We had Noah's parent teacher conferences a couple weeks ago. It was interesting to talk to his teacher and hear about how he is doing from her perspective instead of the "fine" that I get every time I ask him a question about school. He is doing well, and we were glad to hear that he is a good listener and comes to school happy and positive and is a good role model for the other students. Noah is going to get an award next week during a school assembly for being the student of the month for the character trait of the month, 'responsibility'. He doesn't know it yet, and Seth and I and his grandparents are all going to see him "accept his award". I hope he remembers to thank God and his supportive parents during his acceptance speech.
His teacher e-mailed me a few days later and said that she forgot to ask if I had any concerns with Noah naming his colors. She noticed that he was not able to do a patterning activity that the class was doing using orange and green Applejacks. Considering that the kid can do multiplication and fractions, I kind of just brushed any color mistakes off as him not caring or being careful. If he would name a color wrong (usually orange, green, or brown), I would ask "what is it?" and then he would name it correctly. I remember asking his preschool teacher about it and wondering if maybe he was colorblind, but then kind of forgot about it.
His kindergarten teacher said that she was going to have the school nurse check him for color blindness. I promptly googled all the information out there about color blindness and even found an online test for kids. http://colorvisiontesting.com/online%20test.htm I had him do it and he was not able to see the shapes that they say colorblind kids cannot see. There is a picture of a boat and I asked him to say what picture he saw and he said there was no picture. Ella came toodling in at that point and pointed to the computer and said "boat" and Noah looked at her like she was crazy. I realize that information on the internet isn't always the most accurate, so we'll wait and see what the nurse says and go from there. But it was interesting that he clearly could not see the pictures on the online test and Ella and I both could.
If he is colorblind, it makes Seth and I a little sad. No parent wants there to be anything "wrong" with their children or for their children to struggle in any way, even if it is just seeing the difference between green and orange Applejacks. But then I remind myself of all the illnesses, handicaps, birth defects, diseases, etc. that are out there and that helps to put colorblindness into perspective. So far, it has not impacted his academic learning in any way. And he has learned to compensate by knowing what color to say next if he guessed the color wrong the first time. If this is the worst thing for him to deal with in his life, I think we will be A-Okay!
1 comment:
Poor Noah! Although you are right to put it all in perspective. It's really amazing and a testament to Noah's ability that he was able to compensate for this long! And I think that those color blindness tests on the computer are the exact same thing that the vision people give.
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