“Hyper” isn’t always a bad thing

So we went to have Cub poked and prodded today. He had an evaluation to determine which of the available therapies (Speech, Occupational, etc.) he would benefit from.

It was a good day. Everyone was completely taken by how a-damn-dorable he is, and he blew them away with his development. At one point, he was supposed to stack blocks up, which he did with no prompting (it’s one of his favorite things to do), and the evaluator was going to make the note that yes, he had successfully done this task. I asked her if she’d really looked at the blocks he’d chosen. Cub had deliberately picked out the colored blocks from all of the plain wooden ones, and had stacked them in the ROY G BIV order.

On another test, he was supposed to identify items in pictures, and one of them was a cat. The evaluator couldn’t get him to say it, and was about to mark it as a missed question until I pointed out that Cub had written “C-A-T” on his paper each time she’d asked “What is this?”

She was good with him, don’t get me wrong, but I think these behavioral specialists tend to get locked into their own particular line of inquiry, and miss the gestalt. I’m glad they allowed us to hang around while they administered the tests, because we could help connect the dots. For all the words Cub has, he’s still pretty non-verbal, so we could translate and give context, or prompt him with substitute words to test his phonemic range.

One of the things that has tickled us lately is Cub’s surge in spelling and apparent reading. We’ve been working with him on sight words and simple words – we have a few DVDs that we leave running most of the day – and he’s really absorbed it. This was most obvious when the evaluators sat down with him in front of the alphabet blocks and he started spelling all sorts of things, even pronouncing most of them. It’s kind of creepy, though, when he starts spelling out words we know aren’t on his shows or in his books. I keep waiting for “REDRUM” to show up. Fortunately, his letter board only has one “R”.

[Side Note] Speaking of the DVDs, Mrs. Cat and I were talking about that recently. With Kitten, we homeschool, following a fairly traditional curriculum in terms of basic Grammar, Language Arts, and Mathematics. Her school day is structured for the most part, with certain subjects done on certain days and at certain times. With Cub, on the other paw, we’ve settled into what’s called an “unschooling” pattern, which is putting kids in the general vicinity of educational materials, and hope that some transference takes place. It wouldn’t work for Kitten (or, I suspect, for most kids), but it seems to be just the thing for Cub. Go, us.

At the end of it all, Cub has gotten a tentative diagnosis of hyperlexic and hypergraphic. For those that are allergic to Latin roots, that means he’s reading and writing at a much higher level than most three-year-olds. We’re all excited because this gives us a very strong opening to exploit in developing his communication.