Dyslexia advice needed please

Have you had her checked by a specialist Behavioural Optometrist? Often children don't have visual convergence so they see 2 images at once. A regular optometrist can't test for this as it is only obvious with prolonged visual work. A visiograph test may prove revealing. PM me.

There was a channel 4 series about teaching adults to read.
One of the things that helped them was making letters. They used pipecleaners, but I've heard play doh suggested for DCs.
Another lady made the letters shapes with her hands.
Anything that makes letters or numbers tangible, not just symbols on a page
A friend says borrowing maths equipment that clearly had units, sticks of ten beads and sheets of 100 help her DD get unstuck with visualising place value and bigger numbers.
My DD is dyslexic, as am I (although I've only realised that as an adult).
I find isolated facts, names, numbers, French vocab. very hard to remember, but anything scientific much easier. I think this because science and a lot of physical geography have a narrative to them the facts link to tell a story. Also there are often diagrams too!
There has to be a reason for something to go past my dreadful short term memory.
Spellings simply don't get processed at all, both DD1 and I can read words from context without registering more than a few letters and the general shape of the word.
The ed.psychologist likened DDs learning to a wall with lots of holes at the bottom.
Yes she can read, but she's developed lots of coping strategies for the fact that she didn't know her letter shapes, phonics or basic sight words at the appropriate age.
Her spelling is nonexistent, she can't always find an approximation which hampers her written work totally. Even though she knows the answers.
This is rather long and rambling, but what I'm trying to say is don't be surprised if your DD has to massively over learn simple things using reception type tools. Play these sort of games along side age appropriate reading.
It really did take until Y6 for DD to spell come, some, could and should.

Hi I recognise everything you have said as things we saw in our son. We had to help him ourselves as the school was so slow to pick up on the problem. It was always "it's early days he'll catch up".
Any way I pulled out my older sons Letterland book, lovely pics and started from there, Starfall.com has lovely animated videos to learn letter patterns. He loved pictures and couldn't concentrate for long on story books. We moved on to cat in the hat. I started this when he was 7, so you have a couple of years on us.
He's 13 now and doing really well in secondary, I have a blog which I have kept for ooh probably 6 yrs at matthewstory.blogspot.com with all the ups and downs and some techniques we used with him. His word finding difficulties were awful when he was younger but thankfully things are much better now.
Of course your daughter is very young and she may pick up quickly with extra help from yourself.
Good luck!

I have a son who was diagnosed with dyslexia last year, he has just turned ten. For years we knew that something was not right as he could not read but we kept thinking that he would "get there". He was getting extra lessons at his school which we paid for but it was still not enough as he needed a different approach to learning. He loves sport and is outgoing and if you met him you would not know that he had an issue. After talking him to have a formal assessment we were advised that if we wanted him to read then the best thing for him would be to go to a specialist school. We were devastated as he was at a lovely private school. A month after the diagnosis we made the decision to take him out of the school as to leave him there was doing him a disservice as he was being left behind. We looked at a number of schools in London and in the country! We then decided to have another assessment with Jane Emerson from Emmerson House in Hammersmith. Jane was really fantastic, she gave us good advice as to which schools to look at. We narrowed it down to two schools, Bruern Abbey and Appleford. In the end we decided on Appleford as my son felt happier there even though it is a lot further for us to travel on a weekly basis. My son has been there for nearly a year and we have seen a vast improvement in his reading and he loves boarding. The staff and teachers at the school are very supportive and have the right idea to learning. The classes as small with a one to four ratio, this makes a vast difference for a child who cannot read. I am really happy with Appleford and have no hesitating in recommending the school to anyone who have a child with dyslexia. It is not a cheap option but one worth doing if you can afford it.

I can't really help you with what to do. We have had such a bad experience of everything and my daughter will probably never read (she's 12 now). I don't want to scare you with our story.

But my friend's daughter who goes to a fancy school had it picked up from the first term (as you have done) and with a similar profile to my daughter now has a reading age above her chronological age.

Another friend sent her son off to a specialist dyslexic teacher once a week (at huge cost) again his reading age shot up and now, at 9, he's got reading age close to that.

I guess what I'm saying is do something, don't leave it to the teachers at the school. Get the best help you can afford. If you can't afford it, spend as much time as you can researching different ways of teaching her yourself.

Good luck.

She's so lucky that she's got you. That you've noticed it and want to help her.

There'll be people along shortly who will tell you exactly what to do but whatever it is, keep it fun. Dyslexic kids can feel like they're being punished - punished at school for not being able to keep up and then when they get home they have to do more work! If you can keep her attitude positive, baby steps and all that, it will help. Try to get it so she's eager to do the extras with you (bribery works very well).

I work at a secondary school where we have tutors who can diagnose dyslexia using various tests.

Dyslexia is not a disability, very often these children are extremely bright and many mask the problem by using their own learned strategies - maybe this is what your child is doing now and why it sometimes goes unnoticed at school. Clever huh!
Within the school I work at, many reach year 12 without diagnosis. It is at that time, when the pace of work increases and the complexity changes that it becomes less easy for them to hide. So we have a high number of newly diagnosed very bright/able dyslexic students in Year 12 who will be successful at AS and A level.
There is no magic wand you can wave to remove the reluctance for intervention, just patience, kindness and perseverance. It may be worth reminding her that there are many successful people in this world who have dyslexia including none other than Mr Richard Branson.