Quote:
Originally Posted by
joensally 
Will you now go to the "gifted" section for further eval? What will this mean for kindie?
I think I am going to hold out on pursuing gifted testing for now. We know now that at the moment, he appears to be at least MG, possibly HG+ in the visual-spatial field which is helpful to me to have confirmed, though I wasn't surprised. And if we ever need to in the near future, we can refer to those scores. We can also assume that he is a very dominant right-brain thinker, which is also helpful to me to know.
For our day-to-day challenges with self-regulation, I'll see how helpful the OT and this developmental counseling is. I was a bit shocked to hear that the profile his preschool teachers filled in showed these strong anxious, depressed and avoidant tendencies, I thought he was doing better. But to me, high sensitivity is established as well, not sure gifted testing or consultation would now turn up stuff I am not already aware of. Implementing helpful strategies would be another kettle of fish, if the OT isn’t helpful I may look into therapy. Possibly for me too!
NO, right now I badly want to find out more about the low verbal scores, particularly as they don't fit at all with his extreme verbal precociousness. I would have expected high verbal scores because of that, but I have now been collecting further evidence in my mind about this. To wit: auditory overresponsivity, high stress in noisy places with meltdowns or explosions after, meltdowns at "sad songs", not wanting to explore more chapter books, problems with social cues, frequently asking "what" with answering correctly after delay, subvocalization, some scripting, not reacting to being given directions in tones of increasing loudness and annoyance, then having a meltdown if someone starts yelling, sometimes telling me "I don't understand you!" after being told off for something, or yelling "don't say anything about me anymore!" in that situation. And sometimes, weirdly, jut not "getting it". It's hard to explain.
So beyond his being a very visual spatial thinker, there are three likely explanations and I am afraid they might even all play a part in combination:
auditory processing disorder as part of SPD (or part of his very mild spectrumy tendencies; I understand there are theories it might be the same thing) ) ; I understa which I think is extremely likely but am not sure whether he might be too young to test for,
pragmatic language impairment which might be just another way for his mild spectrumy tendencies to show up,
and mild left hemispheric cerebral palsy as a leftover greeting from prematurity and the NICU.
I have read that apart from affecting language skills, left hemispheric damage can lead to problems with boundaries, body awareness and autistic-looking avoidant behaviour. He used to show gross motor neglect on the right hand side but appeared to have outgrown it after torticollis treatment. PT testing recently was inconclusive (a little right side weaknesss, a little left side weakness, overall low coordination). Very rarely, he still drags his right leg but can correct it when told. I noticed he was dragging it when he came back from the testing! This is the one that is most scary to me as it would involve a brain scan and is the one which I think is least amenable to intervention, as it is simply damage to be compensated for, less about growing pathways to be developed and nudged in the right direction. I am not sure however how that fits with his adult-sounding language – compensation? No clue. I will need to mull this over a bit, maybe set my father to it who is a retired neurologist, but does not do developmental neurology at all.
Kindie will be a pullout program in preschool, formal schooling starts in first grade only. His birthday falls into the “grace period” after the September cutoff, so he could in theory start kindie this fall if his preschool teachers are agreeable (and we still want to enter him early). At this point, while we are still sorting it all out and the memories of his behavioral difficulties this winter are still fresh, I do not want to raise the question, so they do not have to formulate a “no” they’d have to back away from, KWIM? He does not have to apply for anything, he could just start taking part come September as soon as OT and maturity and maybe language therapy have helped him develop better compensation skills. And taking part is not a prerequisite for first grade, so we have time to make up our minds. One part of the program is a phonemic awareness training which I do want him to take part in if at all possible, even though to me this seems the one area he does not appear deficient in!
It seems more and more likely to me though that he might do best in the Montessori school, maybe entered early with the understanding that he could just do five years in lower el as opposed to four (local speciality due to tracking starting in 5th).
