Today I had my end of the year conference with Dinara’s teachers. Dinara is in Early Intervention Preschool because she’s at risk of falling behind academically because she was in an orphanage till she was 2 ½.

It’s really sad to hear your kid can’t do things on target with other kids. One example of something “academic” is that my daughter can’t do rhymes. She just doesn’t get it. And Rhyming is a pre indicator on how well children will read in the future. They should be able, as an example, to see a picture of the word BAT and pick out other pictures that rhyme with bat. My daughter can’t do it consistently.

But this doesn’t mean she’s not smart. She really can compensate. For example, the cards have colored backgrounds. So like Bat has a yellow background, Mat has a yellow background, Cat has a yellow background. Snake and Cake have green backgrounds. She doesn’t get the whole rhyming thing, but she’s figured out she can compensate by looking for the cards with all the same background. So she’s SMART…she just can’t retrieve words the same way a “typical” child can.

One neuro- physicist says this is because she’s got a “gap” in her brain because she didn’t spend enough time creeping and crawling. Other experts think that some of this is English as a Second Language issues. Other experts think that this is simply a “delay” that she will catch up by the second grade.

The only thing we all agree on, is that it’s hard to quantify what the problem really is.

And what worries me, is that my kid has pretty good street smarts. So that in an academic classroom, a teacher is going to have be pretty smart to realize what she is really absorbing and what she is simply picking up via cues from other kids, the environment, etc.

Dinara is a charmer. She’s a nurturer. She’s what her teachers describe as “the most delightful child we’ve ever had”. Her charm really does carry her. But I do worry about academics. And I wonder what can I be doing now to make things easier for her in the future.

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