Auditory Processing Disorder, Update

Since I was recently nominated for Homeschool Blogger Award, Live What you Believe, for sharing my 11 year old daughter's journey through therapy for CAPD (auditory processing disorder), sensory integration disorder and visualizing inabilities. Here is the update, straight from the therapist and mom's analysis. These have caused bunches of problems for her in school, relationships, chores, and life. Regarding CAPD, we have been doing Neuronet, with a therapist since April. We are in CD 6 of an 8 CD series. The section of therapy we are in now is English as a Spoken Language. As a mother of a child with CAPD, I did not realize my child spoke less than other children. She could narrate with the best, and she seemed engaged, but as time passed, and I had other children, I realized the words just did not come. Often a nod or grunt was all I got in response to a question. When with her friends, she just looks at them and smiles. This smile threw us off for a while, often the smile was because she enjoyed being with her friends, even if she was not able to follow conversation. Neuronet is going well, but we are not where I hoped we would be after seven months of therapy. This time her therapist is aiming to integrate therapy with her schoolwork. Also, I just began remediating with a reading program called Reading Reflex. Our NN provider feels combining Reading Reflex with NN is our best chance to produce a child who can spell and read phonetically.

As for Visualizing and Verbalizing, ME has gotten to where she seems to be visualizing on her own. Visualizing means making a movie in your mind when you read something or hear something. When I ask her if she is visualzing, she says "Yes, I think so." That is progress. I have stopped using the actual therapy materials, and am just getting her to tell me what she is "seeing in her mind," as she reads and hears. Her new flute teacher is also incorporating visualizing with musical pieces. In addition, he has developed a lesson sheet which has emoto-icons on it, and she is to circle what emotion the music is portraying.

Sensory Integration therapy is proceeding nicely. We have had many fun field trips in an effort to help all our children with sensory issues. Much trampoline jumping, swimming, hiking, playing in streams, camping and eating beef jerky, has happened this summer. I feel like all the children have improved in relation to loud sounds, funny textures and scheduling.

We are within three months of being done with Neuronet, and are waiting to see what our Pediatric Physical Therapist recommends at that point. What has your family been dealing with that is "unusual" or "special?"

Therapy Update

As you can tell, I have not blogged in a while. The 25-28 hours a week of therapy took every free moment and then some. After a few weeks of trying to fit it all in, or figure out how much we could manage, I knew we needed some help. I also knew ME was not progressing as quickly as I had thought with the verbal skills needed to communicate that which she was learning in Visualizing and Verbalizing.
During this time, we were wrestling with the idea of moving. We live in the country and it takes almost an hour to get to therapy, music lessons, Target, etc. Our church is in another city, too. As I began to make calls about the different options for V/V, I made calls in two cities, to see which had the best therapy set-up. I finally found what I thought was a good option in the city where our chuch is, so we decided to move. We have lived in this little town for eight years. At the same time this was going on, DG fractured his tibia. Having a two year old break anything is time consuming and very worrisome. They CRY AND CRY!
The best therapy for V/V told me we could come one day a week until V/V was done and I would follow up with homework. This sounded good, since it is $120 an hour. It is done by a speech audiologist/pathologist. They wanted to do a full speech evaluation on ME. I know she does not have other speech issues, but it is interesting that the part of the brain that works on making pictures for what we read comes from the speech section. By this time, I had learned that ME is also not making pictures of movies she sees. I know this is hard to believe and explain.
As the month passed, I was put in contact with a speech pathologist that does V/V near the city we live closest to right now. He suggested a meeting or two before we move to see if he can directly pin point the newest problem I was seeing in V/V, the lack of higher order thinking. This means prediction, if/then, and other inference questions. Often those problems can be corrected in a few visits, by going back to the picture studying steps of V/V. So, we met, he did a few samples with Mikaela and realized that her problems all stem from her having strabismus (eye crossing) when she was 2 years old. When she should have been absorbing all this information she was taking 2-D images and information in, and not able to make it 3-D. That is one of the key reasons she also can not do predictions. She was unable to watch things follow through.
The end result is we have decided to stay with this speech pathologist, and visit him every other week, with me following up four days a week for 30 minutes a day homework. We will have to continue Neuronet also in the same city, so ME will go in one day every other week to work with Dad. This is much more manageble a schedule and will actually keep me home several more hours a week, like at least 10 hours. Our lessons will only be 2.5 miles from our house now!