Hi and welcome back to Eadie’s story. If you missed it, you can catch up on part 1 [here] and part 2 [here].
One of the main areas of need that prompted her parents to seek out a call with me was the discrepancy between her academic performance at school and what her parents were seeing at home, and this is what we’ll be focusing on today. Spoiler alert, it’s still a big mystery- so if you’re a teacher and have other thoughts, I’d love to hear from you!
Here’s more context.
“At school she is well behaved. She stays on task. She is underperforming. No one has a clue that she is gifted. She is categorized as below grade level.”
Even more telling, is that right around the time we started working together, they got a neuropych evaluation, which placed her in “the 97-98% gifted realm”, and no discernable learning disorders. The neuropsychologist highlighted that Eadie seems to have perfectionistic tendencies and anxiety around school.
And also of importance is that Eadie had just moved to Canada from the US, which means a completely different curriculum while also starting a new grade level (first grade).
Eadie’s teachers were mentioning that she seemed to struggle with oral reading as well as math concepts like addition and subtraction. In math, she was arriving at the correct answer- though when she was told to show her work or talk it through, she was making errors or not making any sense. She was scoring below grade level for both subjects. At home, her parents didn’t notice any difficulty with reading aloud or math equations- though her mom did notice her odd way of skipping numbers when counting, despite arriving at the right answer. Her parents noted there were some letter and number reversals, but at 7, this didn’t majorly concern me, though it’s interesting to note.
