Achievement versus Cognitive scores!!

First, a disrepancy between verb and performance scores are not diagnostic of a learning disability. If there is a significant disrepancy, it is a clue to look further. My daughter is now 6, she had alot of testing at 5-6 yrs of age. I don’t know what lead you to have your child tested, but the tests should target the areas of concern. It amazed me how my daughter could do well on expressive vocab tests, when she has such difficulty finding the words for things she knows. I have tried to put the peices of her learning puzzle together, that is what the tests should do. I am now told she is dyslexic. Last year at this time the school tested her and said there were no problems. There is no significant discrepancy between her verbal and performance IQ scores, but she has a great deal of difficulty learning. She cannot count above 12, does not recognize numbers above 7 out of sequence and has had huge trouble learning the letters. Very high IQ, near gifted. She is very bright, but does below average in pre-reading skills on tests and has significant phonological processing difficulty. I scratch my head and say, what does all this mean FOR HER? She needs help to learn. My daughter is calssified and receives help in school, after I had independant learning evals and showed the school where they went so wrong. The discrepancy in her cognitive ability and her achievements were very obvious in specific areas.

That sounds like my son, has trouble recognizing letters and letter sounds, trouble with numbers over 10-11.

He had an achievement tests, the Brigance, but it only gave me age equivelants, does that test have percentile ranks and scores?

That is the problem I am having right now, I don’t know how to fit the puzzle together and determine what is wrong. I had the test evaluated by a psycologist and she said there were definite auditory processing issues and dyslexia. However, I can’t show any discrepencies becuase the scores on the achivement tests can’t be compared with the scores on the IQ.

I want to work with him this summer so he enters first grade with the letters, sounds, and numbers on board but I don’t want to teach him the wrong way.

What did the independent eval do differently??

K.

The independent eval was MUCH more thorough. The schools academic eval of my daughter took 40 mins tops, the independent took several hours. The one the school did was, in my case, very inaccurate. They said that my daughter knew half the letters, when she knew exactly 6. When I asked them about this, they said “We only asked her a few, and she knew half of what we asked her.” The said she knew 100% of her colors, and I said “Are you telling me she told you yellow and orange?” They said, “Well, not at first.” The most significant indicators in a kindergarten of impending reading difficulties ( according to the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development’s report by the National Reading Panel) are phoneme awareness and letter knowledge. My daughter has very poor phonological processing, as per testing. PAT (phoneme awareness test) and the CTOPP (comprehensive test of phonological processsing) to name a few. There is also a RAN (rapid automatic naming test) which can be helpful, it is belieed that this test uses many of the skills required to read. I believe that all tests can be converted to percentile ranked, as well as age equivelents, though I am not positive. My daughter is being tutored in Orton Gillingham starting in June.

My son had a pretty extensive eval with the school. The Dr. who reviewed the tests with me even said it was more thorough than she normally sees.

You mentioned your daughter is being tutored in OG starting this summer. I read about all the different programs but I often wonder if you need to be able to read??

My brother is tutored in Wilson, it has worked well for him and I am considering taking the Wilson Workshop this summer but I wonder if I can use it with my son this early?

K.

Absolutely!!! It is absolutely appropriate now! Orton works with letters, the names and sounds of them. This is the BEST time to intervene when there is a learning difficulty. Approriate teaching in phoneme awareness through multisensory programs like Orton and Wilson are proven to help these kids learn to read. I tell my Child Study Team that my daughter is sittnig on a silver platter, because she is only 6 and we know she has dyslexia. The appropriate program at this age can make a HUGE difference. PA training should be a priority for your son. (phoneme awareness). I also have a four year old and we do important things like rhyming words, even non-words just to play with the sounds in them. PA should be a priority for ALL preschoolers, it is a very important reading skill. We (me and my girls) clap syllables in words and pull apart sounds (like turkey without the tur). We do this riding in the car, lying in bed at night. It is fun and easy. My daughter that has dyslexia could never rhyme, sing songs or say nursery rhymes. O-G does much more than phoneme tasks, but it is a part of it. My daughter is making some progress, and hopefully with her IEP for next year (Orton), she will make more.

This part of the problem. My son attends private school so the funding would have to come from the public school system. They keep saying he is just 5 ( he is six the end of this month)

I can’t seem to figure out how to get them to stop saying that and doing something to help him. Wilson over the summer would be fabulous. We don’t have tons of money and it would be hard for us to pay for it ourselves. Wilson will have a course but not until July and it is expensive.

I wish I could figure out some way for the school to fork over the money!

K.

I was in both your shoes when my son came out of first grade. Exactly the same problem. He could count all the way to 20 (I don’t remember if he could rote count I was just so pleased he could count at all) before he was 2 but when he was in kindergarten he couldn’t count by rote and he couldn’t visually identify his numbers.

He has always been verbally advanced but could not read when it came time for school. They had him a basic skills class where he was tutored with one other child and it did not help.
He is now in second grade.
I intervened using the book reading reflex. He now reads very well. Can sound out any word. He spelled hippopotamus for his spelling test just today. He is a great speller when he takes the time to sound out. Still has some trouble while he is writing a story but it is improving.

Phonemic awareness seems to be the key. I would highly recommend that you get some help with a program the specifically targets that area. Even if you don’t do it yourself I would recommend that you try to understand the method that is used. The reason is that I use the phonemes all the time when helping my child while he reads a book. I also use them when he has to go over spelling words.
If he would be forced to learn to spell by just repeating the spelling over and over again (which is how they do it at his school) he would fail miserably. He can’t learn that way.

K

Someone reported here that they were able to get their insurance to pay by having the speech therapist do the intervention.

It might be something to look into.

See if your insurance covers speech therapy then see if you have a speech therapist in you area that works on phonemic awareness.

Haveyou looked at the mason’sscottish rites program? They are supposed to offer some Wilson tuition tapes free. Have you looked at Reading Reflex a book available from Amazon.com for $12.oo and meant to help parents teach their kids the PG (phonographix) method. As posted elsewhere try PG if that doesn’t work run to LIPS (Lindamood Bell). My son didn’t have enough phonemeic awareness to do pg. We worked all winter with him just to get him to recognize begnning sounds and letters. We did get him counting , adding, and subtracting using manipulatives (colored rods representing values available at teacher shops online) called Cusainaire Rods. Within days he learned what he’d been struggling with for a year. Now the same thing has happned with LIPS. We paid to have our tutour trained ( a teacher who retired to homeschool her kids about 15 years ago with no spec ed background -just a good teacher) This cost us about $1600 including plane fare and hotel,but since she is going on to make tuition money with the training she’s deducting it from our tution. Within weeks of 4 hours a day tuition with her he’s had breakthru after breakthru.She says she prepares 2 days of lessons and he does them in one day and most important of all RETAINS it!!!! It’s almost scarey. We were marveling the other morning and we both said almost the samething at the same time- if we hadn’t struggledwith this kid all winter we’d probably be saying what the schools said, “It was just developmental.”

What is this program and how do I find information about it?

K.