When you have a combo platter child (child with multiple disabilities, some of which may not be clearly identified), sorting out how their disabilities are impacting their learning can be a daunting task. As the school year cranks back up (and we didn’t do school everyday during the summer as I had originally anticipated), I can see large leaps and lags in LuLu’s academic progress.

Last week (and finishing up today) we did some placement testing on-line in an effort to figure out what levels she is learning at, specifically in reading and math. I’ve always known that math is her forte, and that reading, due to both her severe auditory and visual processing deficits, is problematic. Yet, it blows me away to watch her intuitively guess correct answers on the math portion, even answering material that we didn’t cover last year. And on the reading side, being slipped downward to a lower level when she didn’t score enough on the first test.

It’s a strange mixture of what she does and doesn’t understand. For example, LuLu is a pretty decent speller. (I know adults who are worse.) She understands phonics and some basic spelling rules. But she has the hardest time with vocabulary and comprehension. She also has very poor fluency – if you can’t read fast enough and with fluency, then what you read really doesn’t make sense, does it?

The problem on the math side of things is that she can’t remember math facts. We drilled, and drilled, and drilled multiplication tables last year. Yet some of them (like the elusive 8 x 3) still require that she count on fingers or draw a picture every time! Experts tell me that this is likely due to a “working memory” problem.

The whole process of testing her and clearly seeing the places she excels and the places she’s behind fills me with so many emotions. I’m overwhelmed with how difficult it is for her to do anything (because her working memory is so slow, it takes her a long time to do any test, and we have to work very hard to keep her anxiety levels in check). I’m amazed at the things she is able to figure out in areas where she excels. I’m saddened to watch her struggle in areas where she doesn’t. I’m tired just thinking about the intensity of therapies and learning interventions she still needs. And I’m frustrated that I’ve gotten no help from our public school system either in identifying or remediating a blasted thing. They want to label her as “bad”; emotionally disturbed, and not attempt to lessen her burden by teaching her what she’s able (since admittedly she has a normal IQ).

Related links:

Early Signs of Reading Difficulties
Is It a Reading Disorder or Developmental Lag?
Identifying Learning Problems in Adopted Children