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Jentrovert

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Everything posted by Jentrovert

  1. In an upper kitchen cabinet. Three of us take daily medication(s), and it's easiest to do so in the kitchen, where the filtered water is. I would love to do something different, since I have a small kitchen. Two whole sections of cabinets are taken up with meds, vitamins, first aid, tea, and coffee items. So far, though, I've not come up with anything that works as well.
  2. Thank you, this makes sense. I've actually been thinking this (that she's not really as good at phonological skills as it seems). I think that up until now, she's been able to mask it really well, but now that things are amping up the deficits are becoming more clear. Also, up until recently I think her interest has been enough to propel her through hard things. But now it's a level of difficulty for her where the interest isn't enough/worth it. We had the testing at the dev opt this week, will get results later this month. And the testing with the SLP is later this month as well. Thank you all again. I will either update or start a new thread when I have some test results.
  3. Gotcha, ok. And yeah, I'll see how far out the SLP eval will be before getting Barton. 😁
  4. Does anyone know if HSA funds can be used for testing? Is all this considered medical or solely educational?
  5. Re-reading and had a question about this . . . you're saying I can integrate it into Barton 1 with BOTH kids? Not just my daughter because she passed the pretest, but with both just because it can be done that way. Do I understand that right?
  6. I commented on the audiologist above, and I'll check and see if the SLP has something for APD. I'm going to schedule fresh testing at the dev opt, and that includes testing for retained reflexes.
  7. Ok, so on my immediate list is to get LiPS. Let me clarify my thinking on Barton . . . . is it a given at this point that I will need to do Barton with at least one child, regardless of the SLP evals or other testing? If so, I may go ahead and order Level 1 (not to use any of this before getting the baseline stuff, but so I can begin reviewing it myself). Or, should I hold off on that?
  8. I don't know if an SLP can diagnose either. I tend to think not, because on one of the websites I looked at (I think for a dyslexia center, maybe?) I remember thinking it was worded oddly and specifically avoided stating that they dx dyslexia. So I figured the SLP wasn't able to actually diagnose. I'm leaning toward just what you're saying, that the SLP evals are sufficient for now, and do more later. But I will still go ahead and find and get on the list for a neuropsych, since indications are that will be covered by their insurance. Now, is it an educational psychologist that would dx adhd, etc? Or a neuropsych?
  9. Ok, so I did the Barton pretest on both kids. DD7 passed the test, with none wrong on A or B, and the maximum wrong (2) on C. She did a lot of watching my mouth intently as I said the sounds on C; she would not have passed had she been unable to see me. DS6 failed the test. He had the maximum wrong on A and B, and was well over the maximum on C. In researching SLPs this weekend, I came across a few 2-3 hours away from us at learning centers/dyslexia school, etc. Indications were the testing there takes 1.5 - 2 hours or so. So we have options there. I found one though, about 3.5 hours away, that at least on the surface sounds like much more. I emailed her, and here is part of her response: "The CTOPP is one of the tests I give as part of an in-depth professional evaluation. I provide a full assessment in the areas of expressive and receptive oral language, reading, spelling, and writing skills....Evaluations are serious, in depth investigations into learning strengths and weaknesses. They are scheduled on two different days and usually consist of 5-6 hours of direct assessment. In addition I collect history and informational checklists from the family to help build a well rounded profile. A family never receives a computer generated, generic score printout. Instead, tests are thoroughly analyzed and families receive a 20-30 page report that details the individual results of their child. Reports are explained during a parent meeting and time is taken to answer questions you might have about the unique needs of your child." Her website says she has special training in: Yoshimoto OG, SPELL-Links to Reading and Writing, LETRS, LiPS, Zoo-phonics. Masters in SLP and Reading and several certifications, etc. The cons are that it is a longer trip (which I don't mind for something I won't have to make more than 2 trips for, and the trip isn't unexpected. We're at least 2 hours from anywhere.) and she doesn't accept insurance. The cost is $500. However, it sounds like we'd be getting quite a lot of info for that amount, and considering her time investment (5-6 hours of assessment) it's certainly not an outlandish amount per hour. While we don't want to just throw money away, we are willing to spend this amount for something that will produce some actionable results while waiting for neuropsych. So, first, since DS6 failed the Barton pretest, I want to go ahead and do LiPS with him, right? I mean, I definitely want to do this, regardless of whether it turns out he has dyslexia and regardless of the SLP testing? (Is the fact he failed the Barton pretest highly indicative of dyslexia, even without any other testing?) I've read several threads on LiPS vs FIS, and I feel I can implement LiPS. It is more appealing to me because of the number of reviews and FIS just seems to be $$$ for what you get. But I'm open to further opinions on choosing between them. And, if the above is yes, don't I want to do LiPS with dd as well, since I'll have it anyway, and though she passed, she didn't fly through C with no problems? And then, what do you think about the above SLP? Does it sound (I know there's no way to guarantee) that it would be worth pursing that as opposed to one a little closer and cheaper (likely free)? Like I said above, I don't want to waste $, but this one just sounds like we'll get so much more in one stop. She offers a free phone consult, so I can see what kind of feel I get over the phone too. Thank you all again for helping me sort through this. I have alternately been feeling overwhelmed and sad / confident and ready to get in there and work through it. Along with still some thoughts of, maybe I'm making more of it than it really is . . . but if that were true, they would have blown through the Barton pretest easily, right? A child above age 5 with no problems would be able to do all parts with no difficulty?
  10. I'll be giving her the Barton screening this weekend (she's been at my parent's). A question about the syllables . . . she likes to count syllables by putting her hand underneath her mouth instead of clapping. Does it need to be clapping only? Or is the point simply to get the correct number and it doesn't really matter how?
  11. I'm wondering if it would be wise, when I find someone, for me to go ahead and have my son evaluated as well? They are biologically half siblings and he is 6. He has less phonological awareness than she does (not quite as good with segmenting longer words, for example), and has been much slower about mastering things, both in reading and math. He also has less maturity and attention span (unless it's something he's interested in; I adapt almost all math to include vehicles, tractors in particular. :)) It's difficult to get him to even try something that is harder for him (just in general). At the same time, often he'll surprise me by demonstrating mastery of something just in everyday life, things that we may not have talked about more than a couple times (of course, he's often listening to dd's lessons too. I didn't teach him the single letter phonograms at all, he learned from listening to her). He's very bright, like she is. He seems to process things more quickly and make intuitive leaps that she doesn't. But he's much more wrapped up in whatever he's doing. 🙂 Is he of an age where something like the CTOPP would be useful, or is it better to allow a little more maturity? He's in Foundations B. He knows all his single letter phonograms, and a few 2 letter. He's not reading anything fluently yet, but can blend and segment short words reasonably well. DS draws a lot, and has recently been adding a few words to his drawings. They are spelled phonetically. He seems to be following the same development she did, just a lot later and a lot less interest (which doesn't seem to be unusual for boys?) He'll be having the full testing at the dev opt soon; I recently figured out that he may be seeing double when looking at words.
  12. Thank you, this all makes sense. Ok, so you're saying the tiles are cumulative in that I will need to keep the tiles from each level, to use in the later levels, right? And since they don't sell individual parts, I need to get an extra set for each level so that I can sell a set of tiles for that level with it. Do I understand that correctly?
  13. lol Yes, I was thinking that my husband would enjoy it too. Actually, the kids aren't our bio children, but it's interesting how similar she is to my husband in lots of ways.
  14. My goodness, what a time you had! I feel very fortunate to have found these boards; they are not only a source of direction, but inspiration as well. You're right, I ought not to dwell on the environmental thing. I've read-aloud to them from the time they joined our home (in her case, this was at 16 months old), we have hundreds of books (probably more, I'm frankly too afraid to do an actual count) tucked into every space in our small house, and she's loved looking through them on her own since before she could even identify any letters. There is not one thing I could have done differently in that regard. I'm over here fretting about not identifying something earlier, and my husband is thrilled we'll be able to intervene so early. He learned to read on his own when he was around 11, after being left to flounder in both school and "homeschool". (Actually, he is unable to read well phonetically, he memorized words by sight, by listening to recordings and following along in print.) Thank you for the encouragement!
  15. I tend to agree. This thinking may be partly why I asked the question about Barton above. We've already added in lots more fluency practice than LOE calls for, and I wonder if just rolling with what she needs is sufficient, like the recommendations on the last page of that article. (Still getting evals, etc. and still not opposed to Barton, just mostly talking and exploring here) From the article: "With relative strengths in phonological processing and weaknesses in orthographic processing, individuals with “orthographic dyslexia” are recognized by their ability to read regular words better than irregular words, reduced sight vocabulary, slow reading rate, spelling errors that are phonologically correct but do not follow the conventions of written English." This does sound a lot like my dd. She loves to write stories, etc. and always spells phonetically correctly but rarely is correct spelling. This: "Research has also shown that difficulties attributable to orthographic processing, and related variability in naming speed, are largely the result of limitations in the environment, reading experience and print exposure. . . . .The pattern of orthographic deficits is frequently the result of insufficient exposure to written language, sometimes is present following intensive phonological training and rarely is produced by a biologically-based neurocognitive difference. Genetics plays a greater role in phonological processing; and environment, especially reading experience, is more influential in orthographic processing." Maybe? It is a hard thing to consider that environment caused this . . . it is true that her exposure to written words has been much less than oral . . . but isn't that true of everyone? Perhaps the vision issues have resulted in an insufficient exposure? idk. Driving home yesterday, she started a game of segmenting words. Her brother turned it into segmenting phrases ("ok, now do: Two hundred trees blowing in the wind"). She segmented whole phrases perfectly, and told me (after silently counting) how many in each phrase.
  16. Makes sense. Although I know there are definitely things I'm missing or interpreting incorrectly, I do have a measure of confidence that with evals and direction we can figure things out (at least to a reasonable degree - I'm not sure any of us are ever "figured out" completely! lol) I'm also, in a way, grateful that her difficult beginnings made us be more proactive than I think we might otherwise have been. Vision therapy, iLs, OT, hours upon hours of stuff at home that I never would have known about otherwise. I may eventually regret that I didn't pursue more evals earlier (I've been suspicious about working memory, processing speed, adhd, etc for quite some time, but since she kept improving I second-guessed myself. Upon reflection, the improvement may be because we've been doing what amounts to therapy in many areas, and I've hit a point where I've maybe taken it as far as I can without more direction.) But overall we've done the best we could and I will just have to be satisfied with that. 🙂 Like so much else in life. lol We'll soon be having my son do the whole testing too, and I told my husband I almost dread it because what are the chances he won't need it? And I dread making the 2.5 hour drive every 2 weeks. (Actually, I have a fair amount of trust that they won't have us do it if it's not needed. They've been very understanding about the distance. But, still. 😜) This is good to know. We're at least 2 hours from everywhere, so I know we don't have a school near us, but I will check into what might be available to drive to. This makes perfect sense. You also mentioned your dd being a good guesser with good comprehension, glossing over the decoding issues. If I were not right with her, looking at both what she is reading and where her eyes are going when she's doing it (like, say, if I sat in a different chair and just listened) I'm not sure I would recognize some of the issues she's having right now. She has listened to so many books read to her, that she knows what the next word(s) should be to sound right. If I let her, she would do perfectly well looking at the first letter of the word and guessing a word that makes sense and moving through to the next word she can actually read. She'd be very fluent doing this. lol Good reminder for me, because I am very much a person who like to have things DONE and work from there. This will not be done quickly, or ever. I need to view it properly or I will end up getting discouraged. I've been wondering, what exactly is the difference in Barton and something like we currently use (LOE)? I'm not at all resistant to using Barton, just curious. I have a hard time imagining it being MORE explicit . . . on the other hand, there have been many times I've added additional explaining or made things even more incremental in LOE, so maybe I can see it. Or is it more the WAY it's presented? The pace?
  17. Gotcha. That makes sense. Do you have any advice on choosing a neuropsych? Of course, I'll have it narrowed down some in that not all will accept Medicaid, but I started looking at their provider list today and there are a lot. I'm off to bed now, but greatly appreciate everyone's replies so far and will be back later in the day tomorrow. Thank you!
  18. Thank you! Would the testing at the developmental optometrist likely reveal this? Not a dx of dyslexia, I mean, but the deficit in orthographic processing?
  19. Thank you! Yes, I agree. And those are good points about testing/remediation that I hadn't considered. I'll keep that in mind as I find out time frames on evals. ETA: I was thinking on this more . . . when she was younger, ADHD was definitely on my radar. Still has been, but the hyperactivity part has seemed to calm down. She does move nearly constantly; she even moves a lot in her sleep. I have a difficult time sleeping with her. (She does fine sleeping alone, I mean at hotels, etc.)
  20. Thank you so much for all of this. Even though it would have been nice to hear that I'm overblowing things, it's actually somewhat of a relief to have some validation that I'm not crazy for thinking some of this stuff isn't quite right. I will go about getting neuropsych and SLP evals then, as it seems that is the next thing. Actually, what I probably could effect first is to redo all her developmental optometrist testing. I could kick myself for not doing that already.
  21. Hello, I'm a mom of 2 (DD7 and DS6) in Oklahoma. I've lurked for some time, but as the kids get older am thinking I will benefit from actually posting. Hopefully as I gain experience I may be able to offer some tidbits here and there as well. Eventually I will look into figuring out my profile. 🙂
  22. Hello, this is my first post on the forums. I've been registered and reading for quite some time, and should have come on before now to say thank you for all the tips and info I've gleaned. Now I've reached a point where I'm not really sure what to do, or how to do it, and could really use some advice specific to my situation. This is about my daughter, K. She turned 7 in December. From the time she could talk well, she has had very good phonemic awareness. She would say a word and ask, "now what does that start with?" and "what's at the end?". By preschool she knew all her single letter phonograms just from our talking about words (at her request). She loved rhyming. Her comprehension has always been great with read-alouds, and she has enjoyed listening to chapter books since she was around 4. Loves audiobooks. Excellent vocabulary. K talks all. the. time. To the point it is annoying to the rest of us. Talking and moving, always talking and moving. 😀 I mention all this to make clear that this kid LOVES words and stories. We're in LOE Foundations C. Two or three times, in B and C, we've completely stopped new lessons because it just seems to go too fast (too many new phonograms to learn). This is fine with me. We work on fluency, games, phonogram review until it seems she's ready, and then move ahead. It has never seemed like her reading ability is what it should be, given her interest and background, and the explicit phonics, but she always seemed to be making some progress and was so young, I didn't worry too much about it. She does not seem to have much visual memory. For example, if I had a penny for every time I heard /t/ /h/ /e/ . . . . it took several hundred times of reading this word for her to recognize the /th/, much less recognize the whole word. LOE doesn't have much repetition, and I recognized that she needed more, so we have added it in. But it still takes so many times decoding a word to seem to recognize it at all. She had a big leap around the time she turned 6, where she was able to read things like Biscuit and Frog and Toad with enough fluency to begin to enjoy it. Now, she can read those books with little error as long as she is paying attention. She can decode most words in Mercy Watson now, but frequently not with enough fluency to understand what she has read. If she has a minute or two where she is spot-on with attention, she can read it fluently, but this doesn't happen often. She doesn't seem to reverse letters when she is reading, but does when writing (b, d, p, etc). She has convergence insufficiency and we have done vision therapy (we see a developmental optometrist) for a long time. Last visit, we were told that if she were to visit a new optometrist, they wouldn't know she had CI. She still has eyestrain and tires very easily when reading, rubs eyes. Don't know if it matters, but probably 3 years ago, I printed out the RAN color sheets (I think that is what they are called?) that someone posted here. She did very poorly on them, but with practice has improved. On one hand, it doesn't seem like she's far away from normal with reading . . . on the other hand, there is just something nagging at me that it is harder than it should be. Every single thing has been taught explicitly and practiced over and over. If she decodes a word and it appears again 3 words later, it usually has to be completely decoded again from beginning to end. And I read about stealth dyslexia and think maybe it's just masked by the explicit instruction, like it's just enough to get us this far but how far will it go . . . then again, maybe I just need to cultivate more patience . . . and I go in circles. Other issues: She has always had a good grasp of math concepts. However, at the same time, there seems to be a lag between her actual understanding and output (verbal). Things like skip-counting have taken so much repetition to grasp. I have had 2 grandparents with Alzheimer's and 1 with dementia. Very often, the look on her face is exactly how theirs was when they were still aware of things . . . it was clear they could understand the words you said, and they knew they should easily be able to respond, but they just could not process what the words meant. Kwim? If I ask a question (even something very easy that she completely has down) I need to wait several seconds for the answer. She will say, "hold on, hold on, I've got it." and then finishes thinking. She also often tries to cover up her taking time to think by drawing out words, like "Ok . . . you know this one . . . of course I do too . . . . the answer . . . . is . . ." In addition, anything with multiple numbers or steps requires me to repeat a lot, anything that requires her to hold things in her head. So I am wondering about working memory and processing speed. Another thing I just thought of is that she does not seem to recognize some obvious patterns in sound. For example, if I say, "201, 202, 203 . ." and then she is to continue the pattern, she has no idea. I then say, "hmmm, 1, 2, 3 . . what comes next?" "4, 5, 6" "So 201, 202, 203," and then from the next room her brother calls, "204, 205, 206 . . ." while she is completely stumped. He doesn't have nearly the understanding of numbers that she does, but he hears the pattern. She has improved on this very recently, but that is an example. She constantly asks, "What?" after we say things. (A couple years ago, we had her hearing tested due to this. It is fine.) Many times, she heard, it just takes several seconds for her to process. Or at least, that is what it seems like. K is so very loud, she is always the loudest person in the room and it also seems like she doesn't hear because she's always making loud noises or talking loudly. I find myself getting very irritated with her at things like this. Also, with most of it, like the reading, it is frustrating because on the rare occasions she really focuses, there is marked improvement. But of course, she can't focus so closely all the time. She is really such a wonderful kid, and this post feels like I'm harping on all the irritating things, lol. I spoke with the ped about some of this recently, and she really didn't know. She said that normally it's all handled by the school and so she wasn't sure what to do. (K is so articulate and behaved so well that I got the idea she really didn't think there was much going on.) I suggested a neuropsych eval and she was agreeable. We actually don't even need a referral, she is covered by OK Medicaid and because it's due to adoption they don't require a PCP or referral. Sorry this was so very long, I don't even know what to ask now. lol Probably much of that info wasn't needed. Am I overthinking things and these really aren't issues? Some of it seems within the realm of normal, but I don't want to delay further if I need to be doing something. What do I need to do? And if a neuropsych eval is the thing to do, does anyone have any recommendations in Oklahoma? Jenn
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