Would you be concerned about these literacy difficulties - year 2

[belindarose]

Very little writing produced

Always 'too tired' to read/ write at home

Cries a lot at writing tasks

Can't copy anything written

Reversal of some letters (even her own initial) and reversal of lots of digraphs and short words ('fo' for 'of' for example)

Reversal of numerals and digits within numbers (not a place value issue as she is excellent with this)

Despite good phonics based teaching of reading, will often see a letter in the middle of a word and make a guess from that, or will read the last syllable in a word first.

Struggles with some printed texts - capital letters, different fonts (especially 'a')

She's always loved being read to and can often be really fluent when reading aloud.

Handwriting is joined, cursive, well sized, legible.

She is hugely imaginative and loves to draw and tell stories.

Good logic and mental maths, although written output at school looks minimal.

Any alarm bells for anyone?
Thanks.

It sounds to me as though she is pretty well 'there' in much of her reading, but many children will sometimes 'guess' at a word rather not say anything, or say they don't know.

As a TA, listening to children read, sometimes if I did not quite hear what they said, and asked them to repeat the word, they would often say a DIFFERENT word, as if they suspected my asking to hear it again implied they had made a mistake, rather than I genuinely had not heard it clearly.

As someone else said, I am concerned about this 'lack of stamina' that you have mentioned several times, but I'm not entirely clear exactly what you mean.

I am pretty sure that her reading is not too far from where she should be, but there may be certain areas she is confused over. To help with that, and to boost her confidence I would suggest that you both would find this book really useful:

?An inexpensive and easy to use book, that can encourage children with reading, spelling and writing, and really help them to understand Phonics, is reviewed in the MN Book Reviews section. Just search ‘Phonics’ and my name.

..she said 'oh, Mrs X says phonics is different to English and although you can sound out in phonics, English is really hard and doesn't make sense so you sometimes have to just guess'.

Well, thank goodness that's one complete mystery solved! How utterly irresponsible of Mrs X!

Your next problem will be overriding the influence of Mrs X

I wonder if Mrs X is contributing to her feeling of being bad at things, too?

Thankfully, Mrs x is teacher for only a few more weeks before we move. New school has been carefully selected based on head's ability to explain phonics, assessment and new curriculum to me!

I'm so glad to hear you are escaping from Mrs X .

But I do feel sorry for the children who she continues to teach. I don't think that your DD will be the only child she has managed to confuse...