I could do with a bit of perspective here, because the more I read about dyslexia, the more confused I get. Some people say it's been valuable to have the 'label' and understand what's happening, some people say dyslexia doesn't really exist and it's all because of bad teaching/not enough phonics/wrong sort of phonics/a massive profit-making industry making money out of middle-class parents and their not-clever-enough-for-today's-world kids....
Anyway. I've been worried for YEARS about my DS. He's almost 10 and struggles to put a sentence together without one-to-one help and prompting. He's never produced more than about three-quarters of a page of often badly misspelled writing in a school lesson. He will often copy down words wrongly. He does read - he loves Beast Quest books at the moment, though I'm moving him on to Roald Dahl and James Patterson - his reading aloud can be really expressive when I stop him skipping over stuff and rushing and guessing. He never really got phonics. Although he seems to understand the process of breaking words down when you explain it to him, he doesn't use it as a strategy for decoding, and it has never been automatic. He knows a word or he doesn't, full stop. Writing anything for a homework task is really painful. He will sit there, stare into space, cry, gouge his pencil into the paper, until you sit with him and chivvy, coax or nag him. Sometimes he will produce something really good. Most of the time it's utterly frustrating.
I've been doing the Letts Spelling Success age 8-9 with him to help with spelling and grammar as I don't think the school has a systematic enough approach for him. We saw his teacher yesterday for a routine meeting and it was worrying to see that he was only on about 2c for writing and 3a for reading when most of his class (yes, we peeked) seemed to be motoring on 4's. His maths is OK but I worry that if he is dyslexic, it may affect his performance on some of the non-arithmetic maths that comes up in year 5, and his ability to analyse word problems. He does get extra help at school with literacy, although I wonder if that's enough for him. Thing is, he's not low-enough achieving to be classified as SN, but at the same time there's clearly some problem here which is causing huge frustration. We aren't well off (not for this area of the country, anyway) and don't have ££££ to spare for private everything, and I'm well aware that statutory help doesn't really cover this sort of thing. Is it worth getting him assessed by someone, or would I just be (as my DH seems to think) wasting my money on a stigmatising label?
Sorry about the long post. 