and books to help see if he had dyslexia (he didn't.)

[ChileMama]

You've gotten some great replies so far, but I wanted to add -- a great resource for highly gifted (they would say "profoundly gifted") kiddos is the Davidson Institute for Talent Development. If your daughter's scores qualify her for the Young Scholar program, that provides your family with personal educational counseling as well as access to a variety of online resources. Have a look at http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/ . There's also a "2e" (twice exceptional, gifted with another learning exceptionality) list that's part of the excellent TAGFAM set of lists -- I think it's called TAGPDQ. See http://www.tagfam.org/ for more info.

Good luck -- I agree with the other posters -- you're in the process of being proactivie on this: good for you!

[choirfarm]

Yep, I'm right there with you. I have such tears with my oldest who refuses to do any reading etc. without crying.. Now math, listening to readalouds and handwriting are all fine. But she did have vision problems. He tested her in December and her IQ was very high and she outdid many areas, but in some areas she didn't even come close to where she should be. At the end of March she took the SAT-10 and her Otis Lenin was high as well as listening, and 2/3 of the rest of the test, but she only scored 33 percentile in reading comprehension. She did fine on word recognition, but totally bombed the paragraph section. She has already improved quite a bit since then with the therapy. That said, she still hates to read. I also wonder if she would have done better and would't cry if she were in school. She is drama queen with me and everyone else finds she is absolutely charming.:glare: It makes me so mad.. There is no crying in baseball...I mean school.

Christine

[JennW in SoCal]

Great group of answers here. I agree with everyone that you are doing the right thing by testing, and with the scores and your list of questions and concerns, the psychologist will be able to help you figure out what to do.

Would a success story help?

My oldest is "twice exceptional". Gifted and saddled with profound learning disabilities. I had many dark days of thinking I was failing him, thinking he was doomed to flipping burgers at McDonalds. I had him tested in early elementary and in middle school, trying to figure him out. We tried formal academics, unschooling, outside tutors, and everything in between, and somehow ultimately made it all work for him.

If my success in homeschooling him were to be measured by academics, then I'd probably be a failure because pure academics is not his strong suit. But he most certainly is not a failure. He just graduated with honors in community leadership and creativity. He has his career goals and higher education mapped out. He is a respected and trusted leader in the tech team at our church and in a community theater organization where he is often solely in charge of theater lighting and of training others. And he is only 17.

What worked was to let go of my expectations of what "school" should look like, and to cultivate his interests and talents, make his academics fit around those interests. In elementary it meant lots of read alouds, audio books and video documentaries about whatever caught his fancy, doing science projects but never using any text books. It was a very "unschooly" period. We got more formal in middle school and even more so in high school but still used his interests and skills to his favor. For a high school level final project in World History, he recorded a mock radio show from a day in WWII, giving news reports from the front, entertainment reports with period recordings. For science he did a Mythbusters style video on the optics of special effects. He can write a great essay, but is flumoxed by the most basic of text books. Algebra almost did us in!

Several of my friends have commented to me recently "don't you wish you could have known back in the dark days how well he would turn out?" I just want to encourage you that with lots of love, patience, creativity and some help from educational psychologists and outside tutors, you will also be celebrating a triumphant graduation on day.

Hang in there, and keep coming to this board in particular for ideas and moral support.

[Mere2]

Thank you all so much :001_wub: Its morning here in Australia and I am feeling alot better about my 'failure' as a parent.

I have alot of changing that I need to do, however I feel positive that with the help of the professionals (that being you wonderful people!) and the psych that I can do this. Gut instinct is that I know school is not the answer, so I am just going to have to change the way I hs (but I soooo like the WTM method!)

Thank you for your success stories - they were a great help/ motivation/ reality check.

I am off to check the links and read, read, read!!!

Thank you again.
Fi

Having knowledge is great, but having the wisdom to know when to apply the knowledge is greater still.

[Misty]

My 8yo daughter is exactly the same. She tested as highly gifted and then she tested right around grade level for all subjects. Spelling was below grade level. The psychologist said this was indicative of being learning disabled, but we have not identified a specific learning disability yet (still trying to figure out where to take her to find out). She reads occassionally on her own, but she reads slowly.

My daughter is also extremely shy and barely talks to strangers. The psychologist diagnosed her with Asperger's Syndrome based on some other symptoms she had (obsessively doing somersaults and walking in circles, OCD tendencies, no friends, anxiety, sensitive to sound, etc.).

Keep us posted on what you find out. I will do the same.

[Kalah]

Huck did the same thing. The tester recommended hsing in our area due to lack of decent schools. You'll do just fine! I managed much better when I quit looking at him as someone who is way smarter than me. I just teach him what he needs to learn at the level he needs and take one day, one week, one school year at a time. If I think much further, that's when I start to panic a bit.
Big hugs!

[Nan in Mass]

I find these distinctions very helpful.

(My son isn't brilliant, just brightish, so you may not find this as helpful. Just in case, though...)

Input/Output:

My son needed input at a high level, but I had to be careful to keep my expectations of his output much, much lower or I killed his love of learning. Often, if it is a subject in which he is particularly interested, I need to lower the output to zero or let him choose what he is going to do for ouput. Lots of the output was oral until fairly recently. Your child is still too young probably, but when she gets older, you can adapt college textbooks. Ones that are labelled "conceptual" or "introductory", the ones that we jokingly called things like "physics for poets", are good because they leave out the higher math. Do the problems orally and don't do all of them. You can do every third or every fourth or just the review problems or just the thinking ones or whatever, but don't overwhelm with too many problems. We got a bagful of library books from the children's non-fiction section (which includes folk tales) every week and my son read them. I didn't make him do anything at all but read them. He helped pick them, but I picked many of them with an eye to reading level to keep him from deciding that he didn't like this method of learning LOL. He learned tons this way, had fun, felt like he was in control of his own learning. I still see the results of this now, when he is about to turn 15! You just have to bite your tongue and not "quiz", and have faith that learning is indeed taking place even if you can't see any results.

Skills/Concepts:

This is the other distinction. Academic skills are things like reading, math, writing, proofreading, summarizing, outlining, doing research, designing an experiment, or writing a lab report. Content is things like knowing about the Romans, reading whole works of literature, or knowing the difference between plant and animal cells. For your purposes, you can generalize and say that grammar, writing, spelling, math, and foreign language are skills, and history and science and reading real books is content. One of the things I like about TWTM is that it is rigorous about skills but loose and interest-driven about content. Because the two are separated, you can do the content input at a high level choosing whatever interests your child. The suggested output is general and is a chance to develop academic skills like outlining or designing an experiment or using a nature guide. Skills like grammar and vocabulary are taught separately. One advantage to having a separate writing program is that you can correct history and science for content and only correct writing for spelling and punctuation. Doing this helps keep learning fun. You can lump all the skills work together and get it over in an hour or two every morning and then spend the rest of the day doing the more interesting content stuff. I did this even in high school.

Wide/Fast/Deep:

You can cater to a gifted child by going wide, fast, deep, or a combination. The profoundly gifted need all this, but the rest of them can usually get away with one or two. Going wide means adding extras to the academic curriculum. You can add more foreign languages, more art (both the doing and the appreciation kind), more music (both instrumental lessons and appreciation), more drama or dance, other sciences, etc. Going faster means going through a typical curriculum faster. You might do two math books a year, for example. Going deep means studying something in depth. For example, when you get to the Romans, you might read the basic information and then get out higher level library books on aspects that interest you and read them, ask more questions and find the answers, get Teaching Company lectures and listen to them, and do extra projects. You might even go visit some Roman ruins.

So, since your daughter is still young and you like TWTM, I would suggest doing the placement tests for math, grammar, writing, and spelling and placing your daughter in whichever book is suggested. Never mind the grade level. Work on reading by having her read lots of interesting fun books at whatever level is easy for her. Get children's classics on tape or CD and have her listen when she is stuck in the car or doing legos or puzzles or drawing or something. That will help with vocabulary. For history and science, look at the output suggested for the grammar stage and do that, but also look at the logic stage for some of the input. Get Rosetta Stone or something else oral and learn another foreign language or two. Get Draw Squad and teach her to draw. Learn to play recorder. Some not-to-be-missed grammar stage things are Pharoahs of Ancient Egypt by Paine (think I got the title right - this includes some of the why's of history), all the nature guides (except you will have to find them for your area - this turned out to be a great learning experience for my son - he learned to look things up in the index, lots of biology vocabulary, and a bunch of other academic skills - he kept a nature journal which helped with his drawing and writing), Watercolor for the Artistically Undiscovered (or hopeless or whatever the title is), the stargazing book (can't remember the title but it was wonderful - not sure it would work for your continent, though - learning the constellations and the stories behind them is good, though), Fun with Atoms and Molecules, and all the myths, fairytales and folk tales. Look at the logic list for literature when she can read at that level, and switch to the logic lists for history and science when she's ready.

HTH
-Nan

[Linzy]

Here's another success story for you. My younger brother was very much like your little girl. In a family of gifted overachievers he wouldn't (couldn't?) read and appeared to be struggling to make grades in school. My mother, like you, was concerned and had him tested believing him to be learning disabled. The IQ test came back in the 140's and the tester though she must be insane, but my brother just kept right on plugging (luckily he has a great attitude and is overall a good kid) making mediocre to borderline grades throughout highschool and being lucky to get into college. However once there he was diagnosed with ADD and started on meds. He now is realizing his true potential double majoring in psych and computer science doing independent research in neurology and making straight A's at a very competititve school (he transfered as a sophmore). And he is so happy. The important thing is my mom didn't give up and that made the difference to him.

ETA: nd I think the years of struggle made him a harder worker (unlike many of us for whom school came easy and we never developed good study skills) and a more compassionate person