5yo with a pattern of problems

[3peasinapod]

My 5yo has had problems with recognizing typical schoolish things through the years. It started with color and shape recognition. We would work for months that turned into years, and she never understood. We thought she was playing games with us and she actually knew, but I really don't think this is the case. She now knows her shapes and colors after 2 years of doing things with her in everyday life and focused activities.

 

We're doing K work now, and she is doing the same things with number and alphabet letter/sound recognition. The curriculum keeps adding new numbers (up to 13 now) and she only knows 3 of the numbers. She can recognize an A. This is after a year of work with all of them when she was 4. We took a break, and for just this year, we've had focused activities since the beginning of July. She just doesn't get it.

 

I know she is young, but I have a "gut feeling" that I hope is wrong. I am thinking of trying to get a developmental optometrist to check her out, but what in the world do I do? I plan on mentioning it to her doctor at her yearly physical in December also.

[Ottakee]

Do you see delays in other areas---doing chores, listening to books, interacting with peers, physical activities, etc.

 

I am all for early intervention and would suggest either calling the schools for an evaluation or seeking one out privately along with the vision therapist. If you want an evaluation, I would not wait until December as it can take months to get one after you start the process and you could easily loose the entire school year waiting on one.

[PeterPan]

Well you know I'm all for vision exams, but it doesn't sound like that's going to cover what you need. Vision might be a small part of it, fine to check, but like Ottakee says, it sounds like you need a full eval (neuropsych or developmental ped). These sound like overall developmental delays, not just vision.

[eoffg1]

Though something that I would ask, is if you show her visual images of things like a dog, car, bike, house, flower?

If she can easily associate a word with them?

Where these are concrete images that we can associate a word with.

But letters and numbers are just abstract symbols, that don't really exist?

Which we use to represent something.

So that when you wrote that she can recognize an A.

This word recognize needs to be looked into?

Where A only exists as a 'sound' that we represent with the visual symbol of A.

So that the recognition of A, only occurs in recognizing it as a unique sound within speech.

Which we can then associate with the abstract visual symbol of an A,a.

[PeterPan]

BTW, is this the dc in the sig where it says you're using AAR pre? How is that going? It's not set up well for SN. The phonemic awareness activities (Ziggy) are WAY too hard for some kids and are not in the order phonemic awareness develops. Can she hear the rhyming and do the Ziggy activities? If so, that's a good sign. My ds absolutely positively could not. We've had to re-order the entire program and take it way out of the box. I'm using it with the MFW K5. Ds loves worksheets and cutting, so the worksheets in the MFW and AAR pre really appeal to him. However that doesn't sound like what your dc needs.

 

Bob Jones has a really delightful K3 program that is basically a letter of the week with lots of activities. The activities hit kinesthetic, musical, etc. etc. and are just very delightful. That way you're having fun and fitting her developmentally, whether the actual alphabet and stuff sticks or not. Something on that level might be a good fit for your dd. You can't rush development.

 

I'd definitely trust your gut and get the evals. The neuropsych might find some more things you could work on that you aren't realizing (speech, social skills, OT, fine motor, whatever). It's why Ottakee is really wise when she says not to wait till December. You want the information so you can make the best use of this time.

[3peasinapod]

Do you see delays in other areas---doing chores, listening to books, interacting with peers, physical activities, etc.

 

I am all for early intervention and would suggest either calling the schools for an evaluation or seeking one out privately along with the vision therapist. If you want an evaluation, I would not wait until December as it can take months to get one after you start the process and you could easily loose the entire school year waiting on one.

 

She doesn't have delays in doing chores, listening to books, interacting with peers or physical activities. She can listen to chapter books with active engagement. She asks questions and she'll bring things up later on that she remembers from the book. She does lots of chores such as putting silverware away and emptying trash cans. She is a social butterfly and warms up to people and is not shy at all. As for physical activities, she does these things best. She is very active, moving all the time. She does quiet down for storytime, though. I hope I'm making a mountain out fo a molehill! She is very different from our first girls, and I'm having a hard time pinpointing how to reach her. I've been researching different ways to present material, and we just keep trucking along.

 

Though something that I would ask, is if you show her visual images of things like a dog, car, bike, house, flower?

If she can easily associate a word with them?

Where these are concrete images that we can associate a word with.

But letters and numbers are just abstract symbols, that don't really exist?

Which we use to represent something.

So that when you wrote that she can recognize an A.

This word recognize needs to be looked into?

Where A only exists as a 'sound' that we represent with the visual symbol of A.

So that the recognition of A, only occurs in recognizing it as a unique sound within speech.

Which we can then associate with the abstract visual symbol of an A,a.

 

She easily identifies visual images of anything.

 

BTW, is this the dc in the sig where it says you're using AAR pre? How is that going? It's not set up well for SN. The phonemic awareness activities (Ziggy) are WAY too hard for some kids and are not in the order phonemic awareness develops. Can she hear the rhyming and do the Ziggy activities? If so, that's a good sign. My ds absolutely positively could not. We've had to re-order the entire program and take it way out of the box. I'm using it with the MFW K5. Ds loves worksheets and cutting, so the worksheets in the MFW and AAR pre really appeal to him. However that doesn't sound like what your dc needs.

 

Bob Jones has a really delightful K3 program that is basically a letter of the week with lots of activities. The activities hit kinesthetic, musical, etc. etc. and are just very delightful. That way you're having fun and fitting her developmentally, whether the actual alphabet and stuff sticks or not. Something on that level might be a good fit for your dd. You can't rush development.

 

I'd definitely trust your gut and get the evals. The neuropsych might find some more things you could work on that you aren't realizing (speech, social skills, OT, fine motor, whatever). It's why Ottakee is really wise when she says not to wait till December. You want the information so you can make the best use of this time.

 

We have been working on AAR for a year, and we are now into the sound portion. She did the rhyming within a few lessons, and now she rhymes all the time. She did pretty good on the other activities, though it took a few lessons to understand what was expected of her, but she did very well in catching on.

 

I truly thinks she tries her hardest too. If you show her an F and have her pick the other F's out of a line of other letters, she is fine with that. If I ask her what the first sound in the word monkey is, she says mmmmm, but she doesn't relate the letter m with mmmmm (yet?). Maybe she just takes a long time to process information? I'll try to look into the neuropsych test.

[SKL]

I strongly recommend that the developmental optometrist be one of your first stops.

 

Your dd sounds a lot like mine when she was younger. Until around age 3, she was very inconsistent with her colors, which I did not connect to a vision thing until later. I took her to an ophthalmologist for other reasons and that's when I found she needed strong glasses. The day we picked up the glasses was the first time she noticed a stoplight and said, "red, yellow, green." She never was confused about colors again. I figured that the inconsistency must have been that at a distance, she couldn't distinguish things well enough to name them by color, whereas close-up, she could.

 

The glasses didn't fix her problems with identifying letters, though. Letters are different from pictures in that they don't stay the same thing no matter the position. A cat is a cat whether he's upside down or right-side-up. Can't say that about an M. So it's harder for a visually-challenged child to learn letters/numerals. My dd could hear, say, and trace a letter numerous times and still have no idea what the letter was.

 

I finally learned my dd had convergence problems and that's what clued me in to the need for a vision therapy eval. She needed VT, and VT made a big difference for her. She still has to work hard to read, but she's on track at school.

 

I found it difficult to pinpoint her issues before VT. In hindsight, there was a glaring inconsistency between visual learning and other kinds of learning. Usually we don't categorize learning that way in everyday life, so it can take a while to notice this.

 

ETA: My daughter was also very strong physically. She could skip before she was 3. Supposedly it's a sign of reading readiness if a child can skip at age 5! So, very inconsistent.

Edited September 5, 2012 by SKL

[PeterPan]

You know the developmental optometrist is easy to take care of. At our place you can get in in 2 weeks. A neuropsych takes you a while to find (because it's a big deal, $$, you want feedback from people to know you've got a good one, gotta research), and then it can take 1-3 months OR MORE to get in. A vision exam is *always* a good thing.

 

Guess I'm just rereading the post trying to figure out if the symptoms she was describing were all connected to vision. For instance, if the child gets the concept of say basic addition (auditory description of 2+3) but struggles only with the visual part, that's different from not recognizing a number in any form. It does sound like she did really well with the auditory portions of AAR pre. Also, I think I may have taken the op's comment about "knowing" the numbers very literally. Not to know a number means (to me, sorry, b&w), in any form. That's a developmental issue. But if she means she doesn't connect real life examples and print, well then that's just visual. Guess I'm no longer clear exactly what the mother is saying.

[3peasinapod]

You know the developmental optometrist is easy to take care of. At our place you can get in in 2 weeks. A neuropsych takes you a while to find (because it's a big deal, $$, you want feedback from people to know you've got a good one, gotta research), and then it can take 1-3 months OR MORE to get in. A vision exam is *always* a good thing.

 

Guess I'm just rereading the post trying to figure out if the symptoms she was describing were all connected to vision. For instance, if the child gets the concept of say basic addition (auditory description of 2+3) but struggles only with the visual part, that's different from not recognizing a number in any form. It does sound like she did really well with the auditory portions of AAR pre. Also, I think I may have taken the op's comment about "knowing" the numbers very literally. Not to know a number means (to me, sorry, b&w), in any form. That's a developmental issue. But if she means she doesn't connect real life examples and print, well then that's just visual. Guess I'm no longer clear exactly what the mother is saying.

 

When you say not knowing a number, what exactly do you mean? She doesn't recognize 4 as a 4. When she counts objects, she will tell you there are 4. Does that clarify? I'm a little confused to as to what to describe. Thank you all for your help!

[eoffg1]

You wrote:'If I ask her what the first sound in the word monkey is, she says mmmmm, but she doesn't relate the letter m with mmmmm (yet?).'

Where I would add a quote from a study:

 

"Finally, they were given a set of plastic letters with which they could create their own words. Although all the children had explicit knowledge of letters and sounds, they lacked symbolic knowledge of how letters represent sounds."

Where if we look into the 'explicit knowledge of letters and sounds'?

They could look at letters and tell you their name.

So that they could tell you the name of the letter M.

Also in speech, they could hear the sound 'mmm'.

But what they didn't understand, is that the sound 'mmm' can be represented as the symbol M.

 

Where you said that she 'doesn't relate m with mmmmm'.

But perhaps you could approach it the opposite way?

So that she identifies the sound mmmm, and then associates it with the symbol/ letter m ?

Sound to symbol, rather than symbol to sound?

[3peasinapod]

You wrote:'If I ask her what the first sound in the word monkey is, she says mmmmm, but she doesn't relate the letter m with mmmmm (yet?).'

Where I would add a quote from a study:

 

"Finally, they were given a set of plastic letters with which they could create their own words. Although all the children had explicit knowledge of letters and sounds, they lacked symbolic knowledge of how letters represent sounds."

Where if we look into the 'explicit knowledge of letters and sounds'?

They could look at letters and tell you their name.

So that they could tell you the name of the letter M.

Also in speech, they could hear the sound 'mmm'.

But what they didn't understand, is that the sound 'mmm' can be represented as the symbol M.

 

Where you said that she 'doesn't relate m with mmmmm'.

But perhaps you could approach it the opposite way?

So that she identifies the sound mmmm, and then associates it with the symbol/ letter m ?

Sound to symbol, rather than symbol to sound?

 

Thank you, I will have to think about this to hopefully flesh it out.