What is going on with my son, and am i making it worse?!

[Twinkladdictmum]

Internet, please diagnose my child! He is 6. He's very articulate, chatty, emotionally switched on, great communication skills, creative and so so cuddly! His school is Outstanding, within the top 100 in the country for literacy, amazing sats etc. And my boy cannot read. Or write. He has phonics interventions, literacy interventions, maths group, god knows what, and despite all this expert contact time, he is tanking.

He can just write a diminutive form of his name. He can maybe identify a few numbers, but cannot decode at all. His writing and drawing is incredibly immature and he swaps hands too sometimes. School tested him for dyslexia but then ruled it out. He struggles with coordination and gross motor planning sometimes, and school say he loses focus sometimes but i suspect at least some of that is that he just cant do what the class is doing. He seems so bright and yet can't count anything over 5 and usually climbs under the table when asked to do anything tricky!

I thought i was helping by printing pictures and words and sticking them around the house but now i hear that is encouraging sight reading and is WRONG!

His twin is also "behind" but can decode, do basic maths, and will read when it suits him. He has hearing problems which may have contributed to things, but that seems to be clearing and he seems to be getting on ok.

What is going on and what should i do?

Midnightlurker im going to try to get him to focus on some activities relating to memory.

CecilyP he is quite a nervy chikd and i think he avoids things as a result of his anxiety, or (rather cleverly!) sends his twin first to see if he survives!

Im going to talk to the Ed Psych when i see him about my older son.

The OT service wont take his referral so i dont know how to get a diagnosis/assessment for dyspraxia without paying for it.

The paediatrician isnt interested in dyspraxia, amd keeps referring to OT.

What do i do next?

Im minded to try and find another paediatrician and also speak directly to the OT manager, but beyond that, we seem to have hit a dead end.

Lonny, he has an ipad and will happily play Minecraft, but i dont know/understand how that could help him in class?

While you are waiting for diagneses, would you be prepared to try a Kumon workbook? If you get Reading 1, it very slowly goes through phonics, starting with short vowels and going on to low vowels etc, it is repetitive, requires easy writing (you trace then you write what you have traced etc) and has drawings and games. It is quite easy and repetitive and might provide some building blocks for your dc, which would help with confidence.

You can buy the workbooks online from Amazon, about £5 each.

Repetitive work is also supposed to build self esteem.

It is something you could do with him, maybe starting with just 10 mins a day, so low pressure, and he may like the 1:1 time with you.

The kumon early maths books too - eg basic addition, or addition - the same thing, very easy, very repetitive.

Trainnumber5 thankyou for your suggestion but i dont think i could get him to do it! He just refuses to engage with anything he doesnt like and isnt in the slightest bit bothered by reward charts etc, so the chances of my getting him to do anything repetitive more than once, is very slender. Truly, we have tried. He has loads of school interventions, we have JollyPhonics amd ORT at home (we are quite tooled up beacuse of DS1) and ReadingEggs and he wont/cant do it.

I made a lot of mistakes in my first post! i meant diagnoses, and long vowels.

In relation to getting him to do it, I suppose that is the first thing you tackle? Will he not do it because he has lost confidence? Or because it is too hard? There must be ways of persuading him - inspiring, saying he has to at least try and sit with you, hardcore bribery?!!

In all honesty I wouldn't allow an ipad at all at the moment because I think it would be hugely hindering the other types of learning.

The other think I forgot to mention was montessori which you can do at home. It isn't traditional learning and it might be something you could do as a sort of playing with him thing. If you google montessori maths, the early maths involves using the counting sticks, which help at a very basic level as the child can physically see the value - eg the stick with "one" value is half the length of the "two value" and so on. The sticks can be used alongside to add numbers, eg 2 plus 1, 3 plus 1. If this is too basic then the method goes on to include counting coins to the value of 10, and on. It might be interesting enough, with the use of physical things, to engage him (Montessori would have said it would, anyway!)

thing not think!

Goodness, no ipad? Why? He plays online with his brothers so if i got rid of his then i'd have to stop his brothers.

We have the montessori counting sticks, plus other similar equipment but the hard part is getting him to concentrate and focus for long enough to take anything in AND retain it. His report from school for the paed said that he is only "intrinsically motivated" which is apparently very common in ADD and PDA.

He was assessed in Autumn in school and for Reading, Writing and Maths he is at 40-60E which i think is pretty behind isnt it? He is 72 months...

twinkladdictmum we are not in the UK (and hence supports are poor to nonexistent unless you pay), but we had ed psych (private) assessment when she was nearly 6 and then went through GP for referral under health service. They did three assessments (speech, physio/OT and psych) and concluded that most of her difficulties relate to dyspraxia - there might be some ADD in there too, and certainly some sensory/anxiety stuff. There are good online tools that will give you a clearer sense of whether his difficulties are related to dyspraxia. It's very common for it to occur in tandem with other things. Hard to disentangle coping strategies (messing about, avoidance) from other things IME

They use little laptops in school (sorry, don't know what they are) with proper keyboards and he types all his big writing work on them. He did a short group course of the bbc's touch typing programme to help him use two hands. They use iPads to display knowledge, for eg they use the book creator app to make little books about topic work which they can embed short videos in - showing they have knowledge verbally is a valid way of checking learning. They also do coding, etc as a class. There are loads of ways technology can help.

At home he's allowed to type his spelling homework and sentences and pretty much do as much as he can in a document.