4KookieKids
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Posts posted by 4KookieKids
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6 hours ago, PeterPan said:
It means you need to work on inferences, and yes it's due to the autism. Can you go back to the SLP or are you wanting to do it yourself?
We have since moved, and don't have access to a good SLP any longer, so I'm needing to do it myself.
5 hours ago, Lecka said:I would say you need to work on comprehension with inferences as one category.
But she might have missed the questions from decoding issues and not comprehension issues, depending on how the testing was done. She could have gotten the explicit questions correct from finding the answer even without reading very well. It’s hard to say because low scores ok comprehension can come from low decoding or low fluency.
She had the same discrepancy (100% of explicit, 0% of implicit) when the stories were read aloud to her, so I totally get what you're saying - but I think it's definitely more than decoding / fluency.
5 hours ago, Lecka said:One kind of inference gets called social inferences. On your other post where she is misunderstanding some social situations in real life, she might misunderstand similar ones in a book.
Some easy, non-social inferences can be things like: Sam went inside and put on his raincoat. Why? (It started raining.). I am round, I can bounce, and children play with me. What am I (a ball).
Those kinds of things are a lot easier than “why was someone mad at me?” But they are still things where the answer is not directly stated.
These are great thoughts. I'll definitely think more on this. I feel like this is one area where I don't even know how to make up good examples to talk about and need something scripted! lol.
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4 hours ago, arliemaria said:
I think just reading widely and listening to audiobooks at a higher level than reading ability can't help but improve scores.
I’ve never heard of readtheory.org How does that site work?
He listens to a lot, but I wonder if it's not his autism that hinders him from answering the questions correctly, because he doesn't get nuances and has a hard time seeing the forest for the trees, you know?
Readtheory is basically like a test: you read a passage and then answer multiple choice questions about it. It explains why the wrong answers are wrong and why the right one is right after you answer them. It automatically adjusts the reading level of your passages based on how well you answered the questions on the previous passage (i.e., good answer -> higher reading level, more wrong -> lower reading level passage). It's pretty straight-forward. 🙂
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1 hour ago, Lawyer&Mom said:
So an update of sorts: my second neuropsych said the first neuropsych actually did a really good report, but that my daughter’s social difficulties were too nuanced to show up on the toddler version of the ADOS. They did show up on the elementary kid version. So yay! I wasn’t crazy. And yay! The ADOS can work, sometimes! But it would have been really nice if someone had told me the toddler test had limitations, and encouraged me to retest my kid when she was older. Which I did do, but only because I insisted, and after overcoming a lot of spousal resistance. The whole process still needs major improvement.
I agree it needs improvement. My dd8 got the dx even though she fell a point short of the threshold on the ADOS. I appreciated our examiner really listening to us when she made the final decision. In particular, she fell short of the threshold, despite being able to articulate things like:
It's hard to understand people. In public, in a group, I'll say stuff like, "Yeah, yeah, totally!" But I'll walk away from the group thinking, "What just happened? I don't understand what's going." When I get in trouble for being mean, I don't understand how or why I got in trouble and I'm sad that people don't understand. I'm having a good day and all of a sudden I'm in trouble, but I feel so left out because I don't understand what I did or why they're so upset. It's hard because my brain just doesn't understand things. I feel left out because my brain doesn't understand things that other people understand. And even the things I do understand, I can't do in public because my brain gets so confused around people.
She's smart enough to have learned how to avoid a lot of social mishaps by withdrawing and it passes for "shy," and some other things she's learned just because we've taught social rules explicitly since she was 2 because my older child and husband are also autistic. And the older she gets, the more obvious the signs are - but it took me a lot to actually see them. (E.g., I answered "No" to the question about if she likes to line things up, like toys, cars, etc., and never once thought about how often she re-folds and organizes the clothes in her dresser -- several times a week -- nor did I consider how often she rearranges her books on her bookshelf so that they are in some kind of order.) Even the *examples* they give (cars, trucks, trains) lead you towards a particular profile, it seems, and caused me to not see what was so obviously in front of me.-
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DS10 is 2e (dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADHD, and autism) and taking the PSAT 8/9 this year through Numats. He really wants to improve his language score this year over last year, but I'm not actually sure how to help him. I will not put him in one of those actual "improve your score" classes at this point. He's in level 6 of Barton and is reading voraciously, though I don't really test him on what he's reading, so I have no way of knowing how much is being skipped or missed. That aside, when he does sit down to practice a bit on readtheory.org (please, no judgement! It's all his idea...), he'll call me over for wrong answers, and the answers are just SO obviously wrong that I'm almost embarrassed for him. lol. So I walk him through the question and why the right answer is right and the others are each wrong, but he just makes the same mistake again next time. He makes all the classic mistakes (like choosing an answer because they use the same wording as the passage, or focusing on a detail but missing the big picture) but doesn't write down any notes or keywords or anything because of the dysgraphia thing making writing hard. Does it make me a bad parent to say that I want to figure out something he can do on his own to learn what he needs to learn? I'm quite busy with other kids whose needs are more pressing than improving a score on a talent search test, you know? He's motivated to learn it, but I don't really know where to start on something like this, quite honestly.
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One thing that came up on dd8's most recent SLP eval was that she scored 100% on explicit comprehension questions on a story, but 0% on implicit comprehension questions. So one of the recommendations is to target implicit and inferential comprehension and question answering. I would've asked at the SLP about it, but at the time I was more focused on the dyslexia aspect of things. Since we've moved since then and don't see that SLP any longer, I thought I'd just ask here first if anyone knows what that actually means and what it means I should be doing? I do recall the SLP saying that it *could* be due to her dyslexia, but it's more likely due to her autism. I'm just not sure what that means for me -- just keep reading stories and talking about what's going on and what folks are feeling and why they're making the decisions they are? I confess that I don't really understand what "implicit comprehension" even IS.
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1 hour ago, PeterPan said:
Does she gain anything by saying that? Behaviors usually have a function, a motivation. If she isn't gaining anything, then I don't see a reason to doubt her.
Only my attention and confusion. She has been known to say that it's fun to be sassy or rude because when you're sassy or rude, you get more attention. And she's open about doing things for attention on a regular basis.
So, yes... it's confusing. lol. I may try a different day. Or take those top 3 and try all different variations of those and see what happens. -
8 hours ago, Lecka said:
The overlays really work for some kids. Both my sons have tried them, but it didn’t make a difference for them. But it is worth trying! An OT my older son saw, told me she didn’t see it help too often, but when it did, it made a really big difference. And it is easy to try.
Ok, so can somebody tell me if she's pulling my leg, or if this sounds at all legit? We got our overlays and I was just laying two at a time on two of the Barton stories and asking her which one looks easier to read . One color makes the words look "fuzzy," another makes them look "moving," and yet another makes them look like they're "jumping," she says. A few made the words stand still. With yellow on the left and pink on the right, she says they're about equal, but with yellow on the right and pink on the left, she says pink is fuzzy. She says her left eye just likes yellow more and her right eye likes pink best. I said that sounded ridiculous and asked her what words looked like without an overlay, and she said the letters just look like they're turning into a different letter all the time. I paired them 16 different ways, so not exhaustively, but each one was in 4 pairs, twice on the right and twice on the left. If I group them by wins, 3 colors count 11 wins total, and the other 5 colors won for a total of 5 times, so there's a clear preference for three of the colors. So if I start trying them, what kind of difference am I looking for? Immediate? Long term? Actual improvement reading, or more attention with focus? I can't quite shake the feeling she's pulling my leg a little. lol.
I didn't tell her anything before hand except that we were going to make reading more fun with pretty colors and then asked her which she liked best. -
21 hours ago, Noreen Claire said:
How can I set it up to get those?
Oh, I didn't mean "get emailed" to me. I just meant that I go on weekly, and just click the student name and it pulls up reports for every class he's worked on, so I can check how it's all going. Sorry!
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15 hours ago, kbutton said:
I think it's kind of rare, but some people need colored filters for visual work. https://irlen.com/what-is-irlen-syndrome/ It's probably somewhere between woo and a fancy name for a specific kind of hypersensitivity, but I thought it might be worth mentioning since you said something about color preference with the pages.
We just ordered a set of colored overlays that are coming in the mail today and we're going to experiment and just see what kind of preferences my kids have. 🙂
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1 hour ago, PeterPan said:
The visual closure is visual processing, a side effect of the ornery developmental vision problems.
Yeah, I did just pull out her actual score sheet, and other things that were extremely low were Picture memory, Verbal learning, and Verbal learning recognition (~ 9th %ile, no idea how those two are different, even after googling it, lol. ) Picture span was around the 30th %ile, and her stroop scores were 99th for words, 75th for color, and 13th %Ile for color-word, lol. She's a complex kiddo for sure, and I wish the VT weren't so hard on her so that we could get some of this stuff figured out. She does like reading on the blue student pages in Barton a lot more than the white and says it makes her eyes feel better. Oh well. I suppose it'll all come together at some point! Or not. But we'll keep moving in the right direction. 😄 (hopefully!!)
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On 9/29/2019 at 6:59 AM, Lecka said:
I think too about her scores, when you say it’s lower than other scores, the actual score matters. If her actual score is about 100 — that is really different than if her actual score is about 85. 2e is broader than this, but there are things written about 2e where a spread is like —100 to 130 — and that is different than if the lower number in the spread is getting a lot lower than 90-100.
I don’t think you can go “too” much off of test scores, but it is something.
Also, I am pretty sure working memory is one where all kids improve with age, but stay within their percentile. Sometimes you can look and see what average expectations are for working memory for an age, and then look at percentiles, and adjust to the age expectations that go to a percentile.
A lot of times you can adjust a teaching method to be more supportive of working memory, while curriculum expects an average child with average working memory. So then you can add in working memory supports.
It also means things get easier with age 🙂
I don't recall actual scores, but we had a range of high scores (processing speed > 99.7th%ile, certain verbal areas > 95th%ile, verbal comprehension and story memory > 95th %ile- I think, though I'm not pulling the report out now to look at it) with a wide range of low scores (phonological awareness < 9th %ile, visual closure < 1st %ile, working memory around 40th %ile, etc.) and not too terribly much in the average range except actual reading, which was right around the 60th %ile (so naturally, the neuropsych who refused to test phonological awareness or even give an actual ctopp told me my concerns about dyslexia were ridiculous.).
17 hours ago, Lawyer&Mom said:I’m Autistic and in the “can do Calculus but not arithmetic” camp. Please please don’t make arithmetic your hill to die on. Keep practicing it, sure, but hand the kid a calculator and keep moving forward. I loved fractions, ratios, geometry, statistics, algebra... Still struggle with math facts.
Google “Protractor Art.” Maybe my favorite math thing ever. Frank Stella makes my heart sing.
I'll check it out!! It sounds pretty fun! At this point, even if she HAS to learn some of these things, I'm fine moving on to something more interesting and more fun that she can actually DO. There's too much that's hard for her right now. Barton is cause for tears at least once awake. She just finished having to completely re-do an entire level and her morale is down. That doesn't even factor in that we just moved across the country and she's missing her friends, etc. So if there's fun math she can do that's just nonlinear and not in the normal progression, I want to do. I'm even able to do it myself and have created much material for math clubs I've taught. It's just that *I* am also stretched pretty thin right now and would rather have something simple to implement and follow for my *own* ease right now. lol. 🙂
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Hey, ds10 is working through the PreA book more or less independently right now. Because of dysgraphia and organizational/EF challenges, I don't require him to write anything out when he works on things on his own. I wish that weren't the case, but this is how it is right now (just moved, other kids having bigger issues, etc.). So my main source of feedback is just the Alcumus reports I get on a weekly basis. It just made me wonder what others require of their kids. I feel like green would be fine if he were actually doing some book problems, but maybe I should set it at blue since that's his only practice?
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1 hour ago, square_25 said:
I dunno whether you've ruined her for anything! Everything will feel pretty different to her when she's on less shaky ground.
I'm planning to teach my homeschool math classes pretty much entirely through games (very different from what I did with my daughter, but I'm realizing that it's much harder to create hands-on experiences through worksheets in an environment that's not one-on-one), so I think you could do worse than playing lots of games! There are games and game-like things for the majority of the early math concepts. The only thing I'd suggest is being mindful of what games teach what idea :-). Having looked around, some math games seem much more obviously worthwhile than others...
Plus games will get her to feel better about math in general, I think, if currently she feels confused and not sure of herself!
People are such a funny mix of strengths and weaknesses, aren't they? I don't think my kids are as far from average as yours, but I'm also noticing a serious difference between my two daughters. My first one picked up letters much, much faster than my second. But my second was actually more verbally precocious and still is! She speaks like a 5-6 year old at age 3... and yet it takes serious practice to get her to tell apart her m's from her n's. My first could do this by age 2...
Ha ha. Yes, I was hoping to include her sisters in the games to help give dd8 some confidence and have her help "teach" the younger girls some. I think she's far enough ahead of them that it will only be positive (something I had to consider when I decided against playing nonsense word games with her and the 6 yo, since the 6 yo was reading them better than the 8 yo...). 🙂
Thanks for the encouragement. It's good to just laugh about what a cooky mix of strengths and weaknesses they are when I feel bogged down.-
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1 hour ago, square_25 said:
This might be her autism, but this also honestly might be that lots and lots and lots of people NEED to work with the conceptual model for a good long while to solidify it. And that conceptual model is usually part verbal and part visual, and trying to move from that model to the abstract language of mathematics before it's solid leads to random symbol memorization and to disconnects which later lead to people's inability to do word problems or in general to connect the math they are doing to anything real.
I tend to gently push my students (both younger and older ones) into more and more abstract stages but I'm quick to retreat to the model if there's any confusion at all. I've started teaching homeschooling math classes recently and I discovered that while lots of parents told me their kids could add, it did not actually occur to them to add when playing blackjack or addition war (that's why those were my examples, lol.) They just counted up from 1, including some kids that had been in public school in grades 3 and 4. That's a serious disconnect right there!
What I've focused on with my daughter is making sure all of the symbols are referring to specific things: that she could verbalize or draw or somehow connect the mathematical symbols to the picture. So far, at least, it's paid off. She's really solid on WHEN to add and multiply and subtract and divide, including fairly complicated cases. I've been super unconventional in that we haven't touched the standard algorithms yet at all (she's a very accelerated 7 year old, so she has time), and honestly, it's paid dividends. We've never moved past to something she can very solidly conceptualize in a multitude of ways.
I think the fact that moving on to overly abstract stages before the student is ready is an almost universal problem with almost all levels of math pedagogy... it's not you, it's everyone :-/. And of course, some people DO get it right away, which only exacerbates the issue.
ETA: With that in mind, I wouldn't try to get her to simplify fractions without a picture yet. Let her use the picture until the idea is crystal clear. And frankly, even with my accelerated kid, that takes a month or two, not days and by the time the picture is solidified, we've in fact done lots of complicated calculations and explored lots of interesting idea. And then eventually, we can remove the picture.
Yes, as I've thought about this more, I think I've just been treating her too similarly to my super math intuitive older child. I never did intended to. But I let her rush through when she seemed bored or impatient, and it just never occurred to me (until things were a complete mess!!) that I needed to take a serious step back and consider how she learns best. I may have ruined her for Singapore permanently at this point, but I won't toss it yet. lol. I downloaded the Ronit Bird books on games and am going to spend a few weeks playing those with her, I think, and including my younger girls as well. I think we may just go back to playing with C-rods for a while, as well, while I figure out my game plan. I found someone local who is willing to let us borrow Math-U-See so we can look it over together and decide if she it would be a good fit and if she would like it.
I feel like I need a whole new mind set, but so overwhelmed with ideas that I'm not even really sure where to start, besides the games and trying a new curriculum. I've done math clubs and stuff with math intuitive kids and I've spent so long teaching graduate level courses and my aversion to any perceived drill is so strong that I think I put a load on her that was just too much for most kids (even gifted/accelerated ones!), and I feel terrible about it, because I never meant to! I think I saw her giftedness and that things seemed intuitive, and I just did what I'd done before that worked so well for ds10. Sigh. Hindsight's 20/20. She's just such an enigma to me, because some things are SO easy and she hates how boring they are, and others are SO hard, and yet others seem to be both simultaneously (like when she's reading CVC words that are mind-numbingly boring, she says, yet she continues to make mistakes... And we have similar issues sometimes in math.)-
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1 hour ago, square_25 said:
I don’t have any experience with teaching autistic kids, just with teaching math, so take this with a grain of salt. Out of curiosity, how much visual work are you doing with her for math? When you say she has her addition facts down, can she use them if playing Blackjack or Addition War?
I honestly don't know. I'm sure that she is correct more than 95% of the time when I ask her something verbally. But I haven't really done it in a variety of situations to know where the fault may lie. As dumb as it is, it's just never occurred to me. Inability to generalize is still a concept *I* am struggling with, having come to the discovery in the last 3 years (though it feels like a lot longer!) that three of my kids and my DH area all autistic. I have to sort through all of the comments above and figure out how to actually evaluate in what contexts she is "good" with things, and in which she is not.
Which brings me to something else that happened today that is relevant to this post. I skipped through a huge chunk of her Singapore 3B book with her (lots and lots of conversions, length, volume, etc.) and went straight to fractions just to see what would happen. It was easy as pie for her. No challenge, no struggle, and she finished three exercises in under five minutes. I know the intro exercises are designed to be basic (intro! lol), but it was just interesting for me to really think about the things she's really good at in the context of things she struggles with. There was no question in her mind what 2/5 meant, when looking at a pie chart that matched it, you know? She could draw them in herself, was comfortable writing fractions to match pie charts, and even started fraction addition. I'm interested to see if simplifying fractions is easy from a visual perspective, and whether doing it without the picture throws her for a loop.-
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Thanks, all. I need some time to process all of the responses, because there is just so much information here for me to consider. I really appreciate it.
The reflex work went pretty well for us, actually. We did the exercises faithfully, 3-4 times a day for 4 weeks, and got everything integrated. We just continued for several months to try to make sure things "stuck." It just didn't help the VT struggle at all. And now that we've moved, we're about 2-3 hours from the nearest VT place. lol.
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1 hour ago, Heathermomster said:
So, my eldest is 2e with maths and reading SLDs but no ASD.
I’m reading the OP and wondering whether there is a visual processing type element that needs to be addressed.
Anyhoo...I suggest the OP read How the Brain Learns Math by Sousa. I’m also a huge fan of Ronit Bird; however, I did not use her e-books. I used the Overcoming Difficulty with Number. As a mathematician, I believe the OP could read and intuit Bird’s methods easily enough. She discusses all the pre-skills necessary for multiplication.
I will look into those books. Thanks.
There definitely are visual processing issues going on as well. Her vision doc tested some different (visual closure and a few other things) and she was below the first percentile in her scores. 😞 Unfortunately, we did 4 months of integrating reflexes and then 8-9 months of vision therapy, every day crying and screaming about how it was too hard and hurt her head, with almost no actual progress in her actual test scores. So... we stopped. Whether that was good or not is beside the point -- I have four kids that ALL have issues like asd, adhd, dyslexia, dysgraphia, anxiety, etc, and I was just losing my mind (even after offering substantial rewards and outsourcing it to DH -- she was too tricky and he couldn't tell that she was cheating on the exercises... He's asd as well and just didn't catch the subtle cheating.)
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4 minutes ago, Lecka said:
Hopefully not, I hope not.
A lot of kids who sound like this do struggle with forgetting things they have previously learned, though, and need more practice or review than is usually expected.
Of course maybe not for her 🙂.
It will just depend.
I also think — I have done a lot of things totally different from my strong personal preferences, and while I don’t like it at first, if I see it going well then I LOVE it.
I’m making dinner and don’t have the time to reply to all of the helpful advice you all gave right now, but I will just say that it is definitely her. At one point, she had also Aced Xtramath for subtraction, multiplication, and division, so I put her back on assessment only of all four basic operations, just to see what she had retained (this was a year ago), and she remembered almost nothing… She is currently finishing up level three of Barton for the *second* time, because she could apply each rule in each lesson in isolation, but could not apply them in the mixed form that the post test provided. So I intend to give her much more mixed practice coming back to things that she already learned moving forward.
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1 hour ago, PeterPan said:
Here's the thing. At this point, she may have just memorized them as language. I don't know. I'm just saying she's bright enough to memorize massive amounts of data without understanding.
Ha ha. It's true. Last year, she "read" the first 10 pages of Tuesdays at the Castle to me (small print, lots of words per page!) very convincingly -- until I realized she's actually just memorized the entire first 10 pages, word for word. I called her on it (in a joking way), and she just sheepishly admitted to having memorized it. I told her it was nothing to be embarrassed about, and it's totally a good thing! She also picks up accents very quickly (we just moved to eastern KY and she's got quite a drawl already). lol.
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1 hour ago, PeterPan said:
Have you looked at ronit bird? She teaches multiplication as scaling. Teaching skip counting is making it a language exercise.
I haven't. I don't know that I've ever even heard of it before this thread. I *thought* I was set in my curriculum choices by now, since my kids are 10, 8, 6, and 4. lol. Thank goodness for the individualization of homeschooling! lol. Though DH is of the mind to just suck it up and push her through, since it works for actual schools... (I make the case that it *doesn't* actually...)
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1 hour ago, PeterPan said:
But I agree she SHOULD focus on having fun, yes. Fun improves learning, gets the chemistry going, and will fit with her giftedness. I'd encourage her to set aside the BA and SM, as they don't seem to be helping her make the next step. If they do, that's fine, but there's a lot more out there. Or maybe figure out what she did that got addition clicking, reclaim that for multiplication, and then go forward. Like figure out what WAS working and get back there. She may have shifted methodology and not realized it.
Ok... So the addition facts got learned by sheer, dogged determination, I think, because she doesn't like XtraMath, but did it daily for almost a year straight.
Other than CLE, Math-U-See, and Saxon, any others you'd recommend I start looking into? It's hard for me to wrap my brain around, but I recognize that MY learning style (teach it once, I'd rather scrub toilets than drill-n-kill, etc.) may just not work for her. It's difficult to not view other types of programs as slow/boring/tedious/etc. -
1 hour ago, Lecka said:
What happens also ------ is if something is too hard, the child just doesn't benefit.
There's a few reasons. Let's say she's bogged down adding 3+3+3+3. She gets to 3, hhmmm, haa, hmmm, gets to 9, hmmmm, okay it's 12. At this point she has forgotten what she was doing and why as far as ----- making a connection to "here's what we do to convert between feet and yards." That is just gone. It's totally gone.
Second, things have to be a little easy for there to be that process of "here are the steps I'm doing and how they connect." If you are just doing the steps, and that is taking up all the energy and attention, that other process just is not happening. It's just not happening.
Third, it's demoralizing and can develop a really passive "mom will tell me what to do next" mentality. Ask me how I know this.
Yikes. This is her in a nutshell. Skip counting is still adding - not automatic at all. And DH thinks she's definitely trying to get me to just lead her to the answer so she doesn't have to do it all herself.
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1 hour ago, Mainer said:
The converting of yards to feet sounds really taxing from a working memory standpoint. Does your DD have any working memory difficulties?
If you must do yards to feet, could you make a really long line of masking tape along a carpet, for example, then figure out the yards and feet, physically? Your DD could draw colored marks for each yard, and then segment each yard into feet.
So I'm clearly not in the know, here, because her working memory scores were a good 3 standard deviations from most of her other scores when we tested -- but I don't see why conversions tax working memory? (I realize I'm showcasing my ignorance here.)
We've been letting her do her ft/yd conversions with a really long tape measure, but I feel like the *idea* isn't really sinking in, despite her figuring out the answers. And I'm torn in that place of feeling like she's lazy/not trying/ etc. (all those dumb things I know I shouldn't think of a kid who's struggling, because I *know* that kids do well when they can.) and honestly wondering if I'm just expecting too much maybe because I've been conditioned like that with my son. He's math gifted and autistic, too, but only mildly dyslexic, and for him things progressed more like: Here's how you multiply by 2's... a few examples... ten minutes of doubling later, he says, "I've got it! I can multiply! Ask me anything!" and I said, "Anything with 2?" and he responded, "No, anything!" So I asked him 13x7, and he thought for 30 seconds and then answered correctly. Conversions were the same: It only took him about 2 minutes to go from hearing that 12 in = 1 ft to being able to convert 88 in to ft and in combined and back. I'm trying hard to not compare them, but he's the only other kid who's already been through this, so I think I do it without meaning to (my other two are younger PreK / Kinder still).
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I don't know if this goes her or on the AL board, honestly. I'm so confused and frustrated, and did not think I would have math struggles with my kids, given that I have a PhD in math and routinely teach graduate level courses for in-service teachers.... lol.
Dd8 used to like math and do well at it, it seemed. Sure, there were a few hiccups, like the fact that I often had to translate problems for her (so 12 / 3 would get blank stares, but she could do it if I said we had 12 cookies to divide between 3 kids), her inability to remember ANY math facts, and a complete inability to follow the long division or subtracting with borrowing procedures, despite understanding the concepts relatively well (it seemed). But I chalked it up to the fact that she was young and immature, despite being bright. She finished Singapore 2B around age 5.5, but we held off starting anything else for a while because I wanted to give her time to mature and memorize some math facts. We played math, cooked, read life of fred, skip counted, played with C-rods and base 10 blocks, etc. She watched her brother doing BA and asked for that around age 6.5-7ish, so I got her 2A to start on, and she loved it for about a week, and then she hated it.
Now she's 8 and on grade level in Singapore and a year behind in BA (I know it's hard, so I'm ok with that), and I feel like we've completely stalled out and I get frustrated or blank stares in response to almost any teaching I do. After 2.5 years of practicing, she still struggles with math facts (though through Xtramath she has most of the addition ones down at this point, but she still lacks the others), subtraction with borrowing, and long division. She can't convert anything, ever -- no matter how many times we discuss the fact that 1 yd = 3 ft, and no matter how many examples I do with her, she can't figure out how many ft are in 4 yd 2ft (for example), unless I specifically walk her through "multiply 4 yd by 3 ft/yd, since there are 3 ft in each yd, so it's really 4 groups of 3... Now add the extra 2 ft at the end." Today I asked her (near the end of the lesson, so it's not like we weren't warmed up) what 200 yd would be in ft and her answers varied from 1000 (Daddy said 1000 ft in a yd yesterday! No... he said 1000 m in a km, I corrected...) to 350 to 8. 😞 We walked through it together, incrementally, and I reminded her that we're just multiplying by 3 several times before she was able to get it. But I hated my own teaching at that point, because I completely recognize that I'm only teaching procedurally at that point, and she still has no understanding of the actual concept of conversions that being taught.
I used to think she had good number sense, since she was ok with turning things into story problems (the 12 cookies split between 3 kids example). She's grown up with lots of manipulatives, no pressure (she only was advanced previously because she *wanted* to do math every day), and tons of number sense games (dragonbox has been a favorite here since they were toddlers).
She is diagnosed as autistic and profoundly dyslexic (we had two separate evaluations done, with the last one just 2-3 months ago, because I was concerned that the initial evaluation was inaccurate and maybe she wasn't actually dyslexic), and I know that can lead to some of the issues with math facts and procedural learning. What's less clear to me is where I go from here, and if I need to have her evaluated further (which would be a real stretch at this point, because we just moved to a super rural area), or what I would even do if she did have dyscalculia. We love Singapore, BA, and AoPS in our home. I have NO idea what to do with a kid who seems smart enough to understand the concepts she's learning (high IQ and super high processing speed) but doesn't actually understand them. And there's just so much in life that's hard for her right now (reading, having moved, etc.). I've heard of folks switching to different curriculum to help. I just don't really understand what's going on with her or what to do help. Do I just need to adjust my expectations and give her more time to mature? (my gut says no and it will only stagnate...) Work harder? (not sure we can, our math lessons are so frustrating with me explaining the exact same thing 9 different ways and her still not getting it... or repeating the same explanation over and over again and her still not getting it.... )
She can't tell me why it doesn't make sense. I limp her through a problem, ask if she understands, and she chirps, "Nope!" and then can't do the next problem... I've read about dyscalculia, but it's still just not clear to me how to make any sense of what I'm reading or how to evaluate her number sense (especially because I find so few people IRL actually have a clue about 2E kids). I feel like we're repeating the same crash and burn scenario as we did in reading with math now, and I have no idea how to get off this ride: accelerated & bright & enjoys it -> slowing progress -> starting to lag -> falling behind-> not understanding most of what is taught.Can anyone offer any insight or suggestions? I really have no idea what to do, and I wanted to stab myself in the eye with a pencil this morning as we were trying to get through a page of math together.
Specific areas to target for reading tests
in The Learning Challenges Board
Posted
I will check out mindwings. We had planned to try to start IEW with him after Christmas. We were waiting just to see if dd8 could get through Level 4 of Barton and potentially join him in doing it. Would that address some of these things, since you're talking about writing?