5 1/2 year old identifying letters...

[lgliser]

I told my friend I'd ask here since everyone is so knowledgeable on these boards, so this is for her.  She has a 5 1/2 year old son. Here's how she puts it:

 

"Kason had been trying to learn his letters and sounds for a couple of years.  He is now in kindergarten and has a spelling test this week.   I asked him to spell "we."  He can write it,  but when I asked him what the letters are,  he guesses....H? A?

Then the word "can."  Same thing.   He had some rhymes down, like "A is apple." But he doesn't know many letters or sounds still.   Some times he writes his complete word backwards too.  I am confused as I don't know how to help him.   I have tried different techniques.  He has a hard time looking at a letter (or number) and be able to say what it is."

 

So it's like he's drawing a picture of the word but not realizing that it's made of individual letters that make their own sound. Is he still young enough that she shouldn't worry? She's not terribly stressed but she is just thinking if there's a possible issue, that early detection and help is important. 

 

He also has speech issues but did not qualify for speech therapy. All of his delays (... not really delays I guess but I'm not sure what to call them) are within normal range according to the evaluator. He is hard to understand though... much more so than other 5 year olds, and even most younger kids that I know.

[Clemsondana]

I have a child with speech issues and the professor who oversees the therapy has told me that it's typical for kids with speech problesm to have a lot of reading problems - the act of hearing and saying the sounds seems to be part of helping to learn to read. There were surprised that my speech-delayed child was an early reader because it's really unusual. I don't know when this child was last evaluated, but they will want to stay on top of that. My child went from being in the 40th percentile (below, but close, to average) and not needing therapy, to being in the 5th percentile in about a year - at an age when most kids are improving rapidly, having little progress in 6 months can be a big deal. I don't have any professional advice to back this up, but until she can find somebody who can help, she might try working with him on letters and words that include sounds that he can make. We used hooked on phonics (and I'm sure other similar programs would work) and it was helpful in figuring out exactly what sounds were a problem.

 

The writing backwards might be a sign of another problem - I don't know about that, but the speech thing jumped out at me. Good luck to your friend.

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Edited October 19, 2016 by Evanthe

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Edited October 19, 2016 by Evanthe

[OneStepAtATime]

Who did the speech evaluation? How qualified were they and were they private or through the local school system?

 

He may need an evaluation through a COVD for possible developmental vision issues. Possibly also a second, more thorough speech evaluation and possibly an auditory processing evaluation.

 

At 5 1/2 he is getting old enough that these issues could be concerning. I wouldn't panic but in her shoes I would start looking for some answers over the next few months. He may end up in serious trouble by 1st grade if she isn't proactive. Maybe it will all just fall into place sometime over the next year but in her shoes I would rather be asking questions, getting evaluations and find out nothing is wrong and he just needed more time than to sit back, hope for the best, and hit 1 st grade with his struggles even worse, his confidence crumbling, and a whole year lost that they could have been getting him help.

 

I don't suppose homeschooling for a couple of years is an option? Sometimes kids need both some targeted intervention and a slower time table than the public schools currently provide.

Edited October 19, 2016 by OneStepAtATime

[PeterPan]

If the person doing the evaluating was working for the ps, that's the problem.  At that age he should be 100% intelligible to unfamiliar listeners.  â€Žwww.smusd.org/cms/lib3/CA01000805/Centricity/Domain/603/Intelligibility.pdf

 

Someone can have SLDs *and* a gifted IQ, so you have to be careful when you listen to outcomes.  My ds, at the end of 1st grade, was decoding at a 3rd grade level, reading with comprehension at a 5th/6th grade level, and had a 8th grade level vocabulary.  He still has dyslexia.  He just happens to have had extremely effective intervention and he has a gifted IQ.

 

So she needs a private SLP eval and private psych eval.  By the time they get into the neuropsych, he'll be newly 6.  That's the age my ds was, and at that point they could run everything they wanted (more than at 5.5) and they diagnosed the SLDs.  

 

Personally, I would get the CTOPP done *before* doing LIPS.  However, just to make it glaringly obvious to her that there's a discrepancy, have her go to the Barton website and download the free pretest.  He should be able to pass as a new 5 year, and he probably won't.