We did follow up with the optometrist though, who says she does have some convergence and tracking issues. They’re going to start with glasses to help with the convergence and then in a few months see how she’s doing and probably start vision therapy then. I will look up someone to actually give the CTOPP here. One other thing that I think could be affecting her reading is that her working memory scores are a full 40%ile points lower than any of her other scores.

No, those are raw scores. It did not give me grade levels or percentiles Or standard scores.

So the WJ-III subtests they did were Letter word identification, reading fluency, and passage comprehension. Can I rest assured she would’ve gotten flagged by those if she were dyslexic? Her scores in those areas were 31, 12, and 17 (respectively) and there is no percentile score.

Cool! Thank you all so much! We do often play teams with the younger ones, and sometimes split into groups for a while as well. And give the 2 yo a snack when she decides she's done and just wants to wreak havoc on the rest of the game. lol. But I also thought that there might be other good options for games that are good everyone, and you've given me some great ideas! :)

So, if I were your friend, I'm not sure I'd want a few examples. I might feel like they were cherry-picked, and I usually want cold, hard facts... lol. Instead, I would consider looking at the booksource website. Under the advanced search, you can search for books whose INTEREST level is baby - preschool (i.e., mostly picture books, if they're categorized appropriately), but whose reading level is, for example M-Z (Note that Magic Tree House and Junie B Jones are level M), or something. There are a lot - and it surprised me to see that one of the picture books my 2 year old picked out last week is actually a level M! Some interesting reads might be: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/us/08picture.html and http://mccleskeyms.typepad.com/files/what-reading-does-for-the-mind.pdf Table 1 in this second article might be considered controversial because it actually goes against the normal grain of "picture books are higher quality." It claims that preschool books (what I would generally consider picture books) have 16.3 rare words per 1000, and children's books (which, I would assume, include chapter books) are 30.9. Now, even the preschool books are on-par with adult conversational speech - but that's not the same as saying they're more complex than other kinds of children's literature as a whole. I would tend to argue that many picture books *are* still superior to many early chapter books - but the averages get mixed up because the preschool ones are dragged down by books similar to the Biscuit series or See spot run sort of books, and the "children's books" include lots of chapter books, and not just the early readers. ETA: It's actually super interesting to do the booksource search for something like O-Z... There are an awful lot of picture books that are T's and V's.

Could you just spent some time walking them through the basics? As in, let them watch a favorite TV show online, but they have to turn the computer on, login, open Safari, search for it, and get it turned on themselves, with you sitting next to them just directing them? You could show them how to navigate finder by downloading a game or video from the web, and then having to use finder to locate and open it, and move it to a more appropriate location on your drive? I found that just walking through it to her three times, with me next to them, was enough for them to remember most of those basics. Even my six-year-old is capable of opening the computer, opening a web browser, and finding her own account on extra math or code.org or prodigy, logoing herself on and starting to play… Though she occasionally does it when she’s not supposed to, so I may have to password protect the computer beyond our usual parental controls at this point… :-)

Cool. I was just curious. A Homeschool group local to me offers the Explorer still, and I contacted them because I was really confused because I had heard it’s no longer being offered. It turns out they offer it as informal practice only, because someone just has an old copy of the exam.

It had a few scores, Like overall I Q, working memory, and processing speed. Maybe One or two others. They listed the tests, but not the subtests. They just said some subtests were given. I like specifics numbers however… :-)

PS. We did have a developmental a vision exam, and the doctor said they were definitely flags there and things that she would be concerned need either glasses or vision therapy. But my daughter is so eager to get glasses, but the doctor is concerned her troubles with vision might have been exaggerated. So we bought glasses with clear lenses off of Amazon and they’re going to give her another vision exam next week with her new “glasses†to see if they help her vision And see if she does any differently on the vision exam.… I know it might be considered sneaky, but I don’t want to get her glasses her vision therapy if she’s just exaggerating with What she cannot see because she wants glasses.

We had the initial consultation, we had a four hour eval, and I just got a letter in the mail With the doctors report. But I have no actual score data And to know details on which subtests were administered. So I think my first step might be to email the office and ask them to send me a full listing of everything that was actually done along with all of the scores. After that I might make an appointment to go in and discuss the results.

Is the CTOPP the only valid measure for dyslexia? Despite my concerns and my stated desire that they give her that, it appears that they didn't. They gave her the 21-item test, Grooved pegboard, judgment of line orientation, developmental test of visual motor integration, stroop color/word test, Woodcock-Johnson III Reading subtests, Gordon diagnostic system, WRAML-2, and some emotional stuff like depression and anxiety scales. Should I request that they go back and do that, see someone else, or is this enough information to rule out dyslexia? They basically said that her reading is fine, but if it's because they gave her a bunch of words she's already memorized (she's a bright kid....), then I'm not sure that it was a fair assessment. I'm just not sure how to tell. Any thoughts?

I'm just curious why it's still listed as an eligibility criterion? Can you actually still take it? Or is it just for historical purposes?

I was older when I did this (middle school, but I didn't have the opportunity to go at my own pace and homeschool, so I think that level might still match up with your daughter's capabilities), but I really LOVED doing the "learn a list of words" spelling way when it was ALSO part of a vocabulary program and the words were words that I didn't actually know well already. I wasn't a huge fan of spelling otherwise (seemed boring), but I loved learning new & "fancy" words actually. So we went through a GRE vocab book, and I just loved learning spelling and definitions for words like loquacious, alacrity, iconoclastic, approbation, delineate, opprobrium, etc. Because it was in a B&M school, where points actually matter, you got extra points when you could find the words in an actual book as well, and that was super fun for me because I'd start finding my words in books that I'd already read before but just somehow never noticed these words were in there. Is that maybe something she'd like?

They're hoping for early March at this point, and RR usually gets them about a month behind AoPS, I believe.

My kiddo who is that age does better at self-starting when he has a checklist and knows *exactly* what I expect of him, and we've talked about it by ourselves at some point (without the little kids interrupting). So if I expect him to read a chapter of a certain book, then I write that out clearly. If I expect him to read for a certain amount of time, I write it out clearly. Piano lesson online + 15 minutes of practice. Chores - exactly what his chores are each day. After reading 30 minutes, write a few sentences about what you wrote. etc. And then when I see him fooling around, I can just ask him if his work is done. This doesn't work for the things that he *needs* me to do with him (e.g., correcting the stuff he wrote earlier on his own), of course, but it's very helpful on the things that he really *can* do on his own and is just distracted by all the ruckous of having three younger siblings. :) Then, when I can sit with him to work, he's already got most of the stuff done that he can do on his own.

How do you play this with young kids? Do you have a turn-taking variation? We love this game, too, but the fact is that pretty much anyone (excepting DH) can easily cream anyone who is younger.

My kids range in age from 2.5 to 8.5, and we're having a hard time finding games that everyone can play without being utterly outmatched or bored senseless. So far, the only two we really have are Mimiq and Old Maid. We have a variety of other games: Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Hi Ho Cherry-oh, Memory, Some prek sort of matching/building games (Thomas and Lego), Uno, Headbanz, Imaginiff, Catan Jr., Catch phrase, Monopoly Jr, Skipbo, Phase 10, Dutch blitz, Pandemic, Ricochet Robots, Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, Trouble, Quirkle, Apples to Apples, etc... I like games, so we really do have a lot of games. lol. But most of them are *either* too difficult for my 2 and 4 year olds, or too boring and slow for my 6 and 8 year olds. Mimiq is super fun as a family and everyone always has a good time, and I'd love to find more games like that that actually appeal to a wider range of ages!

We say whatever grade is most relevant for each activity. So my six-year-old is currently registered for kindergarten by the Department of Education and I state, but does a lot of activities with first graders. Similarly my eight-year-old is registered as a second grader, but his activities range from second grade to fourth grade, just depending on what’s the best fit . I say if he misses the cut off by just a few weeks, and you think he’s mature enough to handle the situation, and put them in the kindergarten situation.

Good to know ahead of time! He's looking forward to it, he said, even though we discussed it being work. No, we don't. There is a distinct dearth of them in my town, and they all have long waiting lists to get in. From what little I've been told, I believe there was an issue with my state not covering a lot of ASD related stuff on insurance until recently, and most of the providers got out of dodge a number of years back, and are only now beginning to trickle back in. The social group he's joining is run by someone with a bachelor's in neuroscience and is a certified therapeutic recreation specialist, and does work with a lot of autistic kids, but not exclusively. To be clear, we have never felt or thought that his stimming (new word for me! :) man, see how little I know? ) is in any way related to his relationship with us and/or that he doesn't love us. Only on rare occasions do we ask him to stop; most of the time, if I'm getting annoyed after a few minutes, he's given the choice to either quit or go into a different room to do it. What I was trying to say earlier was just that right now, when he asks why he should stop/go somewhere else, the only real answer I've had is that it's annoying. And, I'll be honest, that doesn't seem like a great answer to me. Everybody has quirks that others might find annoying. So I had just thought that this idea of somehow discussing how making a choice to not bug people is really a way of showing love to those people might be something worth thinking about. On the few occasions when we have asked him to stop altogether, he was relatively competent (only took a few minutes to settle down). Honestly, it took me years even to be able to ask him to go somewhere else, because there was something in me that felt like it was selfish to ask that. He wasn't hurting anyone, and was it really fair of me to try to redirect/relocate him just because I was "annoyed" with it? It just didn't seem fair to me, so I dealt with it and just left the room myself when I'd had enough.... lol. Looking back, I probably should've started talking about it much earlier, but there were just a lot of things that crept up on us slowly and weren't on our radar until they became "big" issues, and this was one of them. I like the idea of talking about repetitive behaviors in general. I failed to make that generalization, and so we just had a running list of things that annoy *most* people *most* of the time... lol. I know it's painfully clear that I don't have enough information about any of this to be doing a great job! lol. As I'd mentioned in another thread, we only had him evaluated about 15 months ago, and the advice that we were working on up until this month was the neuropsych's advice to treat him "normally" since he could use his smarts to compensate for his autism. We know now what bad advice that was, but it took 15 months of a slow spiral into somewhat chaos for us to realize how bad the advice was. Now we're just trying to make up for lost ground. We're on waiting lists for the only places around that do ABA, we're on waiting lists for the psych's in town who work more with autistic kids, we have calls out to an OT who does in-home terapy, and we're starting this social group. The lady who runs the social group shares an office and coordinates care with a group of psychologists who see a relatively large number of autistic kids, and although they are "full" and not taking new patients who "cold call", she's trying to see if she could get my kid in anyway based on the fact that she'll be working with him.

I don’t know honestly how important this sort of thing really is. I got ridiculed a lot for things that seem to me very trivial as a child. They are very young right now, so I’m really just trying to think about the future.

We actually just managed last Wednesday to get him into a local social group that started up two weeks ago. He starts next Monday with a group of other nine-year-old boys Who are high functioning and highly intelligent and on the spectrum, which is perfect for him I hope. We are really looking forward to it, and feel like it was a huge godsend to us and answer to prayer ( just happened to work out that this was the only opening left, the group fits him perfectly, and without even knowing it was available, we qualified for a grant covering the entire cost of the therapy ).

More like confidence versus clueless. I don’t think anxiety, and only sometimes bull headedness. But lots and lots of cluelessness, socially.

See and I struggle with confidence as well. Because my oldest child is very confident, but he is confident in areas where he is actually week, without realizing it. The confidence is not appropriate, really, but he doesn’t realize it. In his case, he very much wants to be social. He wants friends, and he wants people to like him. I just really struggle to find the line between saying , “ if you want people to like you, do XYZ, and don’t do ABC†because I worry I’m actually teaching him that behaviors or values that I don’t actually want for him to have. I’m so glad to have started this thread, and read all the great thoughts you all have. It helps me think through this. Honestly, this is something I have been thinking about with my typical children as well. I want my three girls to be liked and fit in, but I don’t want them growing up feeling like their friendships are contingent upon whether or not they choose to shave, for example. The situation with my ASD child is just more complicated. I really love the idea of approaching social skills and things along these lines by loving others, and being kind and gracious. Choosing to wear make up or not, choosing to shave or not, these aren’t issues of loving other people. But making howling or meowing noises for an hour at a time, or even five minutes straight for that matter, is an issue of loving the people you are around because most people will get upset or annoyed at noisy behavior like that.

I've been turning this countercultural kids thread on the GE board over and over in my thoughts. I don't know what to make of it really, particularly with respect to my kiddo who is ASD2. I want him to be his own person, to be confident, and to know that he doesn't have to "fit in" and bow to peer pressure. But I'm also working hard to teach him what is socially appropriate behavior and the kind of behaviors that are more likely to result in other kids liking him. I know that keeping current on pop culture is different from social skills, and yet there does seem to be some gray here. I feel like I'm sending mixed messages of "Be yourself... but kids are gonna laugh at you if you keep tucking your pants into your socks..." and "You're not responsible for other people's emotions/reactions... but you need to adjust your behavior when you're annoying others/making them uncomfortable/etc." I'm struggling to even put my confusion on this into words. Can anyone chime in? How do you teach kids to be their own person and be confident going across the grain at the same time as you're trying to teach them to go with the grain to make more friends? I certainly don't want to teach him that he has to be different if he wants people to like him, and yet... it seems that he does. How do I reconcile that?

Wow, you guys sure have a lot of great ideas! I'd planned to give a bunch of them a try for two or three weeks at a time, but maybe I'll just try a new one every week! :) Thanks to everyone who posted!