if anyone can help? (yr 5)

[RadioLater]

My son is 10 and year 5, September will be year 6. His report now states that he is
speaking and listening 4c, reading 2a, writing 2b, maths 3c, and science 4c. He is so behind everybody else - I really think that he may be dyslexic and am pushing the school to help. However based on these scores does anyone have another opinion? I really would appreciate your help, many thanks!r

I'm sorry to disagree with you CarGirl but, as with Davis Dyslexia, there is no good scientific evidence to support the use of primitve reflex therapy for reading difficulties:

'(I)t is still a concern that there has been a failure on the part of advocates of primitive reflex therapy to establish any convincing connection between infant motor reflexes and the complex process of learning to read' (Muter V. (2003) Early Reading Development and Dyslexia. Whurr. p 181)

The only truly evidence-based intervention for struggling readers, dyslexic or not, is systematic synthetic phonics.

www.dyslexics.org.uk

I wanted to add something to this thread as the parent of two dyslexic sons who successfully did the Davis Dyslexia program.

It is not a "quick fix" - the program itself (if done with a professional facilitator) is intensive (one-week), but that is just the beginning. It is a jumpstart - but there is work to be done afterward. I worked with my sons for about a year at home mastering the "sight words" (words like the, if, of, were...etc.) - because these are the words that cause so much trouble for dyslexics - there is no picture for them to think with. By mastering the meaning of these words, I watched both of my sons become completely independent readers and 7 years later, my oldest son continues to be an honor roll student (year 10).

My youngest son went through the program 4 years ago and is a straight A student. They are very different, but shared that gifted thinking style that makes processing words difficult.

So, I would caution people out there who comment on things that they know nothing about. You should do your research - you can ask for references, etc. The Davis program was THE ONLY thing that worked for my oldest son...and I wouldn't have considered any other program for my youngest.

Get the book (The Gift of Dyslexia by Ron Davis) and, if it resonates with you, look further into it. I would recommend going to a professional - there is a lot to the program - but if you can't afford to do that, there are many people who have been successful just by going through the steps in the book.

Good luck to you and your family. It is a journey for sure.

I was linking APD to retained reflexes, clearly my children made huge progress with APD without any intervention at all

I agree if someone has dyslexia or other specific reading problems then there is much more appropriate help/treatment out there!

"I worked with my sons for about a year at home mastering the "sight words" (words like the, if, of, were...etc.) - because these are the words that cause so much trouble for dyslexics - there is no picture for them to think with. "

I am absolutely mesmerised by this 'thinking in pictures' thing.

How does someone who 'thinks in pictures' learn to cope with the spoken word, which is, after all, a label for a lot of things which cannot be 'pictured'?

Did all these 'picture thinkers' learn to talk normally?

Davis himself didn't speak until he was 17, he was severely autistic. A speech therapist helped him. He says that before that they had tried phonics with him and it was torture for him and they gave up after a year.

MaizieD - I don't really know how it works - just that DD says she has a picture for every word in her head.

She finds it incredibly hard to learn new words. Normally she comes home from school able to say the concept they were taught - but not having learnt the word for it.

I bought her a doll last weekend, and she wanted to call it Lucy. Then she came up to me every few minutes for 2 days to ask me what she had called her doll! Because she had a picture of the doll in her head, but couldn't pin a word to it.

And like I illustrated before when I say something like 'funky monkey' it goes into her head as a picture and comes out as 'cool monkey'.

So the small words like 'if', 'of', 'the' they don't have a picture for and that is why they find it sooooo hard to read them.

So yes, I guess her speech does suffer. She is not particularly eloquent - although not so bad that you would notice. It's only apparant when you try to teach her a new word.

It makes sense to me, I think that most of us do think visually. A young Tony Buzan is very interesting on the subject
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfNwGwedzXw&feature=player_embedded#!

I never learnt phonics at school, and I can spell. I'm not sure how I do it but I think that my memory can associate the sound of the word "colonel" with an image made up of the individual letters of "colonel" which I see in a flash in my mind's eye. I certainly don't do any of that using phonics.

I think it is important to remain sceptical about Davis, simply because it is so expensive. I would have hoped that something that could help dyslexics could be much cheaper. However, his book is cheap. I haven't read it, but it sounds like it could be a cheap way of trying things out to see if it works.

It's a myth that dyslexics are compensated for their lack of phonological ability by being gifted in the artistic / visual-spatial sphere.

Comforting though this idea may be, it is simply 'opinion bolstered by anecdote'.

The late Martin Turner, former head of psychology at Dyslexia Action, thought it was a 'travesty' to talk about dyslexia as a bonus when it caused such suffering:

'It's a myth that there are compensatory gifts. Dyslexics go into the visual arts like sheep head for a gap in the hedge. They aren't more creative, they are more stressed.'(Jardine)

Dr. Rice and Professor Brooks came to the same conclusion. 'On anecdotal evidence, the belief that ?difficulty in learning to read is not a wholly tragic life sentence but is often accompanied by great talents? may seem attractive. However, systematic investigation has found little if any support for it.' (Rice/ Brooks p18)

The 'dyslexic' journalist A A Gill confirmed this view when he wrote, 'In truth, of course, dyslexics end up in the art room or the music studio or the drama class after school, because it?s the only place they aren?t special-needs remedial. They get good because they can?t do anything else.' (Times 08/04/07 The Fish Club)

I'm also fascinated by the images/pictures thing. Because what are written words but images - visual representations of sounds? If dyslexic people have the 'gift' of seeing images, why don't they see the image of the word? 'If', for example, looks very distinctive, so why can't the picture of an 'if' be remembered? I'm not doubting dyslexia, I'm just fascinated by how people who are apparently very visual can't do this very visual thing - take meaning from images.

I think the gift thing and special talents is something to be wary of, and may possibly be a sales pitch, and I agree that if reading is causing people difficulty then they will naturally gravitate to subjects that don't involve it such as art or music.

However, I don't think that these things by themselves invalidate a visual learning approach. Could Davis still be right that some people have difficulty learning phonologically, that it is not suited to them, and that there are other visual methods which may help them?

Is Buzan right in identifying the visual memory aspect?

singersgirl, Davis says that "if" has no real visual meaning. You can associate an image to an elephant so it can be remembered, but you can't associate an image with "if". He says that dyslexics have problems with letters, they merge into each other and they can't decipher them. He says that they need to concretize the letters into meaningful words by attaching images to them, and I think that is why he concentrates on building clay models of words, so that the abstract words can be represented as real images or symbols that have meaning.

Maverick - I am not saying that she is gifted in art - I am saying that she thinks in pictures instead of words.

SingersGirl - I know it sounds crazy. I don't know why she can't remember letters. But she really really can't. I think it's because they're abstract.

She has been having a 20 minutes daily phonics lesson for 2 years - and so far has only learnt the 26 letters and 6 diagraphs. After 2 years! Letters just really don't stick in her brain.

IndigoBell, is she unable to remember numbers either? If you showed her some random numbers, say 25, 71 and 54, would she be able to say what they were?

No, she can't do numbers either. A few weeks ago for her homework she was trying to write the number '39' and she asked me 'does the 5 come first or second?'

I really do believe it. It's just that for me, each letter looks very distinctive, and so do words. I understand about associating words with concrete images and why a word like 'if' would have no obvious image. I've got a good friend who's a graphic designer, but also dyslexic and he can spot tiny details that are different in designs, but can't see that it should be an 'i', not an 'a', in the middle of Scandinavia. And for me, the word 'Scandinavia' is a picture and if there's an 'a' in the middle, not an 'i', the picture's wrong. I find it fascinating.

But 'Scandinavia' is just a group of smaller 'words', ie, Scan di na vi a' (the 'i' often represents 'ee' in polysyllabic words). Add to this a spelling voice for the 'a' at the end and you have it. He doesn't need to just rely on the visual image?? I have watched my daughter have her Sounds-Write lessons and her tutor regularly worked with her on polysyllabic words. It really helped my spelling too.

Indigo Bell . . . my daughter struggled to remember letters too but her tutor taught them in words, just a few at a time. In school they were just giving her all of the letters randomly and she just got confused.

I looked at Easyread (sorry don't know if this is anything to do with Davis) too. On the video he said there are 1200 graphemes and 70 odd sounds in English. This seems quite a lot to remember. There are actually only 175 graphemes and 44 sounds?

Just wanted to say thank you for all your replies. DS's confidence is at an all time low at the moment but I will explore the websites mentioned. I did ask him if he could spell 'elephant' and whether he saw a picture in his head. He couldn't spell it and didn't see a picture either. However, he is tired after a sleepover and has been out most of the day with friends. I really appreciate all your responses and am that my ds is not the only one experiencing these kind of difficulties.

I agree with singersgirl, I don't think we break words down into their individual letters like that. As Tony Buzan said we form an image of the entire word which we visualise in our mind's eye in an instantaneous flash and we can spot a discrepancy in the word at the speed of light, we are not mechanically phonetically breaking the word up. The more we see the word written down, the more this image becomes enforced. If we were to see the word spelt incorrectly again and again, we would also begin to misspell it. That is the danger of constantly being exposed to the word "definately".

I dont know where this fits in with the whole seing words as pictures, but I am not a great speller although I am an avid reader. So when I am writing a word and I spell it wrong I often know Ive spelt it wrong but I might not know where the mistake is. So I will try to spell it another way and another way until it looks right.

Other times I will happily mis-spell a word and be completly unaware until somebody points it out.

If Im a copying out text or a phone number I can only take in a few words or numbers at a time. But if I am playing visual memory games such as, I went to the shops and bought... I can remember a whole line of items in order. I think this is where visual pictures come in to short term memory and how some people use them to overcome reading difficulties.

"So when I am writing a word and I spell it wrong I often know Ive spelt it wrong but I might not know where the mistake is. So I will try to spell it another way and another way until it looks right."

I think that is exactly right, when you spell it wrong the picture doesn't match the one held in your memory. You keep changing it until it looks right and matches the picture in memory.

But if the picture in your memory is wrong then you can happily misspell it until the cows come home, and you will only change it when someone points it out, after which you will commit the new picture to memory.

I would be very wary of taking a few people's theories or experiences of spelling and saying that that is how it is for everyone! After all, it is apparent from this thread that not everyone even 'thinks' the same way.

Having said that, the 'look' of a word is the way I spot my own spelling errors, but it isn't a purely visual/picture thing for me; I can also see that I have spelled a particular sound in the word incorrectly. So it is a mixture of familiarity with the word from having read it hundreds/thousands of times and familiarity with the correct spelling of letter/sound correspondences.

IndigoBell: 'she was trying to write the number '39' and she asked me 'does the 5 come first or second?'

This is an example of expressive memory, which is involved with spelling -rather than receptive memory -memory with a prompt, which is what reading involves and is much easier.

So, would she recognise the number 39 if she saw it written down?

Is her phonics done 1-1 (or does she have any 1-1-), does she have to learn 'sight words' and does she get ORT or other repetitive/predicatable text books to read?

Maverick - distinction between expressive memory and receptive memory is interesting. I will do some further research.

In the last few months she has got far better with numbers, and now gets 2 digit numbers right most of the time. But this is fairly recent.

I just asked her to remember two numbers - 27 and 31. She could repeat them back to me. Then 30 secs later I asked her 'What were those numbers?' and she said 72 and 31! So something interesting happening there.

As for reading... She has had 2 years of 20 minutes daily phonics as part of read, write, inc in a group of 4.

In order to teach her her 45 reception high frequency words (she is in year 2) she has also had twice weekly 1-1 on those sight words. (I think after 3 years of teaching them she's almost learnt them)

At the start of Year 2 she was not secure on her alphabet (especially capital letters.) Now by the end of year 2 she's managed to learn all her letters + 6 diagraphs. Only 12 more to go?

She does bring home both ORT and Read, Write, Inc. But TBH I don't read the ORT books with her because they're too hard. Instead I have been reading decodable books with her at home.

While she just got a 1A in her KS1 SATS, she has also just been assessed by the SpLD team who gave her a reading age of 5.7 and said:

Whilst the SAT suggests she is almost at level 2 on the National Curriculum, she did not demonstrate this in reading real words, nonsense words, or real passages. Her test performance is below level 1, which would be a real concern if accurate.

I know the synthetic phonics brigade think that kids get confused if taught both methods - but I'm not seeing evidence of her being confused.

I know she sounds like she's retarded. But honestly she's not, she's of perfectly average intelligence. And speaks fine.

Why are schools unwilling to label a kid dyslexic. My ds was diagnosed through the NHS. We were lucky as we were exploring other issues.

A recent meeting with the Ed Psy at school demonstrated a reluctance to label despite much evidence. In fact in a 60 min meeting the word was never uttered.

drosophila, I'm sure it's down to money and funding, once diagnosed (which costs money) they have to provide resources which cost more money!