It has been a fustrating evening. My High School Son is to write a page and a half and in three hours he has produced a grand total of 7 sentences. He does not take Ritalin in the evening so he can sleep, but his attention is in outer space. He is distracted by everything. He does not have the ability to focus himself although he is not hyperactive. He listens to conversations, strains to hear the TV, plays with his hands etc. He has been tested the CAPD, but the school system found no evidence. However, he does not speak clearly, has a big stuttering problem, has difficulty following directions. He sounded like a CAPD case. Would a FM trainer help him to block auditory stimulation? Would I get just as much good from a soothing CD and headphones?
Re: A case for a FM Trainer
What about trying a long-acting version of Ritalin like Concerta which lasts for 12 hours? It’s the only way my daughter gets her homework done!
Have you checked into getting a CAPD eval for him through
your medical insurance? Your best bet would be to call the office of a good CAPD audiologist, as they usually can tell you exactly what is needed in order to have your insurance cover it. You can take an eval like this to the school to get accommodations such as the FM trainer. You can find a search engine for CAPD audiologists in your area at http://pages.cthome.net/cbristol/
When my neighbor did this, the CAPD audiologist also referred them to a neurologist for evaluation of ADD/ADHD.
Mary
Re: pattim and MaryMN and all...need advice on a related top
Thanks for this thread. My sister’s 6 1/2 year old daughter (Joy) has a host of issues…speech, occupational etc. She’s also very small and has been on a growth hormone for a couple years. Her IQ test came back 50/48. This girl is not a 50/48 IQ.
She has had a host of speech therapy and ot (not very effective, it seems) and went to a Montessori school for years.
Had big time ear infections from infancy through 5 years. I think she may have had tubes. She is enrolled in the local public kindergarten and cannot function very well. Cannot follow directions in school…seems not to know what is being said, while at home, can follow multi step directions. Is learning colors, numbers, shapes at home. May have visual perceptual issues as well. The school and the local clinic indicates that testing for CAPD wouldn’t work because they couldn’t get a good read given her speech and her difficulty in “hearing”. Her hearing has tested fine as has her vision. At her multi-factored meeting, my sister asked about an FM trainer. They seemed like they would do that.
What do you think…recommend? She has an appt. with supposedly the best speech person in the area in Jan. In the meantime, IEP-wise they want to get her a classroom aide (which is fine) except my sister says they do stuff for Joy which she can do herself…get backpack, put on shoes, jacket etc. They kids in K like Joy and accept her and she loves her teacher. They want to classify her as Multiple Disabilities and pull her out to go to the (dreary) special ed room for math and language. This is the room for the severly handicapped. There were a couple of kids in there at the time my sister saw it. They did not suggest a resource room, so my sister didn’t even know about that.
Please help.
Hi Osi
Sorry to hear about this precious niece.. I think the Speech evaluation is a great start and a good SLP is worth her weight in gold. Regarding her history an FM device would be good. There are quite a few articles I have come across in my research about FM Systems, Classroom acoustics and reverberation. In the average classroom the noise level is terrible and even hard for normal kids to understand. With acoustic improvements people are able to hear better. With an FM system she could understand more of what is going on around her. She needs to develop her audtiory memory and an FM device would help do that, help her to focus. She may be a good candidate for FFW, but she needs an intensive therapy to help her develop her auditory memory and vocabulary, speech and language. When my daughter started kindergarten she had many phonological processes like consonant deletion, syllable deletion, lack of phonemic awareness, her vocabulary was really low, her VIQ was 70 but her performance was 112. I wonder if a test for a child who is hearing impaired would be better to do with Joy because that may be more where she is developmentally because of the ear infections. Has anyone mentioned any syndromes to you that may be connected to her small stature? Does she have any unusual facial features, thick hair, forehead, a submucous cleft etc? Let me know what you find out…and I will look into things for you.
Re: pattim and MaryMN and all...need advice on a related top
Another thing you might look into is sound therapy. My child has CAPD. We have done FFW also with a lot of difficulty but some nice improvements. I learned later that FFW seems to go easier after sound therapy. I know Dea, who posts on this board, daughter did sound therapy with really good improvement. The nice thing about it is that you can do it with a younger child a lot easier than something like FFW.
Re: What is sound therapy?
Yes. Dea did Tomatis with her daughter. It isn’t available very many places and is pricey, I think. At one time, I looked into AIT and Somonas and concluded I would do Somonas. I spoke to an audiologist who did both who told me she had fewer side effects and better results with Somonas. There is also The Listening Program which you can admnister yourself and thus is much cheaper. It isn’t customized to the child and is milder but is a another alternative.
We ended up though doing doing Neuronet therapy (http://www.neuroacoustics.com/) instead of OT which would have included the Somonas. As part of the therapy, we did some sound therapy from Germany that the audiologist had to work on localization (telling where sounds were coming from). It was a amazing the difference it made. He could actually tell after the therapy. Before the sound therapy, he literally couldn’t tell that a sound was coming in one ear and not the other. I couldn’t believe it.
We also are planning to do some other sound therapy soon—maybe starting next week if the negative ear pressure in his ears has cleared up. We are going to do something else from Germany (the audiologist knows some people there) through our Neuronet provider. She told me that there are two general types of sound therapy. The high frequency type (all the programs mentioned above) work with changing the perceptions of intensity of sounds are are often used with kids who have PDD characteristics. She wants to use low frequency sound therapy with my son which works on timing—perceiving sounds more rapidly—which is often problematic with ear infection kids.
I know Dea has often posted on how sound therapy “woke up” her daughter. I think initially her child had more severe AP problems than my son but now is doing better than my son. I wouldn’t attribute that all to sound therapy though -my son has problems in multiple sensory systems which in some ways is more difficult than severe problems in one. Or at least that is what I have been told by numerous evaluators. With low scores on both the verbal and performance part, I would suspect that multiple sensory systems are also affected in your neice.
Beth
I would check out
http://pages.cthome.net/cbristol/ for audiologists in her area who specialize in CAPD evaluations. Sounds as if the clinic and school are talking about “screening instruments” for CAPD, not an actual CAPD evaluation. There’s a big difference. If there is a choice, I would look for a CAPD audiologist who is associated with a major university or medical center, even if the family has to travel to get the evaluation.
I would be taking a serious look at NeuroNet (http://www.neuroacoustics.com) and sound therapies, as Beth suggested. NN requires certain audiological tests to determine if a child is a good candidate for the program, so that could be coordinated with the CAPD eval.
Eventually, they would want to get a developmental vision evaluation also. http://www.covd.org has a search engine to locate developmental optometrists.
One problem with speech therapy is that it usually isn’t done on a daily basis. It can go better when the parents get involved and work on it every day at home. There is a *wonderful* book on oral-motor speech therapy (often makes regular speech therapy remediate faster) at ITI. I will come back later and post the website. Anyway, the book is written for professionals but is laid out in a way that makes it easy for a parent to use. There are various different manipulative sets you can buy (horns, straws, etc.) to work on specific sounds.
Mary
Re: Low Frequency Sound Therapy
On Nov. 29, Beth from FL posted information about sound therapy. She mentioned low frequency sound therapy. We have used Somonas with my 7 year old son, but he could not tolerate it. He could not sleep at night. We had to stop, which was sad since it was helping his language problems. Beth, or anyone else know about this low frequency sound therapy? Thanks!!!
Sharon K
Hi,
The FM trainer would help him focus in class but it would not motivate him to write his papers. Did he have an outline to work from? People with ADD sometimes have lots of ideas but they need to have a detailed outline to help them get started. I think a productivity CD would be good for him to listen to while he is doing his homeowork. Also a distraction free environment. What about having him to some physical activity before he starts to write to keep the blood flowing. I have read in some research articles that people who have ADD sometimes get into this sleepy mode when they are overwhelmed and can’t get moving, it is like their body just shuts down.