Newbie, Kid (7yr) with Possible CAPD, Course of Action?

I have three-13,17, and 20. Good luck with the vegetables. One of the hardest things about being a parent is losing control. When they eat a school lunch, we no longer have it.You can prolong that issue by packing a healthier lunch than the school provides but that can of course be thrown or traded away. Mostly, its learning to let go-I’m STILL learning ;)

I would suggest letting it go myself as I think you may be ‘asking for’ a lie eventually

He could be finding the work too easy. First grade is especially difficult for bright children as there is much drill on math facts and sight words-if he has had that knowledge awhile, he could be zoning out in boredom(a word you NEVER use around a teacher-and that may include your wife-but, it happens)

He could have a problem with teh physical act of writing. Boys often dont move along in the fine motor dept like girls and the increasing expectations in this area can be wearing. IF you think this is the case there is a program call Handwriting Without Tears that several have had good luck with

He could have trouble with the mental act of writing-what to say and how to say it. This could be a LD of some sort or, again, if hes a sharp, verbal kid he may just not know how to express all those great thoughts running through his head

Or….he wants to write about ‘gladiators’ but has no idea how to spell the word and doesnt want to get it marked wrong

There is a type of ADHD that doesnt have the hyperactive component. That would be ADD inattentive-you might want to research that specific variation

But, honestly, nothing REALLY jumps out at me(although the jumping out of a 2nd story window scared me!!!!)

If you want testing, it is unlikley to be done this time of year. I suggest you ask first thing next year if you continue to worry past the summer

They will run something like a WISC(dont ask my what number)It will measure his IQ in verbal and non-verbal areas shich might be useful if it comes in high. It will also list subtests that will give you an idea of his strengths and weaknesses. Coding would be one that could be a stickler if he has a physical issue with writing

Again, plug WISC into the search or look at this sites info on testing

I find that if my kids are having to go “mom, mom” Im probably spaced out myself, worrying about some work issue and they have a good reason to be insisting on my obvious attention. It could be a bit of impulsive behavior on his part OR it could be learned

Have you asked him whats going on when he doesn finish his work? He might have some insight

Good luck-this is a great board

I’d start with a speech-language evaluation since it sounds like his reading is strong. You don’t really have justification for an educational eval from what you are saying. However, it does sound like symptoms of ADD inattentive…or as Mary said, maybe he is bored.

Go the the pediatrician and get the rating scales for ADD and have his mother, you, the teacher, etc. fill them out. Then the dr. can analyze whether ADD is a possibility. Kids with APD have trouble in various ways, but it is pretty common to see a language delay or reading problems and that doesn’t sound like it is the case from what you said.

I also agree that you need to let him eat what he wants at school for lunch. His diet can be balanced out by what he eats at home. I think punishment related to eating can cause more problems than it solves.

And the grandmother probably should know that kids who need medication and don’t get it are the ones most likely to self-medicate with less desirable drugs later. But you need a diagnosis to find out what he does need.

Janis

Hi Lennie,
I would mention to you something called Non Verbal Learning Disorder NLD.
Which may be relevant?
You note his considerable ability to memorise facts, which comes under Verbal Learning.
The Non Verbal side comes in when you take those Facts and put them together in your own way to Express them.
For an example, whilst one may memorise every word in a dictionary.
It’s a totally different thing to take all of those words and put them together in a way to express a point of view about a subject.
Are his writing problems limited to when he has take ‘facts’ and restate them in his own way? Rather than just repeat what he learnt?
Geoff.

Oh, I forgot to address the ‘follow him for life” issue

There are many, many people WANTING to get their children into special ed who cannot because their kiddo is not far enough behind.. The idea Ive heard some express-not you-that the schools are roping unsuspecting, perfectly okay kids into special ed so they can get funding is ludricous!!!! They are turning them away at the door

The other misconception is the one you DID mention-that this will mark him for life.

My son has an IEP and I invariably approach the teacher a few weeks in(his accomodations are mild)and ask about it. They freak as they HAD NO IDEA the kid had an IEP.

Follow them for life? I wish it could follow them from year to year!

Teachers IME do not read a kid’s records unless they find an issue and decide to check. And it has to be a MAJOR issue

Im sure there are exceptions and horror stories out there but its not the norm

Thanks to everyone for the replies.

The food issue has pretty much resolved itself and the boy is doing quite well in that respect. I really only mentioned it because it was an example of him being reminded and yet failing to follow the instructions. I understand that a kid not following orders to eat broccoli might be something other than not remembering (hehe), they do give him several choices at school though. He pretty much eats carrots and applesauce everyday now, and hey, that is fine with us! And yes, there comes a time when you have to let something go, and I don’t think we caused him an eating disorder from punishing him but that is a good point and certainly something I will be careful about in the future. Basically we’re trying to instill good eating habits with him and his sister and they are doing excellent in this area.

As I said the only real problem he’s having is with writing, that and the bit of a speech idiosyncracy. But he communicates well, has a great vocab, and reads well. There are times when he’ll read and not remember much of it, but I have that same problem at times so I don’t consider that out of the norm (not to say I am normal, mind you).

We had pondered the possibility of a touch of ADD, then after the teacher mentioned the word “processing” we looked that up and we’ll check out the other possibilities mentioned. I talked to his mother last night and apparently the speech person at the school talked to him and didn’t find anything that jumped out at her which is good. She was going to try and observe him in the classroom setting in the next few weeks. So the school is doing something which I can appreciate. I’ll see about having him take the test(s) to see if there are any areas that need work. Basically, I am thinking that whatever is going on, is very mild and only requires something like a set of exercises to give him practice or a way of approaching this writing block he seems to have. He has decent handwriting, and when he does write it is usually fairly interesting.

I am probably making a mountain out of a molehill, I don’t see the lad as having a disability but I just want to nip this in the bud as we think he is a very smart kid and were taken by surprise that he was having problems. Although, his kindergarten teacher made comments about him “working at his own pace”, which in retrospect seems like code for “moving kinda slow”. It is possible that he is bored but I don’t think so. The idea that his mind is moving much faster than his pencil, may be closer to the truth. Anyway, we’ll keep researching and if anything interesting comes up I’ll post back with an update.

PS Geoff, are you the former martial arts guide from another forum?

I and my daughter both had a really hard time with the brain moving faster than the hand. I got up to a minimal level thanks to Mrs. Ross in Grade 3, who taught a cless of thirty-five eight-year-olds copperplate writing with dip pens and inkwells. The classic style of writing, rule-based and consistent (as opposed to invent your own in any direction) plus a writing tool that requires no pressure and doesn’t exhaust the hand, is the most effective approach I know. Nowadays you can use fountain pens or superfine markers, but the rest of the process still holds.

You wrote:

He has been getting in some trouble for not finishing his work in school though. Mostly when the teacher has them write about a topic, he just stis and plays with his pencil. Then loses out on recess as a result.

This one really jumped out at me. I just talked to a mother whose 1st grade son received a negative comment on his report card about his behavior which, it turned out, really was referring to him not writing in his journal during journal time. Not disruptive or anything—just sitting at his desk and playing with his pencil, or getting up and sharpening it, or just writing one sentence that was totally perfect because he spent a lot of time looking up every single word in the dictionary.

Many, many boys at this age cannot write on command about whatever or even some assigned topic. Their problem is they just can’t think what to write about and, thus, can’t write. The mother I spoke to has attempted to address this by giving him an idea every morning of what he could write about in his journal that is interesting to him. So now he is writing two perfect sentences instead of the seven to nine they are supposed to produce.

I am quite sure that whatever topic your son is being giving is not inspiring him to produce and further that he in all likelihood has not been taught in sequential incremental steps how to write about a topic. I have seen a writing assignment that requires the student to describe a pencil. My job entails a good deal of formal writing; if I had to do this assignment for my job, as a professional I would slog through it. But if I were a seven year old boy I would definitely rather fiddle with my pencil then do it.

I do wish teachers would separate for young students the what to write about from the how to write. If they taught them the latter the first without also requiring the former, they would produce children who were confident in their writing skills and able (eventually) to take on random topics assigned to them. Try this article that argues for separating these two things and a proposed solution you may or not agree with: writing-edu.com, click on newsletters, then the article “Writing Without Tears.”

Just a couple of comments. As far as lunch goes, as was already said, you might as well give up and make sure he eats well the rest of the day. If he eats a balanced diet most of the time he will be fine. There are lots of kids who exist on not much of anything and do fine. You know that you are giving him the best you can. It sounds like he probably doesn’t take his lunch, but if he does pack good stuff that you know he likes. My sun likes yogurt, unsweetened applesauce,fruit bars that are made with one serving of fruit and are sugar free, I get them in either the produce section or the health food section. Popcorn is also a good snack. I find that my son is just too busy too eat lunch, he eats enough of what he likes best so he’s not really hungry, but is starving after school.

My other son who is five, just has to be recognized. He always say mom at least twice and has to be answered or he keeps on going. We call him JACOB TWO TWO after a character created by a canadian author called Mordecai Richler. His character is a little boy who is youngest in a family of five children and has to say everything twice just to be noticed. It is a good book to read to your stepson if he enjoys longer books read over more than a day or two. JACOB TWO TWO MEETS THE HOODED FANG
He is very polite but has to interupt everything. He will say “excuse me can I talk to my mom” in the middle of a conversation. Quite often after saying mom a bunch of times he just says umm umm umm… then has nothing to say or starts about three sentences and doesn’t finish. I think he just wants to be noticed and be part of whatever is going on.

He is also a walking accident waiting to happen. At five he has had a broken arm and had two front teeth knocked out from falling. the arm and one tooth is from jumping from three feet off the ground onto a bunch of rocks(not quite two stories but harmful all the same) I think that some children are less fearful than others and don’t foresee any possible consequences of their actions.

I not saying you should rule out the possibility of any underlying causes for any of these things, But it’s probable that he is just a stereotypical boy. I know, I have two of them.

My older son does have a NVLD he has significantly more problems with reading and writing. In grade two he still can’t write properly and has huge problems forming his thoughts onto paper. From my understanding a nvld is diagnosed when there is a significant difference in testing results between oral and written tests, more than 30 points even if they are above the50 percentile mark. Its the dfference that is important. My son tested between 5th and 10th percentile for writing and reading but 87th -93rd for oral tests. That means 90% of kids at his age and grade level are above him in reading and writing but only 13-7% of kids scored above him for verbal. At five he could relate gravity to why people couldn’t stay up forever when they jumped and at 7 he can explaing a black hole(I know I can’tand I’m 35). He even commented that the Disney movie THE BLACK HOLE was stupid because you can’t see a black hole. So obviously it isnt related to intelligence! If your son reads and writes relatively well it may just be that there are just more distractions than he is used to or school may be a social time for him. I wonder if he has siblings, if not it, could be quite differeent to be around alot of kids. Keep an eye on him but I bet he will be fine, he is still young and has good parents who are looking out for him.

Marie, shame, shame; you’re becoming as much of a reactionary as I am! We were taught in exactly this way, specific handwriting skill lessons daily, controlled writing exercises going from single words in Grade 1 to sentences in Grade 2 to paragraphs in Grade 4 to essays in Grade 6. But all that terrible stultifying stuff had to go when the system was modernized and brought up to date, and now we have so much better teaching with relevant writing for meaning and personal journaling and kids in Grade 2 publishing their own books, it’s so wonderful, isn’t it?

Victoria, Definitely guilty as charged. I now have a wonderful, creative, and imaginative 12 year old, a product of all that great modern education, whom I am now taking through Check and Double Check Phonics (your recommendation) because she never was taught phonics and as a result has cheerfully erratic spelling. She has surreptitiously set up her own online blog so she can journal and have all the world view her spelling errors. I am stealthily monitoring the site to make sure nothing worse than spelling “whipped cream” as “wipped creame” shows up. Really, really makes me wish I was raising kids in the era of inkwells.

Good stuff!

It has definitely occurred to me, that the boy simply has a problem with how to get started writing or how to go about it. In fact, I’ve sat down with him a couple of times and tried to explain a logical way to go about writing on a given topic. I gave him a generic way to write an opening sentence, seems a lot of times getting started is the hard part. And when he gets in trouble at school, we generally have him sit down and do some letter writing at home. His grandparents love it, he’s not so thrilled though! I’ll look into teaching him some more on the mechanics of writing, that may well be helpful to him.

Now that we are in LD/ADD observation mode, many things he does might qualify as symptoms. Then again, I exhibit some of these symptoms myself. Yikes. Yet as I said, he’s plenty bright so I am not terribly concerned. Just wanted to nip this in the bud, after all this kid needs to earn a substantial living so he can put me in the good nursing home.

I’ll look for that Two, Two book as well, he is already reading chapter books so I might have him read it to me.