Hi there,
I know you mentioned in several of your posts that you went through treatments with your daughter, but I could not remember the order that you did the treatments. I have a couple of questions.
First of all, I found a Speech/Language Pathologist who specializes in language based learning disabilities. I found her through Scientific Learning’s website as I was researching the Fast ForWord program. We are going to set up a meeting with her to see if she can help our daughter.
My daughter is 8, so she is older than your daughter was when you did some of these programs, so she might be able to do more if age is a factor. First, did you say something about wondering if you should have done certain programs prior to Fast ForWord?
Did you do FFW at home or in a clinic? Since I have 2 other kids at home I was thinking that doing it in a clinic might be a better option. My husband has said he would work from home or just take time off of work to be with the other 2 kids so that I can take her in for treatment as opposed to doing it at home. Did your daughter find it frustrating to do the FFW program? I remember you said that you had to provide incentives, but was the program engaging enough to hold her attention? I read somewhere that if the child gets a wrong answer they lower the difficulty level so that the child can maintain an 80% success rate. Also, how long did it take you to complete and how long each day? I have read so many different things from 1-1.25hrs/day 5days/week for 4-6 weeks and other places I have read 1.5-2hrs/day for 6-8 weeks. Maybe it varies depending on how long it takes the child to get through the exercises. Also, were you able to listen with your own headphones or did you just trust that she knew what to do? I guess if we do it through a clinic then we would not need to participate with her. I know she would want me to stay with her because she is very clingy to me.
Also, one more question that keeps coming up in my mind is those darn non-verbal test scores from when she was in kindergarten. She scored at a very low score even on non-verbal, which makes me question her logic and reasoning skills as well as her cognitive abilities to learn. I believe you said your daughter scored quite low as well. Did FFW or any other program help her to increase her logic and reasoning abilities? It seems to me that even a nonverbal test would require some sort of language comprehension and if that could be helped then maybe even a nonverbal test score could be affected. And if someone’s cognitive abilities are weak, then would FFW still be a reasonable program to attempt? She is not unable to learn, so I suppose that with enough work we can get through it.
I think you also asked me at one point how she had tested for digit span. I looked over the psychologists report again and found this information. She was 5yrs 8mo at the time of testing and the report said that her digit span was that of a 4 year old. So, being almost 6, that is nearly 2 years behind. She tested for receptive and expressive vocabulary on 2 different tests. The Peabody test sowed age equiv of 3-2 for both expressive and receptive. For the Preschool Language Scale-3 she tested at 3-5 for receptive and 2-9 for expressive.
Thanks again for any information you can share,
Kathryn
Re: demarti - Question about FFD and other APD treatments..
I just read an article about visual processing and children with Language Impairments. Did anyone tell you that your daughter had a language impairment or did they say auditory processing disorder or both?
Anyway, I’m not sure if this is interesting to you or not, but it might be since you said your daughter had some visuaspatial issues as well.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1570538
I’m anxious to start FFW with Michelle, but I’m not sure how well she’ll sit through it. It is rather intense from what I understand, but it is supposed to be made so that they can do it at the easiest level and then it progressively gets more difficult. I’m wondering if they will recommend starting with Language basics first or if FFW language will be simple enough. I have read quite a bit of research on it, and it looks promising for kids who have oral language problems as well as auditory processing problems.
Michelle told me that when she performed her dance routine by herself in front of her dance class she was nervous. I asked her how she knew she was nervous, not knowing that she had known what that word meant. She said that her heart was “beeping”. When I told the SLP that she said that was classic auditory discrimination. Also, the more I read about auditory temporal processing it makes sense that it impairs language acquisition and language comprehension.
One interesting thing I read about auditory temporal processing is that music is much slower than speech, which probably explains Michelle’s abilities in music.
And one last gripe about the school…. they keep on insisting that I am talking about Central Auditory Processing, which is different. I never used the word “Centrai” for one thing and I told them that actually, APD and CAPD are one in the same and that the terms are used interchangeably. The resource teacher told me yesterday that according to the school district they are different. Could they be talking about some other issue such as autism or something different? Could it be that they have assigned a new definition to CAPD that is different than auditory processing disorder? I just find it strange. It also explains that another they have told another family that their daughter does not have CAPD when she was clearly diagnosed with it. So strange.
Thanks again,
Kathryn
Re: demarti - Question about FFD and other APD treatments...
Hi Kathryn,
My son and your daughter sound like they have similar difficuties. My son has completed FF Basics, Language and Language to Reading. Our School District offers the program in the summer and before or after school during the school year. He LOVES Fast ForWord and I was hoping he could move on to the Reading 1 program this summer but they are not offering that level yet. I was hoping FF would help him organize his expressive language, but I didn’t see that as a benefit. I do think it helped him “think more” and he started asking lots of questions about things that happened several years ago. I thought your post was interesting because I recently had him evaluated by a developmental optometrist and we have started some vision therapy. I would have never thought to do this except he came home from school one day and told me the words looked like “hockey pucks” while he was reading. He told me the words were “jumping” and they somtimes looked “foggy”. The doctor evalutated him and prescribed prism lenses which have helped with his reading (less choppy) and ability to focus better when writing. He also has significant visual-spatial issues. I’m hoping the therapy will yield additional benefits. Years prior to FF, we did Therapuetic Listening and that helped with auditory sequencing and motor planning. We also did Earobics 1 at home. I feel my son did much better having someone else provide the FF program, but he works much better for others overall. Good Luck!!
Linda
Linda
Re: demarti - Question about FFD and other APD treatments..
How old is your son? I was thinking that if this works out we could try the language to reading. It would be nice to have some additional support outside of school.
I never thought of Michelle as having any visual issues since it is her strength, but really, it is her relative strength. Not sure how “strong” she is visually, except that she definitely relies on her visual abilities. Maybe visualizing things or having visual-spacial issues is different than “vision”.
Kathryn
Hi,
We started with Earobics (vs. FFW) and that was very hard for her. My decision came to Tomatis vs. FFW. My dd was only 5.5 at the time. I didn’t think she would be able to get through FFW when she struggled so bad with Earobics.
I don’t think that Earobics really hits the areas of neurodevelopmental retraining that FFW does. I always wondered if we would have seen additional benefit had we done it as well. After doing Tomatis, Earobics was very easy and we zoomed through it (except for Karloon’s Baloons, which Brain Builder got us through that).
You can do FFW at home with the moderation of a certified provider (I know some parents became certified and then could do the program cheaper). Sounds like you have found a good SLP that you are comfortable with and that is so important. My huntch is that you will see some benefit from FFW and a good choice.
Interestingly, logic and reasoning was very low for my dd on a cognitive test. It’s now an area of strength. I don’t really know what caused the improvement. In my heart I truely believe there is something about the listening program that opened up learning and then the cognitive training -both PACE and Audiblox helped her develop it.