First a quick update: my K dd has had a good year overall. We adjust and adapted a lot, but she is writing, reading (! - it happened in her sleep, best I can tell) and math we can review next year. I still think her hearing is less than perfect, but it seems to be good enough, and I think some of the auditory processing I suspected may just be the fruit of a very literal and visual mind. She stuggles with verbal instructions sometimes, but if I do demonstration problems instead, that seems to fix the problem most of the time.
So, on to worrying about child number 2. He is a very sweet little four year old boy. I have come to suspect that he has some issues with vision however. He complains about not being able to see books and he cannot sequence anything left to right, even with repetition and visual models. So, I took him to the peditrician. They gave him a vision screening starting on the letter chart. He did not get ANY right. So, they told me that he doesn't know his letters as well as I thought, he is only four. (He has know his letters for a long time!) They moved to the symbol chart. The pictures seemed to confuse him, so he was being prompted a lot. His response was mixed. In the end though, I thought he hardly got a thing right, even on fairly large rows. The nurse shrugged, said his vision was probably around 20/40 but that since he wasn't even in K yet, they wouldn't refer him to an optometrist unless his vision was worse than 20/200. We are military overseas, so my options for an outside opinion are limited unless I want to figure out the German system. (I really don't.)
So, the question is how to spend the next year. This would be his Jr. K year. I was already unsure what to do, because unfortunately the MP Jr. K had been a little too classroom oriented for us. Anyway, he knows his letters, writes many of them and counts to ten. Should we skip Jr. K and start K in a year? Should I just wait a year and a half and have him reassessed when he is old enough to be considered ready to read? Honestly, I have things like AAR Prek, but although it has lots of comprehension, letter recognition and phonemic awareness activities there are none for sequencing and tracking visually. So, any advice on what to do with a bright kid now? I don't want to try to "do school" with him if it just leads to frustration that is completely correctable later. On the other hand, he is already my "easy" child that can get overlooked in a busy household (number 4 is on the way in June) so I don't want to leave him to his own devices for a year which would probably translate into being overlooked since he doesn't have sceduled times for Mama's attention. Any thoughts on how to handle the situation? I am not really concerned in the long term. So many vision issues seem to be so correctable these days, I suspect the only issue is to figure out what to do now until I can "document" reading issues that can't be written off as he is too young anyway.
Lena
So, on to worrying about child number 2. He is a very sweet little four year old boy. I have come to suspect that he has some issues with vision however. He complains about not being able to see books and he cannot sequence anything left to right, even with repetition and visual models. So, I took him to the peditrician. They gave him a vision screening starting on the letter chart. He did not get ANY right. So, they told me that he doesn't know his letters as well as I thought, he is only four. (He has know his letters for a long time!) They moved to the symbol chart. The pictures seemed to confuse him, so he was being prompted a lot. His response was mixed. In the end though, I thought he hardly got a thing right, even on fairly large rows. The nurse shrugged, said his vision was probably around 20/40 but that since he wasn't even in K yet, they wouldn't refer him to an optometrist unless his vision was worse than 20/200. We are military overseas, so my options for an outside opinion are limited unless I want to figure out the German system. (I really don't.)
So, the question is how to spend the next year. This would be his Jr. K year. I was already unsure what to do, because unfortunately the MP Jr. K had been a little too classroom oriented for us. Anyway, he knows his letters, writes many of them and counts to ten. Should we skip Jr. K and start K in a year? Should I just wait a year and a half and have him reassessed when he is old enough to be considered ready to read? Honestly, I have things like AAR Prek, but although it has lots of comprehension, letter recognition and phonemic awareness activities there are none for sequencing and tracking visually. So, any advice on what to do with a bright kid now? I don't want to try to "do school" with him if it just leads to frustration that is completely correctable later. On the other hand, he is already my "easy" child that can get overlooked in a busy household (number 4 is on the way in June) so I don't want to leave him to his own devices for a year which would probably translate into being overlooked since he doesn't have sceduled times for Mama's attention. Any thoughts on how to handle the situation? I am not really concerned in the long term. So many vision issues seem to be so correctable these days, I suspect the only issue is to figure out what to do now until I can "document" reading issues that can't be written off as he is too young anyway.
Lena
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