Any teachers please,how is the best way for me to approach this?

[mrsshears]

My dd has recently been found to be highly gifted following an private assessment instigated by ourselves to try and get to the root of problems dd had been having.
School are very reluctant to see dd as anything other than a quirky child who is slightly above average but has a very pushy mother who has over inflated ideas about her childs ability(dd is very introvert and also quite bored at school which makes matters worse as if something is too easy she really can't be bothered with it)
I have a meeting with school tomorrow to discuss dd and see what provisions are going to be made for her,i'm not looking forward to it as i think they will be very negative and defensive as they have been proven wrong about dd,my question is do any teachers know the best way i can approach this? i'm very keen to move forward and make sure my dd gets what she needs and the last thing i want to do is go in like a bull in a china shop and make things worse.
thanks

seeker - I was thinking in terms of letting her adjust slowly to groups of other children, rather than the 'sink or swim' of a crowded, noisy state school environment. A small class of quiet girls sounds ideal to me, but that's just my opinion. If my child had difficulties with the noise and crush of school, that's what I could consider doing.

Not sure why your abrupt answer was necessary, I was just trying to help the OP.

OP no one has actually questioned that your daughter is not gifted but rather that she may have some challenges alongside this (whether ASD or not) and many of us have suggested that this could be the first point at which the school could help.

Please don't build a wall and ask for thread pulls when in actual fact there is some good advice on here.

hev read another thread or two of the OP's now, so have a little more backgroiund.

As I understand it, your DD has been assessed as having a very high IQ - which, as you will know, measures IQ. Even its inventor didn't say it measures anything else (my elder brother, who has a first class physics degree from Oxford, obtains levels on IQ tests more typical of those with a mental handicap. He just can't do IQ tests). The question for you and the school is how to translate that high 'IQ' into 'school performance' (if that is what you wish).

That is something that you and the school can work together on - investigating the barriers she is encountering (which sound as if they are sensory and behavioural as much as the work she may be accessing) and reducing them as much as possible.

OP, I've now read a few of your other threads. Tbh, I'd advise you to approach the meeting with a receptive attitude, and listen to what the school say first. You have a clear, driven belief in your child, as we all do, but there's a danger that your child's teachers could view you as a bit of a fruit loop if you go in all guns blazing. IQ isn't everything - it's a useful measurement - but part of the picture. Perhaps the feedback you'll get from school will help you to see the other parts of the jigsaw.

I'm utterly confused as to why the OP mentioned her dd's sensory hypersensitivity and intolerance of other children her age. These are not signs of giftedness: sensory hypersensitivity is a disability (it is not an advantage to be hypersensitive to something, so far as I'm aware, just a cause of pain and suffering); and intolerance to children your age is a serious difficulty in a classroom of peers, even if it is something you will grow out of when your peers have grown up a bit and become more predictable and interesting. That the two problems are commonly found alongside a finding of giftedness doesn't make them part of a "diagnosis" of giftedness - you can be extremely gifted without them. So, are they or are they not relevant to her dd's issues at school? And if they are, then surely her dd needs help tackling these issues every bit as much as she needs more stimulating work? They can't, after all, be real issues if cured by being given more interesting maths and literacy work...

completely agree rabbitstew.

The OP's description of her DD is screaming asperger's at me - she sounds exactly like my DS2 - severe AS. He started having extreme difficulties in Year 1, it was a complete nightmare by the end of the year and after years of foot stamping, he was eventually dx in Year 7!!!!! He's bright, but the sensory and social isues are a dead giveaway IMO.

I don't really get the op's claim that she's highly gifted generally, more so than in a school way .
If she's not academically outstanding, what on earth is op's gripe with the school? IMO, they might be a little more objective in judging any supposed giftedness, and they appear not to have found any??

I know I am kind of late to the party but I'm another teacher who had AS bells ringing large after op's second post.

can annyone link the other threads? I'm fastinated and want to read more...

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/gifted_and_talented/1343149-Worried-about-my-meeting-with-school I think this is the parallel thread

thanks mrz. fastinating.

I hope mrsshears hasn't left the threads now. I can understand she isn't hearing whats she particularly wants to I do believe that posters are trying to support her.

I also remember reading a post of hers on the special needs board here where she was asking about dd's obsessions and rigid play and quite rightly got pointed in the area of ASD. But now after seeing one ed psych and being told dd has a high IQ and doesn't have ASD suddenly the sensory difficulties, social interaction difficulties, rigidity and obsessions are second place to the need for higher reading books and maths sheets

I really do have sympathy because the prospect of ASD is frightening. I still believe though ASD or not it's far better to work in partnership with the school rather than trying to foist your desires upon your child's teacher.

Mrsshears I have seen your various threads and noted your determination to focus on your DD's academic abilities. The thing is she plainly has many other issues, all of which are probably more important at the age of five than giving her harder academic work. I have a DS whose teachers believe him to be in the top 1% of academic ability and sure enough he does exceptionally well at school. But there are many other sides to his character that are just as important. And being in the top 1% of a population of 60 million people just means you are in the top 600,000 in the country which doesn't sound quite so astonishing.

We had ASD categorically ruled out without doing ASD testing just on great eye contact, appropriate but advanced adult converstation and highest score on comprehension test on WISC 4. We were told that ASD children never have this task as their highest score and cant score top marks of 19 for it. This was NHS team not private. No idea if true but OP may have been advised this like us.

I then spoke to NAGC and they confirmed that other traits such as sensory issues/hightened emotions etc can be confused with ASD when child just has high IQ and their website lists these characterisicts and refers to the book an earlier poster mentioned.

My impression of the posting although may not have read it all is not that OP is asking for more work sheets etc rather that she is asking school why her child is not achieving results more in line with her potential from IQ and how they can help to achieve this.

Agree that IQ do not predict academic results as desire to please, organizational skills etc are all important but reasonable to want a child to achieve potential.

coffeeortea, I think mrsshears dd is only 5, so WISC 4 wouldn't apply as it's used for 6- year olds and above. Tests for younger children don't tend to test so much the sorts of things an ASD child would have particular difficulty with, because normal children under 6 would themselves potentially still not have the requisite levels of understanding. That is one of the reasons why IQ tests for children under the age of about 7 are not considered reliable - or certainly aren't reliable in terms of helping you decide whether certain characteristics relate to a mild autistic spectrum disorder.

Rabbitstew - I had no idea it was not reliable for children aged under 7. None of the huge team of NHS professionals involved in our case ever mentioned this to us. Our son was aged 6 and 1 month when it was carried out! Does this mean that even though comprehension score was the highest score of all subtests and eye contact appropriate it might not preclude ASD?

Should NHS not be testing WISC 4 on a child of 6 years and one month?

No idea on the WISC test but I have two children with autism who have and never have had any problem with eye contact and would say eye contact isn't a feature that would confirm or dispel autism.
The WISC test in itself cannot be used individually as a diagnostic tool for autism and neither can a diagnosis be made or denied by one professional.
To confirm or deny diagnosis a team of professionals would use ADOS or DISCO the WISC test would only determine cognitive ability IME.

I agree seems surprising autism would be ruled out just based on IQ subtest score and eye contact, without an actual assessment of autism as Insanity said. About the WISC-4, it can be used from 6 years, but some prefer the WPPSI at that age (which is IQ test for preschoolers).

If a diagnosis was based on IQ and eye contact then neither of my two would be considered autistic whereas in fact they both and dd in particular has an exceptionally high IQ but has a diagnosis of moderate to severe autism.

That was gobbledy gook should read they both have normal eye contact and both are very cognitively able. Dd in particular has an exceptionally high IQ and still has a moderate to severe autism diagnosis.

Eye contact and appropriate adult conversation doesn't rule out ASD I'm afraid

coffeeortea - no, your ds was 6, so WISC IV was appropriate to use on him. mrsshears' dd is 5, so it was not appropriate for her, she would have had the preschooler's test. They allow testing that young because it can be helpful where children are having difficulties at school to help establish where these difficulties may lie, it's just not a good time to decide on a child's lifelong IQ profile and the under-6s' test is just not going to be looking at a level of social understanding that will definitely catch out a child with mild autism. How effective WISC IV would be at doing this, I don't know, but I'm fairly sure there isn't a ruling that a child must not be diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder solely on the basis of a mark in one section of an IQ test, so at best it is only an indicator that must be taken alongside a huge host of other clinical judgments and possibly used in the mind of the assessor to support their judgment that a child is not autistic if most other signs seem to point to the child not being autistic...

...hence them mentioning other aspects of your ds's behaviour, coffeeortea. As for getting full marks on the comprehension part of the WISC IV test, I should imagine that would be difficult for an autistic child to achieve, because I think it does test aspects of social comprehension, some of which an autistic child could cope with but to be consistently accurate under pressure in all aspects would be a very good sign. My ds1 scored extremely well in these for a child of his age, but didn't get full marks and did get a diagnosis of aspergers in the end (he also didn't score so well in other tests used specifically to test social reasoning which are NOT part of WISC IV and are more specifically designed to test those skills in particular). His lowest IQ scores were actually for perceptual reasoning, which is a strength with many autistic children - you just can't generalise too much...

My son, who is diagnosed with Autism, had his IQ tested at 5.2 years using WPSI-III UK test by an independent Ed Psych who specialises in children with ASD. He scored at High Average to Well Above Average in all but the Comprehension subtest. We were told Comprehension measured a child's degree of Social Understanding and my son struggled when the questions shifted from concrete to more abstract concepts.

While this profile is not unusual for HFA/Aspergers children, as others have said it shouldn't be used as a diagnostic tool. My son can maintain eye contact very well most of the time, although used to withdraw it once a demand was made on him.

While it is very difficult to accept even the possibility of a child being on the Autistic Spectrum, from your posts there are a lot of red flags. As others have I would be very wary of any professional who is not qualified to diagnose a condition, ruling one out either. Even after my son had been diagnosed by a multi-disciplinary team over time and in different settings, my LEA Ed Pysch questioned the diagnosis on the basis of eye contact alone and lost my respect forever.