DD is 6 years old and in Year 2. She struggled quite a bit with blending words in Reception and the first term of Year 1, before it all seemed to click for her. I just pulled out her end of year report and she ended Y1 with 38/40 on her phonics check and ‘working at greater depth’ for both reading and writing.
However, for the last couple of months I have started to suspect that her reading may not be anywhere near as strong as it seems, so I asked her to read a new book to me without letting her do her usual trick of squirrelling it off to her room to study it first. She was unable to make it past the first page before giving up in tears. The book was ‘If I Ran The Circus’ and the two sentences she struggled with were ‘In all the whole town, the most wonderful spot’ and ‘it’s just the right spot for my wonderful plans’ (I was reading every other sentence). She got the first word ‘in’ wrong, saying ‘of’ instead, and made other wildly inaccurate guesses with words like ‘whole’, ‘spot’ and ‘plans’, despite pausing to think about them. We have loads of Dr Seuss books, and if I were to pull any one from the shelf and ask her to read it she would do so happily, fluently and with great expression.
She also mixes up symbols (+ x – divide) in maths, sometimes writes numerals in the wrong order (e.g. ‘90’ as ‘09’ or ‘14’ as ‘41’), can’t see non-vertical lines of symmetry and confuses quarter to/past when telling the time.
She has beautiful handwriting but she takes ages to write anything, crossing/rubbing out and re-writing up to half her words. Her spelling is generally phonetically accurate. She still has to concentrate to tell the difference between p, d and b when sounding out words.
She has become increasingly anxious that she is falling behind at school this year, despite her teacher saying she is bright and getting on well.
I think she’s probably ‘just’ an over-anxious perfectionist. However, my Dad has mild (or at least very well compensated) dyslexia that was not picked up until adulthood, so I wonder…
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Could DD be masking something like dyslexia?
22 replies
SitsOnFence · 03/02/2017 13:14
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