Karen Kallet’s Blog on Selective Mutism

A reader of my blog asked the following questions, that several of you asked about.

 Her comment was: How old was your son at the time of this testing?  I  believe with all my heart that my daughter is gifted as well as having the selective mutism (along with some SPD issues). She’s only 4.5 and has started reading without real prompting.  She’d hit the ceiling the non-verbal portions on a kindergarten readiness test (The McCarthy Scales of Children’s abilities), which is considered a bridge between developmental and IQ tests.  She has a language comprehension of a 7 year old.  I don’t know how well she did on the visual-spatial parts, but I think she did quite well.  I’ll know for sure next week.

I feel that a gifted with an IEP designation will be the way to go, and seeing how it worked out for you confirms the idea that I need to push for it.

But one question remains - how did your son test so well on the private test, but not well on the school’s test?  What did the private tester do differently?

My reply: My son was 7 when after three years of trying to figuring it out and being tuned down and not passing 3 years of the school version of gifted testing, did we have him tested outside.  I think the second grade is a good time, since at that point he gap between this advancement and the teaching level, left us no choice.  His second grade teacher  called saying after 6 weeks from the start of school to tell us that he was done with second grade and what did we want to do with him?  Now we had had that happen also in first grade, but at least it was after the xmas break.   My answer was teach him at his level.  That was not met with agreement.  Thus the outside testing was our only option left, besides leaving the school and that crossed my mind many times.

The private testing is done on to one, not in a group setting.  It is not in a school setting, this is very good for children with selective mustim  like mine who may not be able to speak at school or have anxiety issues around school setting or children from the school.