Now finding reading and writing difficult

[kiltie]

Not sure if anyone has had this experience but would love to hear from them if they have. My son sailed through primary years being able to read write and spell well. He has now gone into third year with extreme reading and writing difficulties so much so that the educational psycologist has diagnosed dyslexia. He has gone for a number of medical examinations to rule out anything sinister and these have come back normal or negative. Additional support mechanisms are in place but we have yet seen no improvement. How can someone be able to do a task and now not. Has anyone any ideas.

How old is he ? Do you mean 3rd year seconinary or Year 3 ? Has he actually regressed or just not kept up ?

I'm sorry to hear that your son is having problems.

In the past primary schools concentrated on high frequency words and many children learnt to read and write by look say. This approach got them through their sats but didnt actually give them the skills they needed. Most children pick up phonic knowledge with out being directly taught. I imagine that your son was bright enough to get through primary school with memorising words alone.

Also secondary schools are large building and children have to more from class to class. They have to remember different books and might have lessons with different groups of children depending on what set they are in for say Maths or French. They also have twelve teachers as opposed to one. In year 9 kids hormones are all over the place and they are experiencing emotions that they never had before.

The problem is at secondary school children are faced with a lot of new words and do not have the phonic skills to cope. For example in science there are words like Chloroplasts or cytoplasm. Both these words are complete phonetic if your son knows the complex phonetic code of reading.

How to help your son depends on how moviated he is. Getting fourteen year olds do things they dont want to is a non starter.

If you look at this website and look under Teenage dyslexics there are some suggestions that might help.

www.dyslexics.org.uk/