New Here - Without Diagnosis but very overwhelmed!

((Hugs)) It is frustrating to see your child having difficulty learning and losing confidence in their abilities. The good thing is that now that you know what the issues are you can begin to help in ways that will make him successful and allow him to regain his confidence. There are many good programs that can help him. :)

One thing that I like to remember is that there are many successful people who have LD (Learning Differences). It helps me to remember that they CAN learn and become successful, thriving adults.

I think we can all relate to the mourning stage. I just had to deal with it all over again this year. Sometimes it’s more obvious that she has a problem and then at other times she seems right in sync with everyone else. She has some sort of auditory processing, but now I am thinking and the teacher thinks too, that she has some sort of add as well, but not adhd. She’s quite calm and very well behaved, but sometimes she is really out there and not with me except for physically. It’s as if she can look right through me and not hear what I am even saying. Sometimes I ask “Can you hear me right now?”. Those moments are very hard for me to watch and make me sad, but I have realized that those moments do not happen every day and when it does, I need to stop trying to force the “extra work” and let her go have some playtime. She’s only 7 after all. It’s just frustrating to me that the school gets her all day when she is at her best and then I get the “after school, worn out child”. We have good times and bad times and I am trying (although it’s hard) when we have a bad day to say “today was a bad day and hopefully tomorrow will be another good day”. Then last week we had 2 bad days in a row. Anyway, knowing what the heck the problem is and getting specific recommendations on how to help her is very comforting to me.

Hang in there for your child’s sake and you will not regret it. You will be amazed at how much you can do for him
Kathryn

Hi Peepa,
I thought that I would just mention some research that I’m doing into auditory processing disorders, which might be relevant? That I’ve previously mentioned to Kathryn.
It is something rather simple, that is taken for granted. Which is the ability to ‘recall or imagine the sound of words in our mind’.
As you read this, no doubt you can probably recall the sound of each word in your mind as you are reading?
But consider what difficulties you might have if you couldn’t recall the sound of words in your mind?
I have found a growing number of children that have never learnt how to effectively recall or imagine sounds in their mind.
Which is a skill that we all develop through practise. Yet many of the children in my study, never knew that people did this?
Afterall, no-one ever mentions it? They might ask; ‘Did you hear what I said?’ But they never ask; ‘Can you recall what I said?’
Even speech therapists dont test or ask;’Can you recall the sound of words in your mind?’
It is just taken for granted that everyone can do this.
So Peepa, perhaps you could simply ask your son if he can clearly recall and imagine the sound of words in his mind?
Geoff.

Geodob - I think you are right on with the research you are doing. Do you think your reseach has anything to do with ‘imagery’ in general? I know my dd has always had a problem with ‘imaging’ anything in her head. I’ll have to ask her the ‘sub-vocalization’ abilities, I don’t know if that is an issue or not. I do know that when she was around 3rd gradish, I discovered she could not picture letters in her head or ‘see the movie’ while reading.

We worked alot with imagery and she now can ‘see’ things but I don’t think it’s automatic for her. I believe this is the root of her spelling issues. Interesting, her PIQ Visual Spatial and Reasoning scores went from 129 to 151 on her last IQ test and the only thing I can account for this is the imaging work and sound therapy.

We’ve still been doing sound therapy to try to get her word retrievel issues better. We discovered during a meeting with her Dr. just last week that one of the reasons she can’t remember names of people is because when she meets a new person, she does not ‘internalize’ the name or what they look like, but rather her mind is focusing on “What kind of person is this? Are they nice, do I like them, how do they make me FEEL”. I emphasize the FEEL because she doesn’t focus on what they look like or what they are wearing etc. It all has to do with ‘feelings’.

My guess is that she does not ‘sub-vocalize’ anything.

One thing Michelle seems to be good at is visualization. She does very well with spelling if she has studied the words carefully. She can take a picture in her mind and replicate it. She had a word count test at the beginning of the year. We practiced at home writing as many words as possible in 10 minutes. She wrote our family’s names accross the top, “mom, dad, etc..” and then down the left side of the paper wrote the short 1 and 2 letter words that she knows and then down the middle we wrote the man family words and then on the right side we wrote the cat family words. A few days later she took the word count test at school and I asked the teacher if I could see it and I’m not kidding, it was laid out exactly as we had done at home. She missed a few words so her word count was lower, but she literally laid it out exactly the same way because she took a picture. She also does well once she puts a word into her “storage” (that’s what I like to call it) and can read it again and again no matter what book she is reading. Like the word “clever”. She is also awesome with those sight words because she has memorized them. I’m not sure about if she is visualizing when she is reading because so far all our books have pictures in them still. We’re not reading chapter books yet, but that’s something to think about.

Kathryn