Daughter (9) is a year behind at school

[Ouuc]

My daughter is in year 4 / 9 years ago. At home we are working through year 3 CGP books (maths and English) and she finds some aspects of these challenging and her reading level is Oxford Level 12, which is about a year below where she should be.

Her school added her to an English booster club during the Spring term, and she also has been seeing a private tutor since January.
However, she is still finding things a struggle.

Inknow some children have a 121/ group LSA. I was wondering if I should ask the school to incorporate some sessions with the LSA or am I barking up the wrong tree.

. She is generally better at arithmetic, where is is working at her expect level. She has had a negative dyslexia screening at school

H

I'm afraid "behavioural optometry" is really just a quack in a not very good disguise.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/vision-therapy-quackery/

You need to read to her too. You do a page using finger following, then she does a page finger following. Breakfast isn't the best time. Teeth, pyjamas, bed, cosy time is. You can still do the morning session.

What you really want is for her to engage and continue reading solo.

An assessor can’t say for sure without an assessment (Im a professional). However they can say the screening doesn’t suggest further assessment is needed. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done or that it might not flag some issues.

The thing with an assessment is that it isn’t useful if it isn’t then paired with strategies that support your daughter’s learning. Sometimes
assessors suggest things that aren’t practical at school, but that you could do yourself (for example pre learning vocab).

Have you seen the screener? Ask the Senco and then ask for strategies you can use.

I suggest sharing the screener with the tutor. The tutor will be able to make use of the information (for example is there a processing speed deficit? Or does she have a strong working memory?) and teach her strategies based on the information (regardless of whether it suggests she would meet a threshold for dyslexia).

Strategies are key. How does she learn? Does she need repetition? Does she need visuals? Does she need instructions broken down into chunks?

The best thing you can do as a parent is to keep up her Self esteem. Find things she IS good at (or just really enjoys! Ballet, tennis, climbing in the park, drawing, singing etc) and make sure she knows that those things are valuable.

keep going little and often with support and keep up the dialogue with school, keep her on everyone’s radar.

I have a very shy grand daughter. Mum asked me to read with her. I have lots of children books. She picked two. We tried the easier one first, she stumbled over simple words. We finished the first book and went onto the second much harder one. She read that really well.

It was confidence she lacked because of her shyness once she relaxed she was prepared to have a go.

We raised three sons with dyslexic traits but with perseverance, lots of stories, worked with it.

My husband on the other hand never got the encouragement and struggles to read, can't spell because no-one gave him the extra time as a child

An ed psych looked at a broad range of capabilities and was able to identify visual processing specifically as being substantially below expectated range and on that basis school were able to put in appropriate support, We also took dc to a specialist optician (previous tests of her eyes had picked up no issues) and more detailed tests found that although her static vision is 20/20 there are issues with how her eyes work together and how quickly they adjust when moving from near to far.

an ed psych is a specialist trained at looking at how children process information and learn best - they are great when you have a general sense that something is off educationally but arent sure exactly what. They will do some observations and run a series of different tests to help isolate different aspects to understand relative strengths and weaknesses, and then can provide advice on what to do next - either recommend a specific specialty for follow up or make recommendations for school and home.

Educational psychologists are not always up to date with what is science (actually I used to know one who had a research PhD before becoming an Ed Psych and complained it wasn't at all scientific. I also had one "assess" my DS and say he wouldn't be able to learn to read using phonics so should be taught sight words. He'd passed his phonics screening...)

Visual disturbances that lead to reading problems are great news for quacks, and won't do anything to help children. Of course, if you've spent lots of money on something for your child, you will think it works. See my link above: it's just the placebo effect.

Processing speed is just how quickly can retrieve known information and respond. I can’t remember exactly how it was first tested - mine were quite young - but something along the lines of how many animals can you name in a minute. My dc could name loads of animals, but not quickly - that is processing speed.

That's verbal fluency.

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/body-mind/psychology/verbal-fluency#:~:text=Verbal%20fluency%20is%2C%20basically%2C%20the,the%20letter%20Q%20or%20animals.

While I agree that the world of behavioural optometry often makes claims beyond what data would support, it doesn’t mean it is all quackery.

The majority of interventions recommended were things like not asking her to copy from the board, reading ruler, etc. There were also some very expensive glasses, but that was very much a science based recommendation.

i agree that there isn’t much data for the exercises that are sometimes recommended, but there also isn’t data showing it doesn’t work either. There just isn’t much hard data at all.

and saying some ed psychs are not up to date is a bit of a nothing statement. I know plenty of doctors practicing medicine that are not up to date on the science because the science is always moving.

I've heard 'reading eggs' are meant to be good.

My child had convergence insufficiency which the article you quoted states has evidence for the interventions and eye exercises done.

My sons were very lucky. Went to a private school where the Sen department is awesome. It's 50/50 NT/SEN. The Sen pupils are in the main lessons for much of the curriculum but in a specific unit at other times. Sciences, sports, outdoors education done together. They just pop off at times for extra lessons elsewhere.

I've seen twelve year olds arrive who couldn't read or write getting into university. In the intervening years they made life long friends.

I haven’t see the screener, I was told by the SENCO that she discussed the results of the screener with a dyslexia assessor who felt no additional tests were required.

Sorey to ask, how do I learn more about the different strategies I can use?

Generally a screening will generate a report (in my experience anyway, to be fair I’ve only ever used 2 different ones, but they are pretty popular). The report will give an overview of relative strengths and weaknesses and a dyslexia index (on GL assessments) which indicates the likelihood of dyslexia. It may also suggest strategies based on the weaknesses. However, your SENCo should be able to suggest strategies that will support your daughter’s learning based on her own understanding of her as well as the report / other assessments they’ve done (for example do they do a HAST(Helen Arkell spelling test) spelling test?).

Obviously I don’t know your daughter, but for example, it might be that she needs to strengthen her working memory, so memory games/ Kim’s game will be useful as well as chunking information. She might benefit from multi sensory spelling strategies such as saying the word phonetically as she writes it or visualising something linked to the spelling pattern.

ask the tutor what strategies they are using and which you can replicate.

Firstly it is great that you are trying to help her. To add my own personal thoughts on this. Both you and her need to understand that although she doesn't like reading particularly it is important. It isn't just going to be about reading books or English in school it is about the other subjects too, so she will be doing History and Science for example in primary. Once she gets to secondary that becomes reading, processing and comprehension, answering questions on the text she has just read.

I agree with everyone above saying make time to read to her and her following along with her finger is important, when just listening your mind can wander. In the school my children were in they did Accelerated Reader. Every day they all read their books for 30 minutes, were listened to as they read aloud every week and they were asked questions about the book by the teacher, LSA or me as I volunteered in school. Once they finished the book they sat a quiz on the computer which asked them questions about it. This is to ensure they didn't just read it, but understood it.

This is something that children need to be taught. Ask questions about characters, how do you think Gemma feels about not being invited to the party? Why is Tom happy? Do you think Jessica is a good friend, and why? It helps them learn to look for these things. You can also ask her to find the first word of every new sentence and you write down the word (make it easy for her) so she can see how varied the text it. Look up 20 other words instead of "said", Reading really helps with writing. Accelerated Reader was brought in because the school had a "language deficit", parents are handing over ipads believing it to be a great resource when they play educational games but there is no conversation, no modelling of language which is also why there are so many SaLT interventions going on too.

Some books she may find boring but that is how you find out what you like and what you don't like and sometimes you just have to do things that are boring. I agree with paying for a private assessment of your DD if you can. Schools only really get on board when a child is 2 years behind which I just feel is too far behind and then you are constantly playing catch up.