My DD is in year 4 and has always struggled with school. I recognised she needed extra help from year 1 and decided to help her more at home so she didn’t fall behind, but despite all our efforts, and hers, she is still struggling and falling behind and it’s heartbreaking. She is an emotional girl and gets anxiety. Although she is a good reader now, she struggled with phonics and relies on knowing the word, rather than breaking them down so struggles and guesses new words. Her writing is erratic and she struggles with spellings, sometimes spelling the same word different ways in the same paragraph even and mixes capital and lower case letters in a word and often lowercase letters and capital letters are written the same size. Punctuation is also non existent, often missing simple full stops. Maths she finds harder. She counts on her fingers and relies on tools to help her. She gets her numbers the wrong way round still after years of practice writing them over and over, and will sometimes write them from right to left.. ie put the 0 first and then the 1 in front to write 10. She has remembered her 2, 5 and 10 times tables and struggles with the others. Gets confused with math symbols. Struggles with subtracting or addition and can’t carry numbers over on harder sums. Most of her problems are related to memory, what she might remember one day she will forget by the next day.
I have spoken to her teachers many times about my concerns, and spoke to the SENCO a couple of months ago who did a very basic test on DD for dyslexia and it showed her as in the middle, with some scores coming out 2 years below her age but a spatial awareness test coming out above average putting her in the middle. She agreed DD needed help and arranged small group sessions everyday. Now DD has gone into year 4, the group sessions seem to have been stopped and when I asked about it they said she only had them when needed, even though that’s not what the SENCO had said.
I’m not a pushy person but worked hard to get DD a bit of extra help. I’m trying to push for a full assessment to be done but finding it very difficult and now thinking about getting it done privately to push for the extra help but at £500 it’s a big sum for us.
Is it worth paying for the assessment, as in will it help me get DD the extra help? Does she sound like she might have dyslexia/ dyscalculia to you? What are your experiences?
Sorry for the long post, but I feel like I’m banging my head on a brick wall with all of this. Thanks in advance for any help.