over reaction to dyslexia -any advise welcome

[bejeezus]

my dd is in year 1. She is very bright and enthusiastic about school and learning new things. She has struggled with reading and 'sounds' and is not interested in practicing. Today her teacher told me they are quite sure she is dyslexic. She is already getting extra help in class and is taken out of class. They said she will get more help. They said she has problems with symbol recognition. She has apparently developed good coping skills.

Ridiculously, I cried. I feel inexplicably really upset about it. I dont know why really. I dont want her to struggle and loose interest in education but I was never determined that she would be a lawyer or a doctor or anything.

I need to read about dyslexia but wondered if any of you have any experience/ advice;

what DOES it ACTUALLY mean for her life?

are there personality traits associated with dyslexia?

is it a given that she will not do well academically?

is it stigmatised? do your kids get picked on for being dyslexic?

in some ways, I feel a bit relieved-it is explains quite a lot

Slight hijack

Cheesesarnie if your ds is having trouble with coordination etc it might be worth seeing an OT to get him checked for retained reflexes.

Hijack over

DS1 has reading and spelling issues (no formal DX he is 7 and in Yr3) the school has been doing one on one with him for a couple of years and he is seeing an OT as he does have retained reflexes. He has gone from lacking in confidence and reading significantly below his chronological age to reading probably a little better than his age. However, the big improvements have been in other subjects such as maths where he has leapt forward this year.

If difficulties are recognised reasonably early then strategies can be put in place to reduce the knock on impact of the reading and writing difficulties e.g. if DS is struggling to get his homework down on paper the school accepts him dictating to me and I scribe for him.
So whilst ds1 is unlikely to be come the school spelling expert! is other subjects are no longer being held back by his difficulties with reading and writing.

Does anyone remember Rupert Penry-Jones on "Who do you think you are" struggling to read the copperplate handwriting in some of the old documents because he is dyslexic. It doesn't seem to have held him back in his career.

No, but he is rather gorgeous isn't he

• which may help when you're an actor !

Hi, I just wanted to add another voice saying that dyslexic people can and do do all sorts of things. It runs in my family. My little brother had a lot of trouble and didn't learn to read properly for a very long time (it is great your DD has been picked up early, this will be a big help). But he got a 2:1 from a Russell Group in History (not your typical 'dyslexic' subject). I'm dyslexic and I am in the middle of a PhD in English Lit - again, not typical dyslexic - and I teach university students.

I am going to go read the thread slowly now but the title came up in 'Active Threads' and I just wanted to say this as so often people told me/my brother we couldn't do essay writing subjects or couldn't cope, but actually with the great support out there now, we are fine. And at primary school, no-one teaching my brother thought he would go on in education past age 16, no one.

Ok, something I think is very characteristic of dyslexia that hasn't been mentioned is that lots of dyslexics will find they have a rather uneven learning curve. So, you might expect a NT child who's coming up as average at year 1, and at year 3, and at year 5, to do the same in years 2, 4 and 6. But a dyslexic may be much, much more all over the place than that.

Dyslexics usually have to develop coping strategies in response to the way they're being taught, so they can't always just get on with learning ... they have to work out how to learn, first. An example would be, I have almost no visual memory, and so I didn't really find it easy to remember what the shapes of numbers meant. So all the time I was meant to be learning the concept of number-bonds, I had this additional problem that I couldn't remember which squiggle represented which number.

If you're dyslexic, you might have bits of time at school when you see to plateau, or even seem to go backwards. This is because teaching styles may expect you to have certain skills you don't have - like me not knowing my number-shapes. But - the good thing about dyslexia - is that once you get the coping strategy in place, there's nothing holding you back any more and you may make a big jump forward. So, to continue my example, once I finally learned which squiggle was three and which was five, it was fine. I went from being really struggling with arithmetic, to average/good. You wouldn't expect a NT child to make that kind of leap on a routine basis, but dyslexics often will.

This is why I want to say, don't feel there's anything your DD can't do! She's 5 - she and you won't know yet what she wants to do, and I know that. But you see these coping strategies have a cumulative effect - the more she learns to get around the problems, the more tools she has in reserve for next time something is hard, and the better she will be as a learner.

FWIW, loads of engineers are dyslexic - I heard 1 in 4 at my uni - because it's exactly the kind of adaptable, prroblem-solving skills you need.

Whew! Sorry for the monster post ....

Please don't apologise - it's all fab stuff, and fabulously helpful and encouraging.
Actually I think I probably have mild dyslexia myself as well as mild ? ADD.

I've never been able to get my head around a word like ocassional for example.
I can never remember whether it's one c and two s's, or two c's and one s !

Though occasionally I might get it right especially with spell-check !
When I was at primary school I'd put a double letter wherever it might be feasible ! - t's, l's, f's & s's were always a good gamble

Also what you said about recognising figures helped me realise one reason why I found it extra hard to learn Japanese, when the kind Japanese ladies teaching us insisted in teaching it in hirigana ( A fiendish Japanese script !)
Generally though was never good at languages - didn't have the memory for it.
Was best at something like geography which had, for me, more memorable, logical and interesting information.

Oh god yes, juggling! I tried to learn Russian script and it is awful. I'm just useless at it.

I think it's more common for dyslexics to have good visual/spatial memory and poor aural/semantic, but memory deficits of all kinds are pretty common.

Do primary teachers generally learn about techniques for teaching dyslexic children, does anyone know? Or does it have to come via the SENCO?

I did a PGCE at Exeter Uni.
There was very little (in the one year) about special needs, organising your timetable, classroom organisation, or managing behaviour of the children.
From my experience you learn most of it (or not ) on the job, in the classroom.
Or from life experience.

Thanks juggling, that's interesting.

lionheart- i spoke to our local dyslexia centre today. she was advocating weekly tuition at the centre. I told her that I wasnt sure it was necessary as the school seemed keen to do alot for dd with extra support and taking her out of class.

She said it is VERY RARE for any teachers in school to have specific training for teaching dyslexic children- or sometime minimal training. In her experience she said, often when they are taken out of class it is just for extra reading, which she reckoned was pretty ineffective. Where as specifically dyslexic tutoring is helping them find different ways of reading/learning and tools for coping

blimey-dont apologise for long posts and hijacks- like juggling said- all good interesting stuff

I am in the education dept of a university and I am told the SEN input of their primary ed degree is half a day to cover all of it; it is the most skipped single session of the course

I have a relative who works for a dyslexia charity and from what I've heard, it sounds as if your dyslexia centre is really good. It is true teachers often have little training - though loads of course will have picked it up on the jjob and will be great, extra reading alone would be a bit crap imo. It needs to be targeted. The worst thing would be for your DD to feel she's failing and getting extra lessons in the same exact thing so she can fail all over again.

My experience is based on having dated 3 guys in my youth who has dyslexia, so not very scientific, only anecdotal and only relating to 3 people.

All were extremely bright, all developed amazing different ways of coping and hiding the fact they had the condition, all would not really like to tell people about it, not in a denial kind of way, I think they didn't want to be judged or treated differently.

All of them were unique very different people, the only similar trait that was very subtle, and on the 3rd guy I guessed he had dyslexia and asked him if he did, they all seemed to miss some verbal control machanism where things seemed to come out of their mouth that other people might censor. When I found out Jonathan Ross was dyslexic I was not surprised, because it was a similar thing where sometimes when you watch him you can't quite believe what comes out of his mouth, you think other people would stop themselves.

Also as another poster said one told me he thought in images not words. All were very creative in their own way.

Because of these experiences I always get a bit when some thick person is happy to sit there and proudly announce they have dyslexia (have experienced this in the workforce), and wonder if it is sometimes used these days as an excuse to cover up poor teaching, and give teachers an excuse not to even try to teach some kids, and the kids a reason not to try. No one I have ever known well with dylexia has used it as an excues for anything.

Dyslexia runs in my family in fact virtually all the boys in the last two generations are dyslexic (my son, brother, nephew and two cousins). I don't think that they have anything more in common with each other than the rest of us apart from their struggles with the written word, but one of my cousins told my son that he thought dyslexics had special brains, which perked him up no end. All have SEN but are also very bright, and the adults have successful careers.

ds wants to be either a defense lawyer, a research doctor or a trillionaire video game designer, and at 12 I think it is good to encourage his ambitions (but remind him that he also needs to work a bit harder!)

We struggled a bit to get him diagnosed when he was younger, as school were much more keen at looking at the autism spectrum (he is a somewhat idiosyncratic child), and took him off to a dyslexia action assessment (which was great, really helpful to understand where his strengths and weaknesses lie). However school did pretty much nothing apart from accept that he had some difficulties as he wasn't far enough behind in their opinion (the fact that he should have been far ahead didn't interest them much).

So on the suggestion of maverick here on MN I got him some tutoring by a Sound Reading System tutor and it totally transformed his reading. Essentially they took him back to basics and taught him how to approach reading like a code, and it clicked. Now he loves reading (although he is very picky). His writing is still atrocious, but with IT that can be overcome (my brother is a management consultant and 'writes' his reports using voice recognition software).

So OP, don't despair, get some extra specialist coaching if you can (we only had six sessions for ds), and I think that when you are clear where your dd's problems lie then yes do talk to her about it.

FWIW, in reply to fapl's post:

A long time ago, people used routinely to diagnose dyslexia by looking, basically, at the gap between the things you did best at and the things you did worst at. This is still a really good sign of dyslexia. You'd expect an average, NT person to score roughly 100 at most testable skills on an IQ-type test. Obviously, loads of people will have variations - better at somet things than others. It used to be common to diagnose someone as dyslexic when they had a gap of 40 or more points betweeen their lowest and highest scores, that wasn't explained by something else (eg., obviously, a partially sighted person will have a poor visual memory, but that's what you expect).

People don't, as far as I know, do something quite that simple any more. But you'd still expect a dyslexic to come out with a seriously uneven profile - some skills much weaker than others. I think this is where the 'bright but quirky' stereotype comes from. I think people have got much better at identifying dyslexia in people whose overall IQ isn't so high, relatively recently. But you have to remember those people are going to struggle just as much, if not more, than pbright peopel with the same pattern of difficulties. Does that make sense?

I justt wanted to say that to answer the point about being suspicious of not-so-bright dyslexics. I don't mean it in any way as a reflection on bejeezus's DD, and indeed it seems extremely unlikely they'd have been able to see she had a problem unless she's bright, because it's so early on.

I am quite taken aback by how little training is available for teachers.

At the University where I work, 30% of students registered as dyslexic get the diagnosis after they have arrived.

Lots of fantastic advice on here, though.

Lionheart - out of interest what is the percentage (roughly) of female students diagnosed as being dyslexic at universtity

It's pretty common for people to get diagnosed when they move from one school to another, or infants to juniors, or into university - it's that jump up that can cause problems that were hidden to become obvious. I don't know figures for my university but it was interesting to see that in my last class (English students) there was someone who'd very recently gone in for diagnosis. And I heard that it is almost routine for staff in certain subject areas (engineering!) to send their students to chat to someone at the Disability Resource Centre at the slightest sign of a problem.

I also know someone who is in the process of getting tested in the second year of a PhD - if she has it that is awful, because she will have been struggling for so long. It's so good when people can tell early on!

I'm interested as I was told that girls with dyslexia frequently fall through the net missed in school and are often picked up at university.

I would like to know the answer to that too - not finding any stats on google and I expect you'd only get stats for those who decided to claim DSA, but it'd be really interesting.

I don't know how often this is true, but I think my dyslexia was more obvious to some teachers because I didn't have that nice neat handwriting and careful presentation people still think of as a 'girl' thing.

CQ--I don't know the answer to that but I wonder if there has been any research.

This is interesting. openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=398452§ion=2.3.1

Just wondering if dyslexia may be missed more often in the less able as there wouldn't be the discrepancy thing so much to point towards a diagnosis. Yet surely it's possible for a less able child to also struggle with the same sort of
difficulties.

I think that is often what happens juggling - of course the discrepancy is still there, but harder to test for. It is really, really, difficult to test someone who is getting very slow scores because increasingly you find the tests just rely on you having certain basic skills. I'm not especially unintelligent, but I know some of my scores are depressed because I just don't have the ancillary skills to complete tests. However hard people try to construct a test that is perfect at only testing the skill you want to isolate, it's never completely possible.

One more reason not to worry too much about test sscores imo, but you're right it must be very tough on less able people.

very low* scores, not very slow scores ... oops!