DD age 7 struggling with reading and numbers

[LemonBreeland]

DD has just turned 7 and is in Primary 3 in Scotland. She has really struggled with reading since starting school. It took her ages to learn her letter sounds and never fully mastered double letter sounds. She started back at school last week and we have her first reading book this week. She is on ORT level 8 and just can't read the book. She still sounds out every single word and will struggle with lots of them. Scho just seem to keep putting her on higher levels of book when she hasn't even grapsed the basics. She is my third child so I have experience of learning to read.

She has no concept of what she is reading. There is no understanding of the story as the level is too hard for her.

Similarly in maths she has struggled to learn her numbers, doesn't know much past 20 and will still write numbers back to front sometimes.

I am going to make an appointment to speak to her teacher, but I don't know what I want from her really. Reassurance that it can be normal to be like this? Hope that it will click eventually?

Any advice gratefully received. Particularly anyone who may have had a similar child.

She seems like a very bright articulate child to talk to, which just makes me confused as to why she struggles so much.

I do it's about meeting the needs of the child not the label and the whole dyslexia industry

I’d see if you can see an educational psychologist about her tbh.

Tbh after two school years of school still haven’t done much I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them.

Just picked up the dyslexia comments- I would associate dyslexia as someone who has long term difficulty in some way with reading or writing. Not someone who caught up, as my son as done at 8.

I even as an adult I have poor phonics skills (I’ve tried, and I can mask this easily by segmenting then blending). My spelling was awful until the end of primary, remarkably so. However I am an adult with an excellent reading and writing ability, I read for pleasure in two languages, I did a law degree etc and it’s probably one of the things people who know me would remark upon (although I’ll admit I am a very lazy fast typer on my phone online, so don’t nitpick my previous posts...). I would consider anyone attempting to label me as dyslexic as possibly having an agenda in doing so, as I clearly am confident in literacy. I think we can be way too quick to label a development difference as an impairment that must be labelled. I’m certainly not against labels, I have an autistic child, but it can go too far.

The simple reasons I wouldn’t follow up a private assessment
1- my child is not unhappy or not progressing, he writes for fun and reads for pleasure well.
2- I think it would knock his confidence for little gain
3-I could spend that amount of money far better on educational resources

I only ever advise anyone to go down that route if they had a child of at least 8 who was both unhappy/ resistant and not progressing in learning

You do realise you can be an excellent reader and still be dyslexic Sloe?

Then what is dyslexia then? If I confidently read, write, follow maps etc I would have thought I’d be excluded from the camp of having an impairment...?

My dd has a diagnosis and a positive dyslexic identity. It hasn’t knocked her confidence because I have given the information in a positive way.

She is also an excellent reader.

Then what is dyslexia then

Put very simply, dyslexia is a combination of poor phonological awareness (the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in words), poor verbal short term memory and slow processing processing speed (the ability to quickly retrieve information from long term memory). Each individual will have a different profile.

The above impacts on reading and spelling; however, lots of individuals with dyslexia are proficient readers, quite often they will continue to have spelling difficulties.

The above difficulties also impact on things like the ability to follow verbal instructions (often they will forget part of a multi-step instruction), copying from the board, mental maths etc. Slow processing speed means that they will need extra thinking time to answer a question in class or in exams.

There are lots of other day to day difficulties that impact on the individual which is why adults with dyslexia are protected at work under the Equalities Act 2010.

Dyslexia often co-occurs with other conditions e.g. dyspraxia, ADHD, ASD, so they individual may have other difficulties as well.

It took her ages to learn her letter sounds and never fully mastered double letter sounds

doesn't know much past 20 and will still write numbers back to front sometimes

Had those issue with my DC. Did Dancing bears - lots of practise of sounds and belnding. Even if they manage to cope better with reading issues you then get spelling issues IME.

Also had the mixing of number up 41 and 14 being mixed up - that stopped when they got a good grounding in place value.

We used mathsfactor but just sitting down and going over it would probably help. We were being told that child was doing okay even well with maths yet sitting down it became obvious quiclky that place value hadn't been understood fully.