Edda went to a child psychologist today to measure her IQ and her adaptive behavior ability. We are just starting to poke our fingers into the mysterious marshmallow that is the bureaucracy surrounding getting special needs services in the US and one of the first requirements is to have these two standardized tests completed.
Some of the questions asked were ridiculously advanced (Does she know not to bully or taunt her classmates?) and others she used to be able to do, but can no longer do (namely some fine-motor things like turning pages in a book), but I think we were in a cheerful mood and somehow this went OK.
Jeremy has been concerned for a few days because he didn’t really want to know exactly how low Edda was going to score on her IQ test. It has taken us a year since her diagnosis to really believe in our hearts that she knows much of what is going on around her and that her mental capacity is not to be underestimated.
The adaptive behavior test was mainly a series of questions for us – social/gross motor/fine motor. The IQ test started with a page with 4 pictures on it – of course, a lot of the questions he asked her were things that we hadn’t taught Edda and we usually do 2 pictures at a time and her tapping can be misinterpreted because the pictures were really close together, but she looked at them and listened to the questions and tried her best. So she got the animal question (giraffe) and the shape question (triangle) without a doubt. Woo hoo!
(Jeremy did justifiably accuse me of trying to cheat on the first question, so I stepped away from her after that. I just want her to show what she knows! – Just a bit of enthusiastic encouragement gone a bit astray..)
Edda and I high-fived and laughed a bit after it was all done.
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Scientific name: Euphorbia milii
Common name: Crown of Thorns
Location: Taiwan
Ah, testing…I’ll tell you what you can do with school districts.(I think this is a common practice around the country.) Because Caitlyn is non-verbal and has a slower response time than most kids, we had her qualified as medically impared. This means that she has a medical condition that interferes with her ability to learn in a typical style. This way, we bipassed the IQ testing. We didn’t want her labled as “slow” or what not, simply because she is non-verbal. Just a thought.
To me, and IQ is a measure of how well you can test, not how smart you are.
Let Edda be Edda. How high her IQ is just a measurement? Mom and Dad like her a lot, no matter what!