Who else has a Gifted/LD child?

Some schools actually have a class for gifted/ld. That was not our experience though. I always pushed for a dual program- one that would remediate the disabilities but that would also educate my son and allow him to use his intelligence and talents. Gifted/LD is a hard concept for many schools and our experience was that the LD alone was focused on. I insisted on as many mainstream classes, inclusion in GATE opportunities as much as my son could benefit from. I did not push to the point of frustrating him, but rather picked experiences that I saw valuable. Like you, but much later, we have selected a private special ed school where he is learning challenging subjects, but not penalized for his learning disabilites. At the private school he has so many opportunities that never would have been available to him.

I have a gifted/LD child who has been in the public school since K-5. It has been a long, treacherous journey, but she has remaine unscathed. In fact, she has more confidence than a roomful of people. (Mom, however, is another story :0) ).

2 yrs. of pre-school and knew 2 letters. K-5 couldn’t read, write, rhyme, tie her shoes or sing with a group. 1st grade ditto, except never finished her work, spent 3 hours doing homework. (like 1/2 pages - nothing significant) and never finished classwork (spent every day on the playground fence while everyone else played). Thought she was a slower learner - that’s why I initially had her tested.

Privately evaluated at end of 1st/beginning of 2nd. Found out she was gifted (I couldn’t believe it), but had every LD you can have, plus SI problems. Had good social skills Began LMB and SI OT.

She’s now 10, entering 5th grade in August. She attends gifted 1 day pullout (she began in 2nd grade though she couldn’t read on grade level nor write legibly). Her evaluator said she needed her “strengths and weaknesses addressed). She has only been under 15 min consult from day one. The school admin. thought I was crazy. (So did I at times).

She has had to work very hard. She loves the gifted ed day better than any other day of the week. Is she still LD? Yes. Does she still struggle? Yes. Does she sometimes get discouraged when she compares herself to children without LD in gifted? Yes. Organization is not her biggest weakness.

BTW, she began using Assistive Technology (alphasmart) at end of 2nd grade 1/2 through 4th she started on a dana. Uses a laptop and draftbuilder in the gifted classroom.

We blazed a new frontier. The School was not used to parents telling them what to do with a child. She was the first severely LD child to darken the doors of the gifted classroom. Now, the teacher who told me 3 years ago …You’re pushing her too hard…” says “Wow, this is NOT the same child”.

We are considering a GATE school for MS. She really wants to go. We try to take it one year at a time.

Be warned, that we are very fortunate. Many Gifted/LD students do no fair as well as mine has been able to. You’ll probably hear from many more parents who did not have success.

Honestly? She is adopted and I often say, “It’s the child who’s gifted, not the environment!” We really don’t do a lot of enrichment at home. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Buckle your seatbelt. You are in for a ride. If you have any further questions or would like to dialogue offline, contact me at [email protected].

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While my son’s overall IQ score would not have qualified him for a local Gifted/LD program, his profile does have areas of gifted performance and he is also clearly LD. We plan to send him to a special LD school that limits their enrollment to very bright /LD kids, because we know they don’t water down the curriculum. And then we’ll see…

How is the school defining gifted? IQ above 130 and outstanding academic talents…is how many public schools define gifted. Our local public schools don’t have a gifted and talented program, but both my bright kids 4th and 6th(LD and not)grades enjoy playing chess, strategy games, reading and talking about world events, etc. Our local( Mass.) public schools are very competitive and offer plenty of opportunity for doing extra projects, etc. My 4th grader has also played violin for 2 years, and I would highly rec. music lessons, piano or violin for bright kids.

Plug the following terms into google to read more about gifted/ld.

Twice exceptional
Dual exceptionalities

My school district doesn’t really recognize these children. My son is like Karen’s he doesn’t qualify by his overall IQ but has some gifted subtest scores. Sped was awful for him because he knew he could learn at a faster pace even if he couldn’t demonstrate what he learned on paper.

You really did the right thing getting her as far away from the public school as possible.

Most gifted kids have some issue. It is pretty rare to have a child that is “just” gifted.

I do. My son, now 12 was identified as gt/ld when he was in first grade. He was placed in a public school self-contained class for gifted children with learning disabilities. This was a great placement for him. He was both challenged in his areas of strength and supported and remediated in his areas of weakness. I took him out of public school for 6th grade because the gt/ld program in my school district kind of evaporated once kids hit middle school and I felt he would not be sufficiently challenged and that the class sizes would be too large for him. I enrolled him in a private school for gifted boys (his brother was already at the school) and he has done spectacularly well there and really likes it (at least as much as any gt/ld kid can like school).

I believe that the most important thing to remember when dealing with a gt/ld child is to place the most emphasis on the child’s strengths. This is probably true for any child, but it is crucial for gt/ld children, who come with all the best and the worst of being gt and ld. They’ve got a tough row to hoe and often the only thing that motivates them is a challenge. My son has an IQ in the profoundly gifted range and he used to get so frustrated when school was just one endless stream of boring information he already knew. When he was allowed to pursue his strengths he became much happier.

The other important thing is to do exactly what you are doing — accellerate and remediate EARLY! My son is an straight A student and his LDs now seem relatively minor. As a younger student, however, his LDs were characterized as severe. Early intervention was critical to getting him where he is today.

Good luck!

Andrea

WOW! This is the topic of the day for me. We have an IEP meeting for Alex’s transition from special ed preschool into mainstream kindergarten today. Alex is HFA and gifted in academics. He just started going to a private school for gifted children on an experimental basis. He LOVES it. Focusing on his strengths is obviously very important to him. So, I’m walking into this IEP prepared to fight for him to have his talents addressed. The director of his special ed preschool program said he was getting bored there and I should start finding other things for him to do. I did feel it was the teacher’s resposibility to make sure he wasn’t getting bored but found out that she was ignoring his IEP goals. I asked her (in writing) to put in writing anything she had to contribute to IEP meeting and got nothing from her. She is not invited to the actual meeting because her attitude is very adversarial and I don’t want it to taint the waters at Alex’s new school. The meeting is at 3 pm pacific time today. Wish us luck. Visiting here today has given me extra incentive to push to have his strengths focused on. Thank you.

Our son is GT/LD. In our school district, GT doesn’t mean very much at the elementary level. I was told they didn’t have pull-out activities for GT kids, just a few enriched classroom activities. Really high performers could apply to the GT Magnet elementary school for 4th and 5th grade. Frankly, I wasn’t worried about him getting GT activities at that point. I was worried about him staying afloat emotionally, and managing even the most basic academic skills. Nothing quite like having a 130 IQ and having every single child in the class performing better than you.

By middle school (again, I can only speak to our district), classes are available for on-level and GT-level for most subjects. A child might have GT-level math, while taking on-level English. This worked out pretty well for us; we could pick and choose the GT classes we thought he could be successful in and choose on-level classes in areas where he wasn’t so strong. The district also has a specialized GT/LD program (only available at certain schools) for kids that really needed more remediation than just an occasional period of SpED combined with mainstream on-level/GT classes with accommodations. Parents I knew really had to fight the system to get their child into the specialized GT/LD program—very limited slots in a program designed for kids that had issues that just couldn’t be addressed in mainstream GT classes.

Our public school has several sets of information they look at to determine gifted. In Kindergarten it was a combination of partial IQ, drawings, and observation in the class. I *think* a parent can ask for the child to be fully tested and if IQ is 125 or above, then they can be placed in GT.

Katy had a 123 score on performance portion of the WASI. Her verbal score of 111 brought her overall score down to 119. The LD school said that her IQ *could* be much higher than the 123. They considered her gifted/ld.

Suzi

Wow!! Good luck! Let me know how it goes today. I feel so fortunate to have my daughter at a school where they really understand what is going on.

Suzi

aj wrote:

> I was
> worried about him staying afloat emotionally, and managing even
> the most basic academic skills. Nothing quite like having a
> 130 IQ and having every single child in the class performing
> better than you.

I couldn’t said it better- you talking about me and my son :-))

I was however very disappointed when they sellected for GT/talented in 4th grade and the criteria were - “good performance on verbal section of standardized test” (quoting a principal of my son school). For a child with language based disability and performance IQ in gifted range it was a killer. I am concern that the school was only frustrating him (due to his LD) and not challenging him intellectually (due to his gifts….). Since we wanted him to go to an LD school rather, I did not pursue this- but will go back to this issue if he comes back to public school.

I do not know what the middle school offers in our district.

Me too! me too!
My son is in middle school, and luckily, has the district’s gifted expert (who’s pretty good at ld) at his school. But…it’s been a long haul. His classroom teacher could not believe that a boy who will not write in class was gifed, so she had him retested w/o our knowledge!! This teacher has done a life-time of harm; he has developed what a psychologist called “learned pessimism” as this teacher is doing everything possible to highlight his weaknesses.
I belong to the Gifted+ board at GTWorld, and thanks to the moderator Meredith Warshaw, it truly is one of the best sources on gifted-ld kids. I encourage all of you to sign on.
Our school district used an achievement test to identify gifted kids too, and the local Gifted Children’s Association made sure that this was not the sole criteria. Achievement tests may get you “bright” kids, but kids that are at the end of the spectrum may not necessarily do as well on such tests for a bunch of reasons. Our district now uses parent identification, teacher identificaition. Lanny Kanevsky’s checklist (typical behaviours of gifted kids) as well as academic achievement. It’s interesting to see that the “out there” kids cleaned up at Oddysey of the Mind competition where creativity and problem solving are key! The “bright” kids did okay. Gifted kids are usually all over the map developmentally (more so for Gifted/LD) so they are often missed.
If your school does not have a gifted program, at the very minimum advocate for cluster grouping of gifted kids. My “lazy” son is a different person when he is with his peers. He can be himself—in spite of the LD. As many of you said, you have to play to the strengths rather than punishing them for their weaknesses.

Karis

My daughter had only the gifted performance and Average verbal; however, they placed her in gifted pullout. I understand some counties don’t do that.

Yes Yes Yes!

That is what I saw happening to my bright (fits all the checklists for giftedness but does not have a gifted IQ) LD child when he was in sped.

It almost destroyed him. They didn’t believe he could do anything and he started to believe it too.

He is doing great with an open minded, flexible teacher in a regular class. I have already made my case to the school for the same type of teacher for next year. His current teacher adores him and sees the real him. He has just blossomed in her class.

I am so glad I took him away from an environment that constantly highlighted his weakenesses and ignored his strengths.

When will the schools “get” gifted or even bright /LD?

The problem is that LD/Gifted students will score low on IQ tests that are not given one on one with a Child or School Psychologist. Our district would not recognize that my son needed to be tested this way unless he had a 504 stating it-my son wants to go to the Air Force Academy and therefore we have concerns about having a 504 ONLY for that as he does not need it otherwise. He has ADHD and a Visual Processing Deficit. When they test him in a group setting, he fluctuates between 102 and 134 (our district requires 135) so after getting nowhere on him being given a one on one WISC without a 504, I paid to have it done privately-what do you know, a 154.

Most districts recognize the existence of Dually Exceptional children, but they are usually only worked with through enrichment because most gifted programs seem to emphasize written work while many LD children have problems with written work.

I srtongly recommend private testing unless you already have an IEP or 504 in place, in which case a one on one IQ test can be listed.

:-)
LOVE GTworld.

My two boys are both gifted lder’s. I sometimes don’t know which is worse the giftedness or the ld. Both can be incredibly difficult to deal with. The public school system could not understand how to teach them or reach them. We opted out into a very small private school for gifted lder’s. Best thing we ever did. They both love it. It is like a lot have mentioned. They finally have a peer group. The only thing I wish they also had was more kids to socialize with. I have actually been worrying about the placmeent and whether I should allow them to move onto a bigger school. My oldest will be high school next year. I asked them what they wanted,and interestingly enough both still want to stay right where they are. The answer I got,”it is MY school,I like it”.My oldest,”could have more girls,but hey I don’t need school to meet some.”

http://www.resourceroom.net/Surfin/index.asp#giftedld — scroll down for it, and take a peek at the other stuff there, too.
http://www.gtworld.org/gtspeclist.html is its website — it’s a very supportive, well-educated bunch.

Isn’t it what drives you crazy and what drives you. A gifted IQ score in K and again in 3rdn and no good reading program to teach him to read and spell. The distroct just wanted to focus on his weaknesses. How many time are we going to read “The cat is red”. Eveytime I pushed for mainstreaming or reading programs, I threw the gifted IQ in their face. They wanted to believe that LD kids are really just not that smart. Since I was a special ed teacher at my son’s school, I ended up with a confidential fiel with all kind of #%!! in it including a note form the psych to the special ed director on a test protocal that “this is where she is getting the gifted score”. Regular ed math teacher didn’t want him in her class because I thought it was wrong to mark answers with backward printed numbers incorrect. Our school had Od. of the Mind, but the written application and size of the school alone precluded any chance for our son to shine there. We to have gone the route of a private college prep high school for LD. He is on the honor roll, student government, journalism. All meetings are positive (great kid, very smart, college plans) Freed from pressure, he dictated a 102 page novel last summer and has a rewrite and another novel and two video game stories in the works. He is taking his second class in stand-up comedy and has performed on stage with his class. He and his dad produce a comedy radio show. We keep the focus on his strengths.

I love it (not!) when people talk about school programs that go” all the way from gifted to LD” - as if they were polar opposites!

Hi Suzi,
You are very fortunate to have your child at a school that can
accomodate both gifted/LD. That is a real luxury!

Like Karen and Linda’s boys, my son doesn’t exactly meet the
traditional IQ requirements, but he has some signs of giftedness
(i.e., REALLY good at chess and creating new games, learned to play piano,
read music, write and memorize it quickly and easily, unusually good with
patterns and visual spatial things, can build or understand how to
build practically anything, great with science and math concepts….)
and some subscores testing in the gifted and “high” gifted range. But
because of his LD’s he’s basically performing at the bottom of his
class and none of these abilities are recognized. He does not in any
way feel he is bright.

Sometimes it makes me very sad to think that these abilites may
never get fully developed. As a parent, I’ll continue to try to ensure
that they do, but the public school system can be a very
discouraging place for all LD kids.

Sorry to sound so disappointing!

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Although our Kevin hasn’t been identified as gifted (he is identified as LD with an IEP addressing receptive/expressive learning disabilities), his great math strength makes me wonder. I don’t even think we want to go down that road, though. Our district provides no great shakes to identified “gifted” children (my husband has taught in it for 28 years), so I’m not sure what the point would be to pursuing it. But it does make one wonder.

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I supect my child is gifted. her IQ is very high and she is so creative and perceptive. She thinks of solutions to everyday problems quicker than I can. However, our school uses the Otis-Lennon test and grades to screen for the advanced learner program. She received accomodations on the Otis-lennon but performed a little above average, not enough to qualify her. The advanced learned (AL) teacher said she could not use the score anyway because she received accomodations - it was not administered in the standard way. They do not grade in the lower elementary class (second grade) in the public Montessori school she attends. The AL teacher said she could not use the high IQ score in kindergartern because that was administered more than one year ago. Therefore, she did not qualify. My daughter is severly dyslxic reading, writing and spelling at a first grade level and finishing the second grade. The criteria they use is highly language based. The gifted students are the ones with excellent language skills-in reality that is what they are basing their criteria on. I probably could fight for this, but I’m just fighting for the school to implement an approriate reading program. I tell you what, this wears you down! Maybe after I win the reading program battle, I’ll take on the AL battle. I feel like the little red hen.

The number of posts on this topic says quite a bit.

There is a need for programs in school that address childrens abilities along with their inabilities gifted or not.

I found a 2 day course taught through the university for children my son’s age on building a robot. He can’t wait to take this. They learn all about integrated circuits. This he will be able to do even if his times tables aren’t quite mastered.

My son is signed up for a week long camp on ancient Egypt art. He can hardly wait to make his own sarcophagus.

Barb

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My child was lucky enough to be placed in a program that dealt as much with his abilities as with his disabilities. What a difference that can make for a child. If he had been placed into the usual special ed setting, I think he would have given up entirely. Instead, he found out how really smart and able he is and is much happier as a result.

Andrea

I just wanted to add that I agree with Linda FF’s post that a large number, if not most, gifted kids do have other issues.

Mine is gifted, but despite every kind of good instruction, couldn’t print legibly until Grade 2 and in senior high school was still complaining that her handwriting looked like a sixth-grader’s. This would class as dysgraphia, if anyone had heard of the term. Luckily I fought it out with the school system and convinced her to keep trying.

She doesn’t memorize disconnected facts well (inherits this honestly from me) and had a heck of a time with multiplication tables, made worse by a nasty teacher, is still as an adult quite slow; this caused weaknesses that had a domino effect throughout her math career and she is no longer majoring in sciences, her own choice but I am disappointed.

Uneven development is part of the package with gifted kids, and you always have the kind of situation with a young person in your house reading Tolkien for entertainment, discussing infinity with you over supper, learning to write a capital A, and going out to try to learn how to catch a ball. You always have the social issues; how can you make friends if nobody speaks your language? And the problem that if the child actually acts like an eight-year-old, people are shocked — many kids have to learn to remind parents and others “Well, I am only eight, you know.”

If parents of LD kids talk for a while with parents of gifted kids, you’ll probably find you have a lot in common.

It has been a godsend for our daughter.

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Victoria,
I actually went with a friend to a presentation about gifted kids (my friend’s son is gifted).

One of the most interesting things was that so much of what the speaker said really did sound like my son. I think some disabilities (particularly language and reading) make it much more difficult to identify gifted kids. While children with stronger language skills are more easily recognized. I don’t know if that’s true, it’s just my impression.

This sounds like a saccharine truism, but those of you who know me will know I’m anything but saccharine (anecdote below).
Many, many kids/people in general have gifts in some area; the point is to find the gifts. Some are gifted in math and some in reading, and school usually finds those. Some are gifted in sports, and both school and common activities will usualy find those too. Some are gifted in music, and that’s harder with modern culture (you’re either a platinum-selling pop star or a nobody, with no room in between) but still this often is recognized. Those who are gifted in art have a harder time in today’s culture, but often fight through. Some are creative “out-of-the-box” thinkers who can run with almost any idea; they have a hard time in the schol system but if protected can do all sorts of amazing things. There are also other kinds of gifts that are harder to identify and work with, people who are socially gifted, people who are gifted teachers, people who are really (not just on college applications) leaders, people who are spiritual, people who are gifted at raising children or making a home, creative cooks, talented mechanics, handypersons; many different kinds of gifts.
I don’t think it’s the job of the school to take on all of these; I’d like to see schools do a good job on academics and do no harm otherwise, and that would be a heck of an improvement and enough of a job.
Parents, coaches, choir directors, churches, arts and crafts instructors, scout leaders, college instructors in every field — all should be on the lookout to develop the gifts that they find. Often the gifts can be used to compensate for or work around the weaknesses that we also all have.

Anecdote: I used to play-act over-saccharine mommy-daughter with Grace when she was little. (one of her gifts is a sense of play, beautiful smile, and word games) One day when she was eight we were doing this over-the-top too-niceness with my then fiance, and Grace asked me to stop. I asked her “Why, my dearest daughter”,and she said “I want my real mommy back”. I asked “Who would that be, my darling”, and she answered “The mommy with a tang.”

OMG, Victoria, you are so right. Our LD son excels at math, but has huge problems with language-based work (disability is expressive/receptive language disorder along with CAPD). However, since most assessment instruments are language based, he comes out looking really bad on IQ type assessments.

Uneven development. That is the exact term. It is a phenomenon that makes teachers befuddled and confused. I am befuddled at times by what we perceive as huge “gaps” in his otherwise good mind. We need our education system to learn how to service these children who have not been cut by the same cookie cutter as the average-bear child.

JAO

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Hi Jao,
That’s been our experience. My son seems to excel at math concepts. For example, I explained to him how to tell time on a regular clock and he automatically knew how. I didn’t have to explain it again…and I remember it wasn’t as easy for my non-LD daughter. I had a little toy clock and I had to go over the concept multiple times with her. For my son he just grasped it. And fractions. He has had no trouble understanding them. He makes errors in sign (+-/x) and over, or undercounts, but “gets” the concepts easily.

It’s almost like easy things are hard, but difficult things are easy. Does that make sense?

I think his “gift” may be patterns and the ability to grasp difficult ones. But having a hard time with language, word retrival, writing (his writing looks like a kindergarteners and is sometimes difficult to read), seems to make a big impact on academic performance.

My gifted daughter, age twenty, university, *still* can’t read an ordinary clock. Well, sometimes, with great effort, and many errors. She’s depended on a digital watch since she was six and probably always will.

I could have fought this issue but there were just so many other things going on with the insane psychologist and awful Grade 3 teacher and both of us having pneumonia and her having appendicitis and peritonitis and two operations and me graduating with my math degree despite the professor working to rule …(Grade 3 was quite a year … ) — I just said, well, clocks aren’t the most important thing in life, and let it lie. Unfortunately multiplication tables are also still not anywhere as good as they should be either and that has domino effect problems later.

So your kid is ahead of a gifted twenty-year-old. See?

Your child in facts sounds a lot like my own learning pattern. I learn things with pattern and organization like a sponge soaking up water, but I have to beat myself over the head to get non-patterned things in, and even then the memory is somewhat unstable — I still have problems with reversing digits in phone numbers etc.
So, teach phonics patterns, sound spelling patterns, prefix and suffix and Latin and Greek root patterns, grammar patterns, .. . he’ll find he’s actually good at language when he looks at it this way. Old-fashioned formal grammatical teaching of a second language can really help, especially Latin and French which feed back to those English patterns.
Read history in the form of narratives and historical novels, to develop a sense of the patterns and interrelationships.
And of course go for the math as much as possible.

That is it exactly! Easy things are hard and difficult things are easy. For my son different easy things are hard but it is the same concept. He had an assignment recently that asked for the number of syllables in a particlular word. I was wondering, “Who really cares how many syllables are in this word? I doubt he will be asked that question from his CFO when he is running a multimillion dollar company someday.” He He

Lets just move on and get to the difficult stuff already.