My little six year old has just been formally assesed by her school as dyslexic.
This, I suppose, is a good thing as it means that she will be given extra help. However I can’t help but be worried, has anyone out there got experience of this?
Our daughter was diagnosed as dyslexic when she was in second grade. She had been failing every spelling test miserably ever since Kindergarten (and boy, do I remember those days), but her second-grade teacher (bless her soul) decided that our daughter was not a dumb kid and forced the school to have her tested.
I still remember the day my wife and I were called into the school to hear the results of the tests. The principal was there, as was the second-grade teacher, the “learning disabled” teacher and (something that my wife noticed immediately but I didn’t) the “gifted student” teacher. The principal started the meeting by describing our daughter as having a wonderful personality and an excellent sense of fairness. I remember thinking “Oh, God, they’re setting us up for the bad news” - and then they brought out the test results.
Our daughter was in the 95th percentile or above in every math test, and in the 5th percentile or below in every reading test. She was reading at the “Pre-Primer” level, but faking things well enough that everyone thought she was reading at the early-first-grade level.
From that point on, my daughter’s life was changed. She stopped thinking of herself as a dumb kid and started thinking of herself as a bright kid with a learning disability. The only time she spent in the regular classes was in morning “homeroom”. She spent half the day in the “resource (AKA learning disabled) center” and half the day in advanced math/science classes. She fought like hell to get out of the resource center and largely succeeded, but was still being given extra time to finish essay tests right through undergraduate school.
Oh, and she’s doing just fine these days. She’s currently a PhD student in Computer science (because in her words, “they just don’t take you seriously if you don’t have a PhD”.) We got to attend her dissertation proposal last month.
So take your daughter being diagnosed as dyslexic as good news, not bad news. Now she’s going to get the help she needs.
I’m dyslexic and so is my SO. He’s a brilliant engineer, but his spelling is atrocious. I am a technical writer who loves to read. Go figure.
Getting help is a good thing. She can learn her way around with reading. Part of it is that you have to inspire her to want to read. A lot. For me, it was my competitive streak that got me
over the hump. I suggest you let your daughter see you reading a lot. Suscribe to the newspaper or news magazines and make an effort to read them while she does her homework. Monkey see, monkey want to do…
Also, be aware that she may have serious problems with learning foriegn languages (or even Shakespeare) if it involves reading. She will probably need to learn them by sound first.
I used to read at an incredible speed but I couldn’t spell the words or pronounce any new words correctly. It took until I was an adult to put the written word “cathedral” and the prounounced word together in my head even though I knew what each word was. They just never came together in my brain before. Now, I read much slower and go over any new words slowly to make sure I can commit the spelling to memory.
Yeah, my high school class had a guy in it who was dyslexic, and trying to memorize how to write out the introduction to the Canterbury Tales (in the original Middle English) completely baffled him. He did great otherwise, though - he was our class valdedictorian or salutatorian, I don’t remember which. He had lots of help early on, and generally kicked ass in all of his classes, so that one incident shocked everyone - and frankly, pissed us off that he had to deal with it, moreso than the hassle we felt over doing the assignment.
This seems very familiar indeed - Mine is the top of her class at Maths and the bottom at writing. She is also faking her reading. When we think she is doing really well it turns out she has the whole book memorised.
Actually the only thing about this that really upsets me is that in the past I have told her off and punished her for things she probably couldn’t do anything about. Still at least I know now. I’m going to take her shopping today.
I had my daughter tested for dyslexia when she was in the second grade, had to go to a psychiatrist to do it, because the school didn’t want to test her. She was quite depressed because she was having such a hard time reading, and she felt that she was dumb. After the diagnosis (and after I raged at the teacher), I had her privately tutored in addition to her regular schoolwork. She learned how to deal with the dyslexia, but she didn’t enjoy reading for pleasure until she was in middle school.
I started reading to her when she was about 3 months old, and it wasn’t just bedtime stories, either, but whenever she wanted to be read to and could indicate it by bringing a book to me. By the time she could talk in complete sentences, she could recite various nursery rhymes when I opened the book and showed her a page. We rapidly went to books with chapters, and I read a chapter or two each night.
When she was in middle school, I had a pretty bad case of bronchitis and pneumonia, and I couldn’t breathe very well at all, much less have enough wind to read. Her father is also dyslexic, and just couldn’t read her bedtime stories very well. So, since she was interested in What Happens Next in her current book, she tried to apply those hard-won reading skills, and learned that she enjoyed reading. Ever since then, she’s been a voracious reader, and when she found out that she liked fantasy, AND that Mom had a huge library, she scoured my bookshelves for books to read. And then we’d talk about the books. When she started to buy her own books, I borrowed them and read them.
As a teen and young adult, she worked in a couple of used book stores, working up to assistant manager in one and as a book buyer in another.
Dyslexia doesn’t mean that a person can’t learn to read, and to enjoy reading. It just means that the person might need a little extra help here and there. It’s great that her problem was diagnosed while she’s so young.
Do you what George Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, JFK, John Lennon, (Happy Birthday John) Lewis Carol, Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison and Cher Have in common?
Right. They are/were dyslexic.
She’s in good company and getting the help she needs, she’ll be ok.
http://www.dyslexia-test.com/famous.html
I am dyslexic. Back when I was in school they did not test for this and I recall my mother saying that one of my teachers said that she had neverseen a student that added extra letters when spelling like I did.
It took me the longest time to learn if the the line in the center of a Z and an N when this way/ or that way.
Growing up I loved to read ( and still do) but could not spell for shit.
My spelling has gotten better since I got a computer. Spell check gives me very quick feedback so I do improve.
One funny thing about my reading. If I just glance at say a headline, my mind can misread it then I have one hell of a time unscrambling it.
for example I might see a headline that reads “County government cuts taxes.”
I might read that as “Country government cuts taxes”
Country government? WTF? 
In extreme cases I have to spell the word letter by letter to unscramble it.
I do that too. Sometimes I exclaim about it out loud to others and then re-read it and have to excuse myself. 
Galanthus–my Father is dyslexic, & he would up the VP of Sales at the largest dental supply company in America, & is liked, admired & respected by almost everyone he meets.
Your daughter will do fine, with patient help.
One twin is an excellent reader, great in art, and very introverted. The other has excellent math, mechanical and athletic skills, loves people and meeting new friends…and has an awful time with reading (your examples are ringing lots of bells here. He’s amazing at memorization, and using the other clues in and around what he’s reading to fake his way through reading.) So I’m watching this thread intently.
My daughter is 17, dyslexic, and a senior in high school making A’s and B’s. She had a hard time in grade school, mainly because she has an overachieving older sister and an overachieving younger brother. It did aggravate her when they would blow through their homework in five minutes, and it took her a lot longer, but she has come to terms with the fact that she learns things differently. I will say that puberty/female hormones kicking in at the high school level can complicate things, since nearly all teenage girls think they’re fat, ugly and dumb at some point or another. But she’ll graduate in May, and then on to bigger and better things, we hope!
There’s dyslexic and dyslexic. The three following examples are all from people whose native language is Spanish, but I imagine that the techniques work for any language.
The classmate I tutored in reading between ages 4-6 (those were both our ages, our teachers would set those students who were best at whatever to help those who were worst; that’s a normal age to be learning to read in Spanish) comes from a family where everybody is heavily dyslexic. P and her immediately-older sister, who learned from P, are the only ones who can read; they have powers of attorney for the whole family. The gist of what I taught P was:
- if it doesn’t make sense, it’s probably wrong,
- you know which are the letters you confuse. See if changing one of those for another makes sense.
- read as much as you can, and take as long as you need. It will take you longer than it takes me, but it’s still the best way to acquire a wider written vocabulary (knowing how to say a word tells you how to spell it if you’re from Northern Spain, as we were… unless you happen to be dyslexic). Remember that you’re not in a hurry. Also remember that if you don’t like the story, it’s OK to stop reading it.
- never be afraid to ask for help when you know you’re not reading something right.
We also worked in determining exactly which groups of letters were a problem, and in analyzing each letter individually. For example, “m and n are very similar, but n has a single arch and m has two”. I learned very fast that if I described the difference to her, it didn’t really help: if I asked questions until she saw the difference herself, it did. She would still need to stop and think “ok, how many arches does it have?” but she’d be able to figure the answer out.
Middlebro confuses bdpq. Not cursive or block letters as they don’t really look alike, but in printing he pretty much has a 25% chance of reading any of them right. In his case, the “try substituting another letter” works well. P and her family confuse many more letters though (bdpq, plus eui, plus blt, plus mn but not ñ, plus ao…), so it doesn’t work so well. I’ve heard some dyslexic people say that “the letters dance”: for P, they dance ska.
I “diagnosed” (IANAD or a language specialist) a 45yo coworker with dyslexia. Dude had a BSc in Chemistry, an MSc in Chemistry and was working on an MBA, and he confused the letters a and o: if they’re not the two most common letters in Spanish, they’re among the top five. His own name was Paco, and he would manage to read it wrong… I don’t know whether he was able to do something about it or not, having lost contact. He learned everything by rote, but often what he’d learned was wrong due to having switched those vowels; I guess that his teachers never realized and thought “gee, Paco’s handwriting is so horrible that half his as look like os and half his os look like as”. He hadn’t had an oral exam since grade school.
That is definitely a big issue. A diagnosis of dyslexia tends to be more a recognition of general symptoms than anything more specific, and as a result a tactic that works for one person diagnosed as “dyslexic” often doesn’t work at all for the next person with that diagnosis.
When my daughter was younger she used to say they “crawl away and hide”. There was no difference at all between a “b” and a “d” because each morphed into the other constantly.
One of Scott Adams’ books has a chapter discussing what it’s like to be dyslexic… I think it was The Dilbert Future. It’s interesting, definitely worth reading given your daughter’s diagnosis. The thing that stuck with me most was that Adams says he takes information in in one lump, rather than as a linear stream. So if someone reads a telephone number to him, he processes all seven digits at once and can’t put them in order.
Neurologically, it’s fascinating. A non-dyslexic brain cortex has the pyramidal cells all neatly lined up, facing the same direction, sending their axons out in orderly bundles. A dyslexic brain cortex has the pyramidal cells facing all different directions, firing who-knows-what into who-knows-where. It’s frankly amazing that these brains function as well as they do.
Does that organization tend to make it better than average at some tasks?
I don’t have any citations at my fingertips, but it does provide advantages in group problem-solving situations, because a dyslexic member will go about solving puzzles in a different way from the rest of the group… makes the group as a whole more intellectually fit, I guess you could say.
Something’s telling me that dyslexic people have a higher-than-average chance of ending up in creative and artistic life pursuits, but again, I don’t have a citation.
Oftentimes yes. Of course, in today’s world where reading is so important often the reading issues overwhelm the extra skills in other areas.
Apparently one of my dyslexic daughter’s skills is recognizing shapes and how things mesh together. Back when she was being given batteries of tests to determine the exact nature of her problems, one of the tests she was given involved shape puzzles. Basically, the examiner would show her one of those three-dimensional collection-of-shapes puzzles (you know, here’s-a-bunch-of-blocks-that-fit-together-to-make-an-apple type stuff) while it was in one piece, then take it apart in front of her and ask her to see if she could put it back together. This was done with a number of puzzles, one at a time.
The examiner later told us that she had never seen anyone put those puzzles back together so fast. It was like my daughter could see how they all had to fit together.
Of course, ask her to spell “apple”, though…
I don’t know where you are, but if there is a Masonic Temple near you you should check into if they have their dyslexia tutoring program. You have to have an official diagnosis (sounds like you do) and agree to commit fully to attending. If you are approved they use the Ortin Gillingham (sp) method which if done through a private facility costs $5-$10k/yr. It took us a year and a half to get in… had to drive 40 minutes each way and sit for an hour in a waiting room type of environment two times a week for three years. My son absolutely hated it.
It was the best thing we ever did for him.
I could echo all the stories above about gifted with math, struggled to keep up, etc. It sounds like Lynn may have had the same experience as us because we were forced to get private testing ($1500 out of our pocket) because we had an idiot of a counselor who felt that since he wasn’t failing she wouldn’t test him. I have quite a story about our fight to get through that roadblock, but it would need to go in the pit.
p.s. I am not a Mason/Shriner, but they do great work in this regard.
Glasses, my daughter is dyslexic when she doesn’t wear her glasses. Thank dog she can read properly now but it was a few years before we got them as they kept saying there was nothing wrong with her eyes. But int he end it was a focus issue.