Cogat/ITBS update/thanks to Wapiti and Abbeyej

[plansrme]

I posted and want to update this thread from back in late June:

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=285642

 

Short recap: my rising 6th grader's ITBS/Cogat scores showed, again, a 35 point discrepancy between her nonverbal (high) and verbal (lower) scores, and about that same amount in every core subtest of the ITBS except reading comprehension.

 

Update: I got her into a highly-recommended educational psychologist who spent 6 hours testing her and 1 1/2 hours with us yesterday going through her results. This psychologist works primarily with kids from the most elite private schools in Atlanta, and most importantly ;), he said we are doing a "phenomenal" job homeschooling her, and that is not true of most homeschoolers that he sees. I would argue that he might not be seeing a fair cross-section of homeschoolers, but still--I'll take whatever credit is offered! But back to my daughter...

 

The testing was extremely helpful, and everything I have observed about the way she learns, her strengths and weaknesses, etc., showed up in testing. He recommended that she see a speech language pathologist, which we will pursue, and try the Visualizing and Verbalizing program from Lindamood-Bell, which I learned about on the SN board here and had already bookmarked because the "symptoms" on their website matched her pretty precisely.

 

His most specific recommendations were the V&V materials, which I ordered last night, and teaching her to work more slowly. Her processing speed is "phenomenal" (he likes this word), and well into the 99th percentile, which is great, but he thinks that is getting in the way of her comprehension and problem-solving because if she does not get an answer right away, she gives up.

 

We are going to spend this year working on (1) specific strategies to slow her down (I've laminated the PQ4R strategies and taped it to her desk--anyone had any success, or not, with this???), (2) narrating and copywork, which we've never really done, (3) getting some input from an SLP on possible auditory processing issues; (4) teaching her to organize her writing; and (5) extreme vocabulary building (she does not acquire vocabulary naturally but does learn what she is taught explicitly).

 

I want to especially thank Wapiti and Abbeyej for their input on my previous thread. The testing was expensive and time-consuming, and while it confirmed most everything I suspected, also included enough surprises and insights to make it worthwhile.

 

Terri