My granddaughter is an eager, attentive and well behaved student, but has gone to summer school this year after 3rd grade. She has math, reading and comprehension problems. When I read to her she comprehends excellently, picks up foreshadowing, nuances and even predicts what will happen next. When she reads she often struggles with words and cannot concentrate on the content. She had a reading tutor who worked with her at home throughout second grade. I can’t say that I have detected a lot of improvement.
Her third grade teacher (a generally excellent teacher that my granddaughter loves) says that in math she seems to “get” a concept but loses it later.
I am concerned that in-depth testing has not yet been done as her parents don’t want to “make too much of this”, thinking I guess that she will work out of it if they work more with her. They also think that she has a sugar sensitivity and wonder if that factors into some kind of concentration problem. I feel that it is not a concentration problem.
Over the years as I have tried to work with her she becomes very frustrated - so much so that I have backed off and just make observations as we read together.
Any advice as to suggestions that I can make to her parents to help her? What type of testing should they be looking for? Thanks to anyone who can help me.
[Modified by: Jess on July 18, 2006 11:57 PM]
Re: Learning Disabled??
Comprehensive Neuropsychological testing would be helpful so that interventions can be more taylored for what she needs. I know with my dd that we tried a lot of interventions that actually caused more harm than good because they weren’t what she needed to be successful.
Re: Learning Disabled??
It is difficult to get comprehensive, accurate testing. A complete neuro-psych eval is wonderful if a family can get it (usually runs about $2,000 and medical insurance won’t cover it if the nature of the problems seems to be “educational”). School testing is often pretty minimal and, with the kinds of problems you are describing, usually it just confirms that the difficulties you are observing actually exist.
One area that is often overlooked is developmental vision testing. You can find more information about this at http://www.childrensvision.com . Some children with the difficulties you mention are struggling with undiagnosed visual efficiency problems (problems with convergence, accommodation, and tracking being the most common). Visual efficiency skills are *not* evaluated in regular eye exams. A child can test with 20/20 acuity and still have severe developmental vision delays. A complete developmental vision exam takes about 2 hours. You can find board-certified developmental optometrists who perform this type of exam at http://www.covd.org
Testing aside, I would recommend some home programs that often are very helpful for children with your gdd’s problems. One is the “Reading Improvement and Intervention Software” from http://www.soundreading.com . This is a computer CD that costs about $60 including shipping. The website is terrible, so I always suggest calling the company to be sure you are ordering the right CD. I do not care for the company’s other reading products, but the CD is a wonderful supplement to any reading program for beginning readers (suitable up to a beginning 3rd grade level).
If your dd is 8yo or older, I would strongly recommend either putting her through PACE (http://www.processingskills.com ) or doing BrainSkills with her at home (http://www.brainskills.com ). These are cognitive skills training programs that work on many skills important to reading, math, and other academic work. These are one-on-one programs that do require a substantial commitment in terms of time and perseverance. Although they can be done as little as 1/2-hour per day, the recommended time is at least one hour per day 5 days a week. With most children, about 40 hours of training is necessary before you start seeing significant gains. These programs *do* assume that there are no major developmental vision delays.
Early intervention can prevent a lot of problems later on. Unfortunately, schools and most parents think only “in the box” and add in hours of academic remediation. It is usually more valuable to look at the problem in more depth, and figure out what is causing the difficulty in the first place. Many areas of deficit can be reduced or eliminated if addressed with appropriate interventions. Unfortunately, academic intervention alone is often very inadequate.
Nancy
Re: Learning Disabled??
I tutor students like this all the time. Yes, there is the possiblilty of a learning disability or a visual problem or whatever. However in my experience tutoring, I have found that nine times out of ten the problem is that the child simply does not know HOW to read, and does not know because she quite simply has not been taught. Many misinformed teachers and unfortunately some misinformed tutors spend huge amounts of time and energy — they really do work hard — trying to convince kids to love reading, when the problem is not whether or not they like it but again the fact that they do not know HOW.
Many children at the age of yours start to show behaviour problems out of pure frustration and are labelled all knds of alphabet soup, when the problem is that they are in a massive Catch-22 — you must absolutely love reading and if you can’t do it it is becasue you aren’t loving it enough, what a horrible thing to feel.
Before spending several thousand dollars on testing and another several thousand on special programs, it is worth doing a simple easy intervention and teach the child some basic reading and writing skills from the ground up. IF (and this is a big if) the child simply cannot learn these simple concepts when presented directly, then by all means go on with testing and further programs. However in the huge majority of cases once the basics are straightened out then the rest follows, even liking to read.
You can get the theoretical background on the LD In Depth pages on this site.
If you would like my how-to-tutor outlines/book in progress, a bunch of answers posted to people in your shoes detailing how to teach basic reading from the ground up, please just email a request to
[email protected]
Good for you for keeping the reading “fun” - sounds like she’s going to have plenty of frustration.
It *does* sound like there’s an issue here. “Making too much of it” - welp, that’s all in how you approach it.
Maybe they need to read some of the posts from parents about the incredible guilt many of them feel in hindsight for not discovering that there was a *reason* for struggling, and there *was* something they could have done about it, had they but known?
Regardless… keep the stories and the language and the oral langauge comprehension going with her. Can you get her interested in books on tape?
Good for you for being her ally and advocate :-)
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