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Mabelen

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Everything posted by Mabelen

  1. The average in the US is 12.5 years, with 90% of all girls already menstruating by 13.75 years of age. She was 15.5 when she had hers and was the only one she knew like that. My oldest had hers a couple of months before she turned 14. The doctor was not concerned but my dd was. We were a bit concerned about her height for a bit, but test results showed there was nothing wrong. Her height basically stayed the same during most of middle school, then started growing again at the end of 8th grade and through 9th grade. That’s really what I meant. She still looked like a little girl in middle school while all the other girls were already full blown women.
  2. Sorry, guys! When I said she was a late bloomer physically speaking, I meant in terms of puberty. She had her first period at 15 after her high school freshman year. She hit all childhood milestones normally. The only thing that was noticed in elementary school -around 1st grade- was that for a while she had a minor speech disfluency, like she would need to pause for a breath in the middle of a word sometimes. She was evaluated, didn’t qualify for any services and grew out of it. She was later found to have mild asthma, so we don’t know if that was a factor for her speech issue. She grew up bilingual with me using Spanish as my mother tongue, and my husband English as his main language (his mother tongue is a South Asian language but was raised trilingual from birth). She started Kindergarten recognizing some letters and sounds, and then she had a massive explosion in reading around her 6th birthday and was moved to the advanced reading group where she stayed the rest of Elementary.
  3. Wow! Did you receive accomodations? Fascinating! My dd loves to play several instruments and receives praise because of her musicality, but she does not like sight reading music and finding patterns in compositions.
  4. I will read about NVLD, what are the particular things that you feel are suggestive of NVLD? Her standardised testing so far has shown her slightly stronger in reading and language arts than math but not much more. She did have some difficulties in Honors Pre Calc last year (got a B), but she was not devoting enough time to practicing due to her extracurricular involvement.
  5. What assessments helped to figure out your son's issues? What kind of professional help did your son receive to resolve his language problems? Something that she did once that seemed to help her process her reading was to read everything out loud in a British accent. She seemed to enjoy it, the only problem is that it was very time consuming so not really a solution. What you mention about the crisis before the breakthrough was kind of what I initially thought might be happening when she started talking about her difficulties, but now I can see it likely is more than that. ADHD is a possibility because of her distractibility and lack of focus, but what is confusing is that she really is very organized and usually gets a lot done. My mom I suspect had ADD issues, as myself and my oldest too, but all of us are/were weak in executive functioning and organizational skills, very unlike her.
  6. @PeterPan This is my worry. How do you define "ability to access her education"? She is taking the most difficult classes available at her school and still getting decent grades, so they could say that if anything is going on it is not affecting her ability to do so. How do I jump this hurdle? Does the fact that it is costing her so much effort matter at all? Yes, realistically, a 504 is what I would think she may need. Thank you for your insight on self discovery and self advocacy. Definitely pondering about what this all means for her in college.
  7. What aspects of my dd's difficulties do you think would indicate low working memory and/or low processing speed? The time she needs to take to get through the readings and her work?
  8. My 16 year old started complaining last year that she was having trouble with learning. She was a late bloomer physically speaking and I simply thought it could be a matter of brain maturity. She has always been a very good student, organized, conscientious, and motivated to do well. She has always attended public school and there has been no change in that respect. She started having a tough time taking notes for her AP European History class last year. She says she finds it difficult to gauge what is important as well as making connections. According to her, she is working so much harder than her friends and getting much worse grades because she doesn’t seem able to grasp and retain the concepts as easily. Lately she notes that she is having a tough time focusing while reading and doing her work. She gets easily distracted. She says that she has gotten dumber and can’t really understand what she is reading a lot of the time. She has always been very involved in extracurricular activities, marching band, water polo, swim, pit orchestra. She has always thrived keeping very busy. When covid hit, she did lose a lot and started feeling more and more down. Eventually she fell into a depression because all of the activities that she loved were gone while the academic demands remained, and distance learning was just bad. She started seeing a therapist a couple of months ago and just started seeing a psychiatrist as well. She is feeling much better now, but she is still spending an enormous amount of time and effort doing her school work. She said she needs three hours to do what her friends need one. APUSH is particularly taxing. Her therapist suggested to get her assessed for learning disabilities. My daughter wants help. When I contacted her school counselor she was surprised because my dd still has good grades (mostly As) even though she is taking difficult classes. Her school says the first step is to meet with the Intervention Assessment Team. When my daughter found out she felt very stressed at the thought of having to meet with her teachers to discuss her difficulties. I think she would feel fine if it was just the counselor and the psychologist. I am very confused with all of this. Is any of this normal? Any ideas what could be going on?
  9. Good questions! The hills are 750 above sea level, the city itself and our home is at around 450 feet above sea level. The firing site is at 715 feet above sea level.
  10. The city next to us is doing fireworks from a new site this year. We are less than three miles away. There are hills 750 feet high between us close to the firing site. Also, there are hills 650 feet high in between next to us. Do we stand a chance? What about if we go up to a spot in the close by hills 600 feet high? Today at 2:23 pm 0 replies
  11. Well, yes. The confused part applies in the same sense to each of my kids’s identities also. They are Spanish, but how Spanish are they? They are Sri Lankan, but how Sri Lankan are they? Then we have the intersection of British identity for my English born kid. She is British, but to what degree when she left at age three? My youngest is American born, and both are growing up in the USA, how does that play in all this? How all these parts of themselves interconnect gets complicated due to the lack of peers with whom to relate. They do share commonalities with other Desi kids, and are friendly and friends with some of them. My youngest keeps dancing kathak in part because she has a group of friends there that are important to her. It’s just that they don’t fit in completely because we are not your typical Desi family. They do share some commonalities with Mexican kids, and are friendly and friends with some, but again they don’t fit in completely for the same reasons. We do live in a diverse neighborhood, and they have friends of many varieties. We value those friendships. All of that doesn’t make up for the feeling that there is no one like them. Hence the emphasis on confused, because for them, it’s just complicated. ETA It doesn’t mean my kids don’t live happy fulfilled lives. They do. The just would like to meet someone with the same cultural background to crack jokes about starting the new year both with chocolate con churros and chicken curry and kiribath. 😊
  12. I think there’s a range of language proficiency even within families. My oldest has always had stronger Spanish speaking skills than my youngest. In part due to interest/ability, in part due to place in the family. My youngest grew up with an older sibling with whom to speak English at home, my oldest didn’t. My oldest has a best friend of Chinese descent (Taiwan on dad’s side, Hong Kong on mom’s) and her Chinese is very basic despite her mom’s attempts. She and her brother even attended Chinese school at some point but they dropped out because they couldn’t keep up.
  13. My kids are definitely confused. My husband is a Sri Lankan Tamil, and I am a white Spaniard. They are yet to meet anybody else with that particular heritage. My oldest looks Indian, while my youngest has a more ethnically ambiguous look. There are large groups of kids in their schools of both Indian and Mexican heritage, and although those groups share similarities with our cultural make up, there are also a lot of differences. Their families tend to socialize with each other outside school too so that kind of leaves my kids on the outside.
  14. My dh grew up with three languages. At home, his mom talked to him in Tamil, the family’s mother tongue, a minority language in his home country. His dad used English, the ex colonial language. They lived in an area where Sinhalese, the majority language, was predominant. At school, he had subjects in all three languages. At the age of 17 he left his home country, and has lived in majority English speaking countries since. His entire university education and professional career have been carried out exclusively in English, but he can still speak his other two languages. He has obviously lost some vocabulary and fluency because he hardly uses them. He can still read both although with some difficulties, both have different scripts. And writing in either of them has not been tested for many years.
  15. He does. They are just plain old cheap earbuds. That’s why I was thinking good quality noise canceling earbuds would be helpful.
  16. I am glad the OP’s issue seems to be resolving. I would love to pick your brain. In our case, my husband is hearing sensitive, working from home, and our younger daughter needs to practice her instruments, especially piano. Because our older daughter is also working from home, next to the piano due to Ethernet cable issues, and taking and making calls for work, our younger daughter only has a short time frame to play, but then my husband asks her to stop if he is in a conference call even though he is upstairs and behind closed doors. We also have neighbor teens who workout in their garage and their bass bothers him a lot too. We did talk with them and tuned it down a bit but the bass is still somewhat annoying. In the ear would be preferable rather than the heavy headphone type. Earbuds would work for my husband best probably. Modest budget but needs to be effective. Thank you so much! 😊
  17. My public school kid so far has not changed her AP plans for next year. She is planning to take two, and she took two this year as well. As far as I am aware, she knows of no cheating. I think her friends were too scared by the fact that their teachers will read their exams to try anything. I hope that if there is a need for remote exams next year, that the exams go back to the normal format.
  18. I had an online conversation where several people were claiming voter fraud because some US born who had acquired Canadian citizenship had received ballots. They claimed you lost US citizenship when you acquired a second one, therefore they could not vote. Even when I cited the relevant State Department quotes, they still didn’t want to believe that you actually couldn’t just lose your citizenship and that you actually had to formally renounce it.
  19. I am not going into the essence of that statement, but students can still submit SATs and have them considered in their admissions for the classes of 21 and 22, who are the ones who realistically may have been preparing already.
  20. Oh, my! Are we talking the Poway Unified Westview? If so, my daughter attends the other “lesser” PQ high school and has several Westview friends. The academics are the same in both schools, but Westview has a lot more hard core academic tiger families and kids are more pressured to take a higher number of APs in any given year while also engaging in time consuming extracurricular activities and leadership positions. At the end of the day though, there is no real difference in what colleges kids end up. Kids with equivalent academic rigor etc end up being accepted to the same colleges regardless of the high school attended.
  21. If a student has a good SAT score it can only benefit to submit. They have gone test optional, not blind, for the nest two years.
  22. Online classes, groups, summer anything? She cannot take part in competitions in the fall. Best if affordable.
  23. Thank you so much for your reassurance!
  24. Can environmental allergies cause only one eye to swell? My dd has complained in the last couple of weeks that one eye is itching occasionally, which I have put down to a possible ragweed allergy. Last night she slept over at a friend’s. Her friend lives in a more rural part of town and apparently they slept with the window open. She woke up with a swollen eye and took an oral antihistamine in the morning, which helped quite a bit. She has also washed her eye, and put antihistamine drops in it, but the eye is still red and a bit swollen. Could it be something else? Tomorrow she has water polo practice and I don’t know what we should do!
  25. Bittersweet. It’s beautiful that those students could help and make a real difference in the teacher’s life. At the same time, having witnessed my sister’s demise to ALS, I can’t stop thinking that it might not be that helpful for very long.
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