It truly is a delight to work with a student, to help him or her achieve in areas that were not accessible before. Over time, I get to see the subtle changes, and at the end, we can compare how much he or she improved.

Currently I am working with an 11 year old girl; let’s call her Annie. Her mom brought her to me originally because she was concerned about Annie’s reading comprehension, and that there was too much intervention given at school, resulting in her being pulled out of class too often. She has had a private tutor and AIS (Academic Intervention at school), but still reads at a 4th grade level, despite graduating from 5th grade.

During the evaluation, I ask about her strengths – sports, Legos, and spelling. I looked at motor planning, and I see her balance is off by quite a bit but finger sequencing was good. I checked her primitive reflexes, and found a slight moro, a slight TLR, a stronger Spinal Galant, and a very strong ATNR. I did not test for the STNR since it may emerge later during our work.

When looking at her senses, I found that her vision was OK, but she was hypersensitive to sound and smell. Vestibular was off, and she was hyposensitive to tactile sense.

She displayed some anxiety traits – test anxiety, difficulty changing tasks, nervous to change schools for middle school.

Other symptoms that were found included poor posture, poor sequencing skills, fidgeting, poor concentration, poor memory, mixed dominance, poor handwriting, poor expression of ideas on paper, “w” leg position while sitting on floor, and slow with copying tasks.

That’s it for today; tomorrow I will describe the results of her cognitive testing.