Becoming a Sensory Detective

Becoming a Sensory Detective, yellowreadis.com Image: Child covering their face

Whether your child has Autism, Sensory Processing Disorder, or is Gifted/2e with mild to extreme OEs, dealing with sensory issues is going to be a part of life. But as a parent of a child with a different sensory profile, it can be difficult to understand why they are having problems, and it is also equally difficult to figure out what is causing the problems.

My own journey to becoming a sensory detective has taken time, observation and patience. It’s not easy understanding where the problem is when I can’t see, smell, touch, taste, or hear the same way as my children. One thing that helped me get my head around this idea was flowers. Yes, flowers. Continue reading “Becoming a Sensory Detective”

Coping With (Not-So) Distant Disasters

I was going to do a post on our most recent holidays this week, but under the circumstances, and given the fact that many of the places are under water at the moment due to record-breaking flooding, I thought it might be a tad out-of-place.

This has been a difficult few days. With family in every part of the flooded areas, (and being so far away), we have been relying on social media, the odd phone call and news services to find out how family and friends are going. We’ve heard funny stories, scary stories and terrifying stories.
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Darn Those Mythological Gifted Kids Who Are a Construct of Our Social Norms

Darn Those Gifted Kids Who are a Contruct of Our Social Norms, yellowreadis.com Image: Toy dragon looking sadly at floor against wooden wall

There is a wonderful, probably reasonably obscure book by Rafael Sabatini called “Bellarion the Fortunate” where the intellectually gifted Bellarion is sent out into the world by his abbot because his reading and reason have lead him to believe – with the certainty of an intellectual who has read all the literature and thought hard about it in his convent – that evil and sin are a construct and do not exist.

But to all the weapons of his saintly rhetoric Bellarion continued to oppose the impenetrable shield of that syllogism of his which the abbot knew at heart to be fallacious, yet whose fallacy he laboured in vain to expose. ” [1]

The book is not a treatise on the reality of good or evil, but an adventure book which ends with a very worldly Bellarion who is very much more aware of his fellow humans after leaving his ivory tower of thought.

But I am not writing today to talk about Bellarion and the nature of his discussions on good and evil. I am instead going to write about the work, so far, of Dr Clementine Beauvais, and her blog entries on ‘The Giftedness Project’ [2].

Much like Bellarion’s abbot, I do not expect to be able to make much of an impression on Dr Beauvais as she has her armour of academic credentials, and the raft of knowledge collected from many thousands of academics discussing ideas among themselves with little reference to the outside world, and that armour is very strong. She has also made clear that she is not interested in the reality of giftedness, which she believes to be largely a construct of society.

Continue reading “Darn Those Mythological Gifted Kids Who Are a Construct of Our Social Norms”

Homeschooling My Gifted Kid, Part 2: What the Bleep is PG!?

Homeschooling My Gifted KId Part 2: What the Bleep is PG? yellowreadis.com Image: Old map

In this second part on our convoluted journey to homeschooling, I’d like to talk about the crazy slippery slope of figuring out what ‘gifted’ and ‘PG’ actually mean.

This is not meant to be a definitive guide for people trying to discover more about gifted kids, or IQ. This is just our personal journey, and a few of the curious signposts along the way.

What is high IQ?

This is actually pretty tricky to define. Is it ability? Talent? Potential? How do you define it? What does it mean? Is there more than one type of intelligence? Western society has been tying its metaphorical knickers about this for over a hundred years, and there’s still no end in sight.
Continue reading “Homeschooling My Gifted Kid, Part 2: What the Bleep is PG!?”