Gifted and LD?

He was given the WISC-IV. I don't think he was given anything else. I'll check.

As michellea mentioned, a good place to repost your question is in the Learning and Attention Difficulties Group at community.greatschools.net/groups/11554

I'm trying to be sure I understand your evaluators' comments, where in the last sentence of your 2nd paragraph, you said "A 35 point gap between verbal and perceptual reasooning skills ndepicts adequate development."
Could you double-check to see if that's really what was said? I'm pretty sure your son was given the WISC-iV, but I'm not sure what that comment means. Also, the WISC-IV is an IQ test....was your son given any other tests, like an achievement test such as the WIAT, or the GORT or other tests?

Here is what the evaluators had to say:
"Zach was cooperative in the individual testing situation and valid results were thought to be obtained. He showed good perseverance on all tasks asked of him. He did tend to have a slow response pattern and required time to complete most tasks. He did tend to tire on some tasks but not before he was able to invest significant time and energy. At one ppoint he asked the examiner to give him additional time to produce an answer. Repeating digits backward on the Digit Span subtest stood out as a task that took him an extrodanary amount of time to complete. He was able to correctly repeat up to four digits backwards even though he took up to thirty seconds to respond.

His ability to find conceptual patterns when looking at a series of pictures was truely a special strenght forr him as he obtained a scaled score of 18 which places him close to three standard deviations beyond the mean on this task. He scored one standard deviation above the mean on Block Design suggesting his visual perceptual skills to be at least adequate. A 35 point gap between verbal and perceptual reasooning skills ndepicts adequate development.

Zach indicated that he is not good at reading and does not llike reading. He stated that he is required to read at school and again at home in the evening with his mother. He lamented that he was getting a double dose of something he did not have good feelings about. Zach is clearly a bright boy with several areas of cognitive strenght and appears to have developed a sensitivity to reading that may be counterproductive to his reading development."

His special ed insstructor has these ideas. Specialized instruction in reading comprehension and fluency using direct instruction in a multisensory format. He dis plays significant delaymemory processing and speed. As a result he experiences significant delays in the areas of reading comprehension, oral reading fluency, and math calculation. His instructiona needs in these areas require remediation, repetion, slower pacing, and instructional materials not not available in the general education setting. Zachary will also benefit from small group and/or one-on-one instruction found in the special education classroom. He has an excellent work ethic. He is a self starter who wants to do well. he has inconsistant skill in decoding cvc words. He knows his letter sounds but is unable to consistantly blend the sounds into words. When he is decoding longeer words, he will often reverse letters. Although his lisstening an comprehension is good, he works so hard decoding words that he does not comprehend what he ha read."

All that said, He doesn't have any othe challenges, i.e. fine motor skills etc. He hasn't had any speech or language, specialized testing. The reading program the SE teacher plans to try is. "Fast Forward." I have noted that he can pass or anwer anything asked of him if the material is read to him first. with astounding accuracy.

Hi miThreeSons,
The school should use a research based, multisensory, phonemic, rules based remedial reading program such as Orton Gillingham, LiPS, Wilson to help him with decoding skills. In addition to this, he will need practice with his fluency - often times schools use the Great Leaps or Read Naturally Programs. You should support this by having him read ALOUD books at or below his independent level for at least 20 minutes a day.

A multisensory rules based program will help tap into his strengths and overcome his weaker areas.

As far as comprehension - what is the root cause for his problems in this area? How is his listening comprehension? Vocabulary? Is his slow decoding/fluency zapping all of his energy so that he can't take meaning from what he reads? I'd ask these questions to his evaluator - based on the answer, you they can provide instruction in the problem areas to help. Again, they should play on his strengths (I am guessing he is a visual learning) and give him rules based strategies that he'll eventually internalize.

It is hard (if not impossible) to improve processing speed. Previewing of information and new concepts, explicitly teaching how concepts and information link together and extra time will help with this. Fortunatly, your son's processing is relatively solid. My son has similar scores (but the VCI and PRI are reversed) and his processing is 85. It's very frustrating for him!

I also wonder if any speech and language tests were given? His VCI is much lower than PRI. Sometimes language difficulties can artificially depress this scores.

Does he have any other challenges? Fine motor issues? Attention or organization? If so, these skills should be addressed, too.

Come visit us at the 2-exceptional group. You'll find members that have gifted children that struggle with LD. community.greatschools.net/groups/16042

The Learning and Attention Difficulties group is another great place to post questions.