DS (8) struggles with reading, writing, spelling. Overall he has developmental delay - young for his age, late to develop language etc. He has no diagnosis and the delay is assumed to be due to early years experience- being in care / adopted.
He has poor phonics awareness. We’ve been doing games, flash cards, online systems daily and reading consistently for the last two years (reading with him daily since he started school). For example we’ve been going over phonemes such as “air” and “ear” since before he started year 2 - brainstorming words they appear in, writing them, spelling them etc - he can read both as words but struggles to recognise the sound as part of a larger word. In lockdown it felt like the repetition and structure of home schooling moved him on. He’s fallen back since school holidays despite us still reading each day.
He is approx two years behind. He guesses words constantly - even short ones “of” can become “for” or “on” for example even though he’s read it thousands of times. He unsuccessfully decodes words putting in letters that aren’t there (often a t or a r). He finds longer words easier sometimes- maybe because their shape is distinctive. He will forget a word that he’s read in the last sentence even though he has an amazing memory generally and we’ve sounded it out etc). He sometimes gets letters backwards - b d p q and 9 although this has got better. He can read words that kids would spell in Year 1 but he knows them by sight and so progress is slow as he not using phonics so cant apply what he knows to new words. He’ll often read the end of a word wrong eg add “ed” when it’s “ing”.
He doesn’t read independently. He saw me reading the other day and thought I was pretending as I wasn’t saying the words.
He is a very reluctant hand writer. His writing isn’t good. He needs to be reminded about punctuation, spacing things out, misses out words and has poor awareness of whether a word will fit when he gets to the end of a line. He struggled to read his own writing back. He can verbally tell me a story using good imagination, detail etc with no problems.
He’s better with maths (but still behind). School SENCO isn’t great. They have never suggested it could be anything other than delay. They have provided some TA support as part of a group but it doesn’t feel as though they change gear / identify imaginative approaches when what works for the majority doesn’t work for DS.
For those of you with kids who have a dyslexia diagnosis - what triggered you getting an assessment?