'Who' can dx Dyslexia?

[coogar]

Ds2 (adhd) recently had a 3 hour long assessment with a child/educational psychologist. It was very thorough to say the least and I was so proud of him - he managed really well. They will be producing a lengthy report, but at the brief chat afterwards, they indicated ds was mildly dyslexic. This is probably a silly question, but are they able to dx this or do we need further investigation at an assigned dyslexia screening centre?? By the way, I absolutely agreed with everything they said. TIA !

No, an Ed Psych is the correct person to dx dyslexia.

Sometimes they call it 'specific learning disabity (or SpLD)' instead of dyslexia.

Thanks Indigo. This person is a registered educational and child psych, so I guess their dx is all we need ... ?

Yes. But need for what? I think you are going to find a dx of dyslexia means abs nothing.......

They have recommended some 1:1 for ds at school. I know we have gone down the private assessment route and this may not go down well with the LA, but school seemed really perceptive to the idea and are eager to get a copy of their report. I'm not under any impression that this will bring him 1:1 attention, but just hoped it would help them understand what he finds tricky and why. I'm not sure if mainstream state schools make any provosions for children with dyslexia .... we'll see.

The problem is that school can't provide effective provision for dyslexia - all they can do is various teaching strategies....

But if a child really has dyslexia (not just problems learning to read because of bad teaching ) then you need to correct the underlying problem - which school can't do.

This is my current crusade. It has taken me 3 years to find out that DDs dyslexia was caused by auditory problems.

To stop others taking 3 years to find stuff out, I have written up the stuff I have found in this website. It's not finished yet....

But basically, dyslexia can be cured, but not by special teaching or 1:1. But by finding out what is causing the dyslexia, and then fixing that....

Flippin' heck, Indigo! You've been busy ... thank you for this. I'll take a look at it tonight when ds is in bed. Links to Amazon literature, I'm really impressed. Will be back with more questions, so could you take a browse here in next couple of days? Meanwhile, have you heard of Jungle Memory? It was a recommendation from them .....

yes, I've done jungle memory ( 3 years of trying everything)

It was far too hard for DD.

I'm very very skeptical of it. There have been other threads on it before, and no one on here recommends it.

The program I'd rather do with DD is Challenging Our Minds. It's very cheap. I haven't done it yet because it takes half an hour a day which we don't have..... So I can't tell you if it works or not.

But I can tell you jungle memory doesn't work because it's too hard.....

But also it doesn't work because it's trying to fix the symptoms not the cause...

The cause of everything turned out to be (in our case) auditory problems. Fixed them and we fixed her reading problems and her memory problems...

I can see where you're coming from. I feel ds2's issues stem from his adhd. His inability to pay attention for prolonged periods has to affect the way he has learned to read, write and process information. Unfortunately, the only treatment we have been offered is medication. Does that mean unless we treat the inattentive/attention symptoms, he will never be free from the 'dyslexia' .... ?

All I know is from research done on my own children

Back in Dec I thought DD might have ADHD, so I started to research it. One of the first things I read was LCP Solution which basically claims the cause of ADHD is lack of Omega Fish Oil.

We immediately started DD on Omega Fish Oil and noticed a huge difference. Including a diff with her memory.

I dont' know if DD actually does have ADHD or not (she probably doesn't), and lack of Omega Fish Oil may not be the cause of all ADHD - but I am convinced everyone should at least give it a go.....

And the other thing I think is that the cause of ADHD is the same as the cause of dyslexia. Fix the underlying cause of one and you'll fix both. There have just been so many diff treatments claiming this, all coming from diff angles, plus the 'experiments' I've done on my two make me think this.....

Treatments that claim to cure ADHD and Dyslexia include:

• Auditory Integration Training
• Retained Reflex Therapy
• Dore Program
• Balanced Child
• Primary Movement Program
• Brain Gym

All the treatments that have improved DS who has ASD have also improved DDs dyslexia............

So an awful lot of co-incidences......

Kwym Coogar, ds2 is on the spectrum but also has a dx of adhd and now that I have been following Indigo and Dolfrogs great suggestions re: dd3 (I think apd) I can see the difficulties that ds2 has (hope that all makes sense!). Anyway, ds2 is medicated (equasym xl, not an easy decision) which def helps with his concentration but needs extra help around things like sequencing, oh and lots/various other things.

Anyway! Yes, I think both ds2 and dd3 will always find certain things tricky but helping them learn skills to manage/overcome seems to be key.

Ds2 attends a speech and language unit - we are lucky coz staff are very in tune to his needs.

Dd3 attends mainstream, her teacher is gr8 and very proactive, stage 2 IEP and I am doing extra with her (at most) 3 times per week. No formal dx.

x posted with Indigo, as usual takes me ages to compose what I have to say! I have followed some of the suggestions, the next one I think will be the reflexology for retained reflexs, will give it a go; doing extra work, fish oil etc and the primary movement is excellent! x

HelensMelon - same advice to you then :)

Don't try to teach them skills to manage / overcome. Try to fix the cause...

It requires money, time and guts. But it can be done.

x-posted LOL

Yes, I am determined Indigo; thankfully dd3 loves school and learning this year (I think her teacher last year tried to help but was part of the problem unfortunately - she also needed glasses!).

I will give everything a go; her teacher is very reluctant to go down the ed psych route and after reading your website and checking out any relevant threads, I realise there is plenty that I can be doing, which is empowering x

Great! Feel free to PM me if you want any more advice...

After such a long hard battle for my DD I would love to stop others going through it.......

Also, I'm always keen to hear of anything that has helped others......

thanks Indigo, I will do! At the beginning of this so not the most helpful atm, however, I expect that things will unfold! x

The best reference work I have come across is "Dyslexia, Literacy and Psychological Assessment", published in 1999 by the British Psychological Society. In the first instance, they point out the obvious: there are about as many definitions of dyslexia as there are experts. Although they do not dispute that many children have greater or lesser difficulty in learning to read, this can result from deficits in any number of areas of perception and processing. In other words, no useful purpose is served by labelling one child as 'dyslexic', and another as just being a slow reader.

As they point out, low IQ cannot possibly be an explanation for the inability to decode letters or spell, since most low-ability children do not have any particular problems in this area.

But the real eye-opener is that all the known tests used to diagnose dyslexia will also flag up children who learn to read with no difficulty. This includes the classic 'ACID' profile used by most ed psychs.

Having personally taught several hundred children with learning difficultiesboth privately and in a secondary schoolI have never found that the concept of 'dyslexia' is of the slightest use. Virtually all children can be taught to read--it just takes a good synthetic phonics programme and a lot of patience. Parents spend lots of time and money chasing after the magic diagnosis of dyslexia, thinking that it will open the door to specialist help. It won't. Most schools pay very little attention to diagnoses by independent psychologists.

There are a lot of good programmes available--but avoid the expensive ones. Here's a useful link: www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3353375/The-ear-the-eye-and-an-open-mind.html

Hi all, just read this thread.
My DS2 (12) is dx with dyslexia since 7.6. I don't think it needs to be "cured" as my son has an unique way of looking at things and if "curing" him changed his thought processes I would be horrified.
My take on things is that finding the underlying causes which I believe you can work on with therapies, can make a huge difference, but the once the brain has rewired itself to compensate for the underlying difficulties it can not completely reverse itself. My DS has OT dx of SPD.
My son did the Dore program which was a mixture of vision therapy and OT exercises, we went there rather than wait 2 yrs for an OT appointment. It was excellent it sorted out my DS's wordfinding difficuties within 3 months and he found his memory which was lost in a haze. The constant watering of his eyes while trying to read disappeared. I would recommend it if it wasn't for the cost.
Along side this I had to do the reading remediation as the school only offered a 1 hr class once a week (useless). He did have a 1hr 5 days a week TA which should have been a qualified LSA but school was welsh medium and couldn't find 1. Toe by toe was brilliant. Yes he can read now but still with mistakes and it doesn't sound fluent when reading aloud (he can certainly fool his teachers), he is still reluctant to read, biggest problem is his writing composition, along with writing speed. We are hoping something will kick in with age. He seems to be able to remember spellings once learnt but does occasionally forget easy words, punctuation is a nightmare.
Anyways we have a blog for anyone interested matthewstory.blogspot.com/ it's been running now for 5 yrs and we are still battling with the school system.
Dyslexia is also a passion with me Indigo, like to compare note!

Dyslexia is a man made problem, a problem in decoding the graphic symbols used to represent speech.
There are no cure for the various cognitive subtypes of dyslexia which have a genetic origin. Any so called cure would require gentic engineering to change your childs genetic make up.
There are many remedial programs some of which have been listed by Indigo which can help provide some basic work arounds the cognitive deficits of disorders which can cause the dyslexic symptom.
Dyslexia is language dependent, so it is possible to be bilingual say in Japanese and English but only dyslexic in English.
In societies which do not use the visual notation of speech as a form of communication there is no dyslexia. But the cognitive or medical problems that cause the dyslexic symptom do exist. Auditory Processing Disorders, Visual Processing Disorders, and Attention Disorders. So a diagnosis is a screening process for a further clinical assessment to identify and diagnose the cognitive / medical causes of the dyslexic symptom.

Dyslexia is only a learning disability not a medical disability, and there are many medical disabilities which can cause the dyslexic symptom.

Hi Dolfrog, how you keeping? haven't seen you on Being Dyslexic for ages.
Lesley

homeboys - On this page it says

We recommend devoting at least 30 minutes to an hour of interaction with the system every day

Which is way more than we have at the moment - what with the inconvenience of having to send DD to school where she doesn't learn anything

I can't even remember now why I thought it would be good.

We might do it over the summer holidays..... If you or anyone else does do it can you tell me how it goes?

Jungle memory I've done. It is too hard and made DD very stressed. You also have to get 10 / 10 right to move up to the next level, and she could never do that so found it very demotivating. It was really hard for her.

DDs done the sample games on the challenging our minds website and loved them. I've done them too and found them good.

Jungle memory is again cheap enough to try and see whether or not your DS likes it, and it only requires 10 mins a day...

With all of the online memory training programs I have looked at, the only people who say they are good and work are the makers. All of the academic research seems to say that memory can't be improved in this way....

Wow really impressed with info on this thread. Wondering if my youngest son is dyslexic, age 9, best reader in the class I'm told, spellings fine, maths average, writing structurally fine. But, teacher can't get any writing out of him. This has been going on for a while. Says he's afraid to write as teacher always severely critical, but wondering if there is more to it.
Wondering whether to get BDA assessment done and pay for it. School not got great record for getting fast diagnosis for more subtle problems. What should I do?

lelly88
Hi Lesley - been doing other things, editing on Wikipedia, started my own APD and dyslexia groups on Facebook, and sorting out my research paper collections which are now listed here
I still have your web page listed on my dyslexia web page
I hope your son is making good progress.

dolfrog