Griffin has speech therapy every week both in his preschool classroom and in a private therapy center. His speech therapist, Nancy, evaluated him and found that his expressive vocabulary is equal to that of his typical peers 3 years 6 months but his receptive vocabulary is only at 2 years 3 months. It is usually( with NT kiddos) the other way around with receptive vocab being much higher than the expressive. The reason why is that Griffin has hyperlexia, which I just recently found out. I didn't know that there was a word for this condition; his love for letters, reading, and spelling.
Hyperlexia: The presence of advanced ability to read compared to the ability to understand spoken language.
Children with hyperlexia have a precocious ability to read words, far above what would be expected at their chronological age or an intense fascination with letters or numbers; significant difficulty in understanding verbal language; and abnormal social skills, difficulty in socializing and interacting appropriately with people.
Now that I know this it helps me to be able to work with him in reading comprehension. Griffin has shown me that he can not only read words but he can spell them as well; just yesterday he came up to me with 4 little alphabet blocks that spelled out P O O L. At the same time he was saying "let's go to the pool". He has been taking swim classes and he either figured it out from the word seen while at the pool or he just figured out how to spell it phonetically. Either way, I say BRAVO little guy!
2 comments:
What a smart little guy to figure that out! He sounds like my 4 yr old - who can count to 1000, and could say his alphabet before he was 2 and will ask me how to spell everything - but is having problems in kindergarten because of his social issues. It's tough to see our kids are so very intelligent, yet there is that invisible barrier. frustrating really.
I think hyperlexia is a gift for most not a disease. its absurd. one physician is asking parents for data because MOST hyperlexic kids lose any autistic symptoms including serious reception problems by age 6. they usually jump in capability from age 4.5 to 5.5. so they learn differently. many kids dont do well in different subjects how is this different? hyperlexics are of at least average intelligence and many are incredibly smart. so why do we call this a disorder? competition and comparison. I really think this is absurd. Ive had three hyperlexics over a ten year career and only one lagged noticably in social skills, all lagged in reception compared to most but not all of the class and they really seemed like normal enough kids to me. same with autism spectrum disorder. these labels are being overapplied.
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