Dyslexia advice needed please

[clutteredup]

DD2 is only 5 but she is very different from my other two DC in her attitude to reading and writing and counting- even DS who was a reluctant learner was a keen reader and both the other 2 have a natural instinct for numbers counting easily to high numbers without . I know all DC are different but I am a primary school teacher but not Early years and just 'know' there is something not quite processing normally with her. She shys away from letters, numbers and reading and has a lot of word memory problems - forgetting the names of friends, family and ordinary everyday things. She can recognise her key words but doesn't then remember them from page to page in a book, we go back and look at it and she has forgotten. I thought she was trying it on but I sense a reluctance in her which seems to be born out of a struggle to do it. I don't want to push her as she can get very upset easily about it. She is generally happy otherwise and quite bright in her approach to the world in general and has a fantastic sense of humour. She likes doing physical things and is definitely more able in that area but we do have dyslexia in our family so I'm conscious it is a possibility.
She is at a school which has a denial attitude towrds SEN generally and doesn't 'believe' in dyslexia - I know as I have worked there- so I am looking for advice as to what to do at home with her as I know she will go unnoticed at school .

I work at a secondary school where we have tutors who can diagnose dyslexia using various tests.

Dyslexia is not a disability, very often these children are extremely bright and many mask the problem by using their own learned strategies - maybe this is what your child is doing now and why it sometimes goes unnoticed at school. Clever huh!
Within the school I work at, many reach year 12 without diagnosis. It is at that time, when the pace of work increases and the complexity changes that it becomes less easy for them to hide. So we have a high number of newly diagnosed very bright/able dyslexic students in Year 12 who will be successful at AS and A level.
There is no magic wand you can wave to remove the reluctance for intervention, just patience, kindness and perseverance. It may be worth reminding her that there are many successful people in this world who have dyslexia including none other than Mr Richard Branson.

Thanks sender
I'm not 'worried' about her having dyslexia as I said we have it in family most notably my brother who went to Cambridge but can't remember his own telephone number! I just want to help her feel OK about her reading as I have come across older undiagnosed dyslexics who were so relieved to find out that their 'secret problems' were actually quite normal. She is aware that she is having problems reading - I know , she's only 5 - but she is aware than it is something she is struggling with - and I don't want her to withdraw from learning at school because she 'can't' do it.

She's so lucky that she's got you. That you've noticed it and want to help her.

There'll be people along shortly who will tell you exactly what to do but whatever it is, keep it fun. Dyslexic kids can feel like they're being punished - punished at school for not being able to keep up and then when they get home they have to do more work! If you can keep her attitude positive, baby steps and all that, it will help. Try to get it so she's eager to do the extras with you (bribery works very well).

Thanks mitz I have been careful not to push the reading as she is so reluctant but when she does get a word right she is so pleased with herself but she doesn't want to do it for any length of time. I'm just aware she has been at school for a term and still isn't interested in any of the reading and writing - I mean forming the most basic of letters and basic key words. I want her to be able to progress but without puuting her off completely.

I can't really help you with what to do. We have had such a bad experience of everything and my daughter will probably never read (she's 12 now). I don't want to scare you with our story.

But my friend's daughter who goes to a fancy school had it picked up from the first term (as you have done) and with a similar profile to my daughter now has a reading age above her chronological age.

Another friend sent her son off to a specialist dyslexic teacher once a week (at huge cost) again his reading age shot up and now, at 9, he's got reading age close to that.

I guess what I'm saying is do something, don't leave it to the teachers at the school. Get the best help you can afford. If you can't afford it, spend as much time as you can researching different ways of teaching her yourself.

Good luck.

I have a son who was diagnosed with dyslexia last year, he has just turned ten. For years we knew that something was not right as he could not read but we kept thinking that he would "get there". He was getting extra lessons at his school which we paid for but it was still not enough as he needed a different approach to learning. He loves sport and is outgoing and if you met him you would not know that he had an issue. After talking him to have a formal assessment we were advised that if we wanted him to read then the best thing for him would be to go to a specialist school. We were devastated as he was at a lovely private school. A month after the diagnosis we made the decision to take him out of the school as to leave him there was doing him a disservice as he was being left behind. We looked at a number of schools in London and in the country! We then decided to have another assessment with Jane Emerson from Emmerson House in Hammersmith. Jane was really fantastic, she gave us good advice as to which schools to look at. We narrowed it down to two schools, Bruern Abbey and Appleford. In the end we decided on Appleford as my son felt happier there even though it is a lot further for us to travel on a weekly basis. My son has been there for nearly a year and we have seen a vast improvement in his reading and he loves boarding. The staff and teachers at the school are very supportive and have the right idea to learning. The classes as small with a one to four ratio, this makes a vast difference for a child who cannot read. I am really happy with Appleford and have no hesitating in recommending the school to anyone who have a child with dyslexia. It is not a cheap option but one worth doing if you can afford it.

Hi I recognise everything you have said as things we saw in our son. We had to help him ourselves as the school was so slow to pick up on the problem. It was always "it's early days he'll catch up".
Any way I pulled out my older sons Letterland book, lovely pics and started from there, Starfall.com has lovely animated videos to learn letter patterns. He loved pictures and couldn't concentrate for long on story books. We moved on to cat in the hat. I started this when he was 7, so you have a couple of years on us.
He's 13 now and doing really well in secondary, I have a blog which I have kept for ooh probably 6 yrs at matthewstory.blogspot.com with all the ups and downs and some techniques we used with him. His word finding difficulties were awful when he was younger but thankfully things are much better now.
Of course your daughter is very young and she may pick up quickly with extra help from yourself.
Good luck!

There was a channel 4 series about teaching adults to read.
One of the things that helped them was making letters. They used pipecleaners, but I've heard play doh suggested for DCs.
Another lady made the letters shapes with her hands.
Anything that makes letters or numbers tangible, not just symbols on a page
A friend says borrowing maths equipment that clearly had units, sticks of ten beads and sheets of 100 help her DD get unstuck with visualising place value and bigger numbers.
My DD is dyslexic, as am I (although I've only realised that as an adult).
I find isolated facts, names, numbers, French vocab. very hard to remember, but anything scientific much easier. I think this because science and a lot of physical geography have a narrative to them the facts link to tell a story. Also there are often diagrams too!
There has to be a reason for something to go past my dreadful short term memory.
Spellings simply don't get processed at all, both DD1 and I can read words from context without registering more than a few letters and the general shape of the word.
The ed.psychologist likened DDs learning to a wall with lots of holes at the bottom.
Yes she can read, but she's developed lots of coping strategies for the fact that she didn't know her letter shapes, phonics or basic sight words at the appropriate age.
Her spelling is nonexistent, she can't always find an approximation which hampers her written work totally. Even though she knows the answers.
This is rather long and rambling, but what I'm trying to say is don't be surprised if your DD has to massively over learn simple things using reception type tools. Play these sort of games along side age appropriate reading.
It really did take until Y6 for DD to spell come, some, could and should.

Have you had her checked by a specialist Behavioural Optometrist? Often children don't have visual convergence so they see 2 images at once. A regular optometrist can't test for this as it is only obvious with prolonged visual work. A visiograph test may prove revealing. PM me.

Thanks for all the advice - i spoke to her teacher today just 'generally' about her reading and she said that she was fine in 'group reading' and joins in with the others but had little concentration for her key words. The thing is when I'm reading she talks over me with a time delay of a few seconds so she is 'group reading' way beyond her level at home . The basic words she has just group read are new to her again a few seconds later. She's already developing strategies.
The teacher also said she would only engage with things she was interested in and would rather be doing other things - well I can agree with that we all do that and that's normal but it's more than that she is really finding it hard to do. It is good to hear that I'm not just overreacting and that my concerns are ball park familiar to a lot of peoples experience - I'm going to keep an eye on it -I have Letterland somewhere in the depths of DSs bookshelf and we have the cat in the hat too - at the moment she shys away from any mention of word recognition so I'll just try the picture approach thanks for the website - horsemadmom thanks for the suggestion I'll wait a while for professional intervention and see if I can work through with some of the other suggestions. Annatome I went on a Maths course at Appleford School many moons ago and still use a lot of their suggestions in my teaching now - its a great school, unfortuantely private isn't an option for us right now but again if we still have issues later we may explore that one too.
Thank you for your support it's nice to know I'm not doing this alone - haven't mentioned it to DH yet.

Hi,

I would recommend a book called Toe by Toe which is a reading manual that teaches in very specific way.

Thanks I'll check it out.

''She can recognise her key words but doesn't then remember them from page to page in a book, we go back and look at it and she has forgotten''

OP, as a specialist reading teacher I would suggest that there is nothing wrong with your child and you need to look at the school's teaching of literacy. If she is being given 'key words' to memorise by sight as whole shapes she is not being taught correctly.

www.dyslexics.org.uk/should_I_have.htm

But some people (of any age) do learn better if they learn visually rather than phonetically or by remembering the order that the letters appear in a word.
My DS was taught Magical Spelling (google it) by a Dyslexia specialist. Magical Spelling teaches you to store words as a picture in your visual memory. When we use it he learns his words very well and can spell them forwards and backwards as he is "reading" the letters from the picture stored in his memory.
This sort of learning works very well for some people including those with dyslexia.

Lots of great advice. Start by ensuring that she has her letter-sound correspondences in place. lots of letter level multisensory work - playdough, shaving cream etc. You can build from there.

Question whether you will be fighting the system throughout the school - hard decision but others have raised it. Is it the best place for her.

toe by toe is good, but I don't recommend it until children are in around Y5, lots of underpinning needed before then.

Sorry, got to post and run, school ( but you need to know I work as a qualified dyslexia specialist in primary).

Developmental dyslexia is not a condition, but the shared symptom of many cognitive disabilities or disorders.
Dyslexia is a man made problem having problems with a man made communication system the visual notation of speech, or decoding and recoding the graphic symbols society chooses to represent the sounds of speech.

There are two types of dyslexia -
Alexia (acquired dyslexia) which results from a brain injury, substance abuse, stroke, dementia, or progressive illness.
Developmental Dyslexia which has a genetic origin.
Most dyslexic children have developmental dyslexia. Dyslexia is language dependent due to the subtle variations of cognitive processing skills each orthography requires.

Developmental dyslexia has three cognitive subtypes: auditory, visual, and attentional. Which means that an auditory processing disorder,a visual processing disorder, an attention disorder, or any combination of the the three can cause the dyslexic symptom. These are medical or clinical conditions which can have more severe symptoms than dyslexia.
clutteredup the issues you have describes could be suggesting a possible auditory processing disorder.

Thank you again for all the great advice - I haven't checked all your links yet dolfrog but DD has had problems with her ears - possibly glue ear but has never been so bad that it's been diagnosed or treated directly - DH had it too but worse and was therfore treated before he got to school, although we reckoned that he relied on lettewrs from an early age to help him communicate he was nearly reading befor he started school and knew all his letters- but I'm wondering whether DDs possible auditory processing problems could be as a result of that- her hearing goes from perfect to terrible and back again so it's an intermittent 'fault' as it were - could this be a cause perhaps?

Glue ear can cause the issues you describe.

Lots of correlation between children with a history of glue ear who then go on to experience 'dyslexia' - makes sense as it is widely recognised that one of the common characteristics is difficulty with processing and manipluating the sounds/phonemes wtihin words.

I would also query your DD's school's approach to teaching reading if she's expected to memorise words.

Wouldn't consider Toe-by-Toe for a 5 year old. She should be having masses of multisensory phonics input, reinforced by a structured approach to reading using decodable books.

Plus all the usual stuff about still being read to etc so that she remembers that books are good fun and reading is worth working towards etc.

'dyslexia' as a term isn't really very helpful, it doesn't tell you very much! Much more important to look at the child's own profile to identify the gaps.

Sorry must run and dunk DC through bath......

Sorry I meand DS not DH - although DH has hearing problems too but I put that down to domestic hearing loss
Thanks bramble we'll look into the hearing thing - the problem is that it is so intermittent that she's always fine by the time we get a hearing test done.

Thank you ASByatt they do 'do' jolly phonics at school but not very often adn in amongst the look and see approach - the letters they have done through JP she is OK with but they do them slowly across the Years R and 1 whereas by this point in the year my other two had covered them all as they did one a week bringing each one home each week to practice the sounds and actions together . I did get the JP book but she's not interested in doing school stuff at home and won't listen to the stories.
I read to her every night and we have bookshelves full of books and I still read to DS (10) so she knows listening to stories is nice and I do let her choose so she will listen - I have stopped pushing the ones I like more !!

Ah you see that is probably the root of the issue, the school are muddling along with mixed methods from an early stage - it should be properly structured, lively fun phonics, with appropriate texts to reinforce.

(Haven't left DC in bath, honest - DH is with them and I've come down to find gin..... )

Gin sounds good - waiting till all mine are in bed no DH at home at the mo so reckoning on staying sober till all safely in bed
No doubt some Friday nighter will be along in a moment to tell me I'm an irresponsible mother and that will be why DD has problems there seems to be a lot of growlers around tonight.

Growlers? Aren't they small ice-bergs?

Like it ready for my now