Is my 9yr old DS a normal space cadet boy?

[outofteabags]

Am trying to get some perspective here.
We have an only child and August born boy who is 9 and is having issues at school.
The school are helping, he is under the SENCO and getting help but I have a suspicion that they are not getting to grips with whatever is going on. They suspect he has a processing issue from head to hand and is hyper sensitive so classroom noise creates an issue with concentration.

Once again I have sat with him doing his homework - tonight's was English. I am concerned as I am not seeing any progress in his work. He is unable to punctuate and use capital letters, we have been working on this since year 1! He is unable to work out his train of thought to write down what he needs to say - watching him wrestle with a blank piece of paper is painful, yet when he tells me what he wants to say he knows exactly what to do.

Homework can be very distressing for us, I have also explained this to school. At home he lets his guard down and his problems with his work are so apparent. To a degree I understand the importance of homework to create the habit as he gets older but for us, the quality of instruction what is being set v his understanding of what is required once he gets home is so far apart that the very action of attempting homework is fraught with issues.

I have raised my concerns about this now with his teachers but I am not getting any closer to resolving whether his apparent lack of progress is typical of a boy of his age, with his workload (he is particularly talented in music and this is a major feature of his life), or not. From my point of view he has stalled quite spectacularly for sometime now. Perhaps at some point the penny will drop and he will grasp what is going on?

Many people see a bright astute boy on the surface, but my concern is that currently he doesn't grasp that he is slipping further and further behind. Any thoughts on what we should do?

Push for him to be assessed. My DS struggled in a similar way to yours, he's a very bright lad, reads and comprehends well but can't get thoughts and ideas back in to paper. He was eventually diagnosed with dysgraphia. Once school got a diagnosis for him they were ably to help him.

I have asked for him to be assessed. I raised Dyslexia as a query and have been told no. They have said its his organisational skills and hyper sensitivity but I don't feel that is the answer.
How do I go about getting a proper assessment?

I asked my GP for a referral to the child development team. Dyslexia was ruled out for DS as his reading was relatively unaffected (except he has no decoding skills even now at 19). His dysgraphia affects his hand writing, his spelling, his grammar and punctuation. It took us until he was Yr 8 to get answers though as it was such a battle to get him diagnosed.

What do you mean by decoding skills? Does he read by choice? My DS has an incredibly high reading ability just simply isn't interested in doing it and I suspect that while he can read the words with great expresion he doesn't actually retain what is going on and follow a story.

My lad can't break words down. He has problems with sequencing so although he knows there are 26 letters in the alphabet he can't remember the order. He can't remember his phone number either not chains of instructions do he could remember 'go upstairs' but if you told him to 'go upstairs, clean your teeth, put your jumper on and fetch your book bag' he'd do the first and last and not remember the rest. With reading he can remember word shapes once told what the word says but doesn't see the individual letters in the shape. For years he couldn't spell his own middle name (Samuel do not tricky). He was horribly disorganised at school and marked as lazy because they knew he was bright but couldn't understand why his class work didn't reflect his verbal skills.

Sorry on phone so just seen spelling mistakes, hope it makes sense.

Makes sense, your comment about a chain of instructions is spot on and drives us all round the bend. Goes upstairs and forgets why he has gone up there!

My DS now nearly 15 has similar problems. A fairly high IQ top 5% but totally disorganised often poor concentration although not when interested a complete inability to write anything on paper very very articulate a fantastic reader a photographic memory and poor at following instructions. The problem became obvious when at a village primary but they did an assessment to see if he needed an ed psych assessment and as he did not score high enough to be dyslexic they refused to have him assessed by an ed psych! We moved him to a prep school paid for the ed psych report and he was diagnosed with a processing disorder that affects only 1 in 500. Help in both the prep and now he's back in state ed at our excellent local comp is sometimes patchy but he has improved. He needs a structured environment this year he joined the air training corp (sort of junior RAF) which is unbelievably rigid and structured he loves it is more confident and his school work has definately improved.

Mine is similar. Dyspraxic with working memory and auditory processing difficulties

Go for a full ed psych report. Worth every penny. Once you know what his strengths and weakenesses really are you know how to start working on them

Def sounds like he has SEN. And def sounds like school don't have a clue :(

Sensory difficulties and processing problems can be symptoms of:

• Sensory Processing Disorder
• ASD
• ADHD ( hyperactive or predominantly inattentive)
• Dyspraxia
• Dyslexia

Problem is, you need different professionals to test for each one :)

An EP can only diagnose dyslexia (and give you a 'cognitive profile' for your DS).

An OT can test for Dyspraxia or SPD, and a paed is needed to diagnose ASD or ADHD.

Getting a EP through school is virtually impossible.

I would be inclined to start with an OT report - but then I'm not a huge fan of EPs :)

Also depends what you can afford. You can go to your GP and ask to be referred to a paed, and an OT. But unless you paint a very strong picture of his difficulties, you probably won't get to see one.

Or you can just go private. All of these professionals are available privately. Ballpark figure £300 - £700.

Sorry, trawling through old threads (bored at work!) and saw this. Do push for an assessment. My younger brother was considered badly organised and not that academic at school (although he had good readfing ability and his school was v academic, so he was still above average) but my mum felt there was something up for similar reasons to you - (a) complete inability for an otherwise bright child to put pen to paper, (b) inability to repeat a sequence of numbers (eg couldn't repeat or write a series of more than 2 numbers if told to him) and (c) an away with the fairies nature, mainly through not being able to remeber series of instructions...

She paid for a number of private assessments (this was years ago) and he was diagnosed with dysgraphia.

The school then understood exactly what to do and my brother's school life totally changed - he went on to get straight As and get a first at oxford.

If you vcan possibily afford it, I would pay for a full private ed psych assessment and take it from there.

He sounds very similar to my (9 year old) DS.

DS is a day dreamer, and is clever enough but can never get it onto paper. teacher says that faced with a piece of paper he is like a "rabbit caught in the headlights". his writing is terrible, including his spelling an punctuation. He is also really distracted by noise, even "low level disruption". He did not just stall, he went backwards after the holidays . To family and friends he seems a bright and sensitive child. not slow at all.

He got 30 minutes or so a week with the SENCO, but they never defined what was wrong with him.

I pushed for a dyslexia test, but school put brakes on.

This was because it costs the school money to do this test! (did not find that out until later). When he was 8.5 I decided to fork out the money to do the test privately( 440 pounds!!!).

It came out that he IS dyslexic and has also problems with short term memory.

There are lots of things SENCO and teachers can do once they know exactly what the problem is.

It is my advice that you become a pushy parent, and talk about your concerns with the teacher (and head and SENCO), and will not be sent away with vague promises, but you all sit down and draw up a plan of how to help him.

In our case, I sadly had to move schools as he just didn't get the help, and the school "let him sink". Hope your school has better resources.

Just to update, we had the ed psych assessment done on Friday and it will be the best £400 we have ever spent.

While we haven't had the full report the conclusion is that DS has a form of dyslexia and will be formally statemented for that. It means that when he sits his exams he will get more time and will do on a laptop. We have to see what help is now required from here.

While we recognise the hurdles ahead, to get confirmation of what I knew to be true, he is different from other kids, is the biggest relief ever.

Turns out my lovely boy has been working his socks off just to be at the standard he is... which in testing shows he is way ahead of his peers but due to the issues he has has been interpreted as the difficult kid and has been continually told off. I feel so sad for him as he must have been thinking how much more can I do!!!!!

The best thing that was said to us yesterday is that we all have to understand he is who he is, a seriously clever kid who operates differently to everyone else, he won't change, we are the ones who need to change for him!

This has been the culmination of years and years of people telling me, there is nothing wrong, he is just imature blah blah blah... well the psychologist said yesterday, she always trusts a mothers gut feeling, so my advice to anyone going through the same, stand your ground and fight because it could be game changer for your kids

Hi,

Glad you finally got a dx.

I have to disagree with the EP that he can't change, and instead the rest of the world has to change for him.

There are loads and loads of effective treatments for dyslexia. Lots you can do, now you know what the problem is.

www.dyslexiaadvice.co.uk/treatments.html