9yo DS is in Y4 and has always struggled with his reading and has never enjoyed it (despite loving stories and being read to). In Y1 he needed some additional support in class (as part of a small group) to work on phonics and general understanding and, although he has obviously improved since then, he still finds reading difficult. Now in Y4, he regularly skips lines and small words when reading, eg it, an, of, as, etc. He also struggles to read longer words if he doesn?t recognise them immediately and will make no attempt to break the word down into chunks. He just makes up a word that begins with the same letter (even if it isn?t a real word). He has been to see a behavioural optometrist who prescribed glasses for close work but nothing else out of the ordinary was noted.
Tonight, he was reading and was skipping words again, reading in a very halting way and clearly struggling. I asked him what the words looked like on the page and he told me that they were fuzzy. This was with his glasses on and the book VERY close to his face. I put the book on his knee, pointed to a word, and asked him to read it to me. He couldn?t. I asked him to tell me what he thought the letters were and he got quite a few of the letters wrong. I then asked him if the words were doing anything and he told me that the words in italic (a few lines on the page) were jumping about a bit. I also asked him why he skipped the small words and he said it was because he didn?t see them.
Over the years, we have had concerns about his general literacy levels. He is in the bottom group at school and struggles to complete tasks in class, his spelling is poor and he finds it difficult to structure his writing (punctuation, order of sentences, etc). However, in CAT tests over the past two years he has scored well above average in all three tests. We have tried to raise our concerns with teachers but are always told that he is doing OK and there is no need to worry, he just needs to work on xyz. At the last parent evening, his teacher asked if we had noticed that he struggles with two-step instructions. When I asked her if we should be concerned about it, she said no.
I?m not so sure. My gut feeling is that it is part of a wider problem. DS struggles to stay on task and focussed with lots of things, whether it?s getting dressed for school, at swimming lessons or doing homework. He lacks confidence and thinks he is stupid, it?s heart-breaking to hear him say this and he is such a lovely, caring and bright boy. I feel we are letting him down and should be pushing more to really get to the bottom of whatever the problem is. I just don?t know where to start or who to push, the school just bat away our concerns.
Sorry again for the long post, thanks for getting to the end. Any advice would really be appreciated.