Read It and Weep

 It is so interesting when discoveries are made concerning your child's learning abilities. A light-bulb goes off when you realize why your child may learn one way or have difficulty learning another way. It explains so much!

Recall a previous blog when I talked about learning styles. This is similar, but slightly different.

Recently I have been having a lot of trouble helping my daughter with her 2nd grade reading assignments. She is a very bright little girl with huge imagination and great grasp of several academic subjects. But she would always give me issues when it came to reading. And other subjects would be affected due to the fact that she would skip reading the instructions about the lesson and just guess what she should be doing. Now, she has a very stubborn attitude about things and if she doesn't feel like doing something, it really doesn't matter how easy it is, she won't do it on principle. So for a long time it never occurred to me that she might have a problem, I just thought she decided she didn't want to.

Until about 2 months ago, when it suddenly hit me, an epiphany. Maybe, like some aunties and cousins and seconds cousins, she has dyslexia. I had seen some of the symptoms in her earlier on, but a lot of little kids have what look like dyslexia symptoms in kindergarten, but they grow out of them and it is no problem. It's only when it stays and becomes a pattern that it is a warning sign of Dyslexia.

For instance, she could never ever ever seem to keep her 'b's and 'd's straight. Or 'p's and 'q's. And sometimes she would even confuse 'd's for 'p's...

Also, she was afraid to read. Like, she desperately avoided it at all costs and when she made a simple mistake would break down and just quit trying. So sad.

I don't know why it took so long for me to figure it out. She is actually pretty good at reading on occasion, and she is really good at the other subjects. Ahead, and very smart. So I looked into the symptoms.

Google, my go-to searching tool. I typed in "How can you tell if someone has dyslexia?" I go some great answers.
Some of the sites I found helpful are:

www.dys-add.com/symptoms.html

www.dyslexia.com/library/information.htm

www.frameworklearning.com/dyslexia (This is the site of a Teacher named Emily Boles, MAT, Educational Therapist and mother. She will email you a checklist depending on your child's age that will help you very much with identifying whether it is a problem or not.)

When I took that list, I checked off the huge majority of the questions for my girl. It's like "Oh, my goodness, she has all these symptoms! Wow, how did I not connect this?" But I am not a licensed educational therapist nor do I have my masters in teaching. So it's okay.

Some of the symptoms are:

• She might see some letters as backwards or upside down;

• She might see text appearing to jump around on a page;

• She might not be able to tell the difference between letters that look similar in shape such as o and e and c ;

• She might not be able to tell the difference between letters that have similar shape but different orientation, such as b and p and d and q ;

• The letters might look all jumbled up and out of order;

• The letters and words might look all bunched together;

• The letters of some words might appear completely backwards, such as the word bird looking like drib ;

• The letters and words might look o.k., but the dyslexic person might get a severe headache or feel sick to her stomach every time she tries to read;

• She might see the letters o.k., but not be able to sound out words -- that is, not be able to connect the letters to the sounds they make and understand them;

• She might be able to connect the letters and sound out words, but not recognize words she has seen before, no matter how many times she has seen them -- each time she would have to start fresh;
•  Reading a paragraph might look something like this:
  
  

• She might be able to read the words o.k. but not be able to make sense of or remember what she reads, so that she finds herself coming back to read the same passage over and over again.

Reading symptoms:

•   She can read a word on one page, but won't recognize it on the next page.

•    She knows phonics, but can't—or won't—sound out an unknown word.

•    She has slow, labored, inaccurate reading of single words in isolation (when there is no story line or pictures to provide clues)

•   When she misreads, she'll often say a word that has the same first and last letters, and the same shape, such as form-from or trial-trail.

•  She may insert or leave out letters, such as could-cold or star-stair.

•   She may say a word that has the same letters, but in a different sequence, such as who-how, lots-lost, saw-was, or girl-grill.

•  when reading aloud, she reads in a slow, choppy cadence (not in smooth phrases), and often ignores punctuation

• she becomes visibly tired after reading for only a short time

•  reading comprehension may be low for her due to spending so much energy trying to figure out the words. Listening comprehension is usually significantly higher than reading comprehension.

•  directionality confusion shows up when reading and when writing

•    b-d confusion is a classic warning sign. One points to the left, the other points to the right, and she is left-right confused.

•   b-p, n-u, or m-w confusion. One points up, the other points down. That's also directionality confusion.

•     Substitutes similar-looking words, even if it changes the meaning of the sentence, such as sunrise for surprise, house for horse, while for white, wanting for walking

•  She misreads, omits, or even adds small function words, such as an, a, from, the, to, were, are, of

•    She omits or changes suffixes, saying need for needed, talks for talking, or late for lately.

Spelling:

•    Her spelling is far worse than their reading. She'll sometimes flunk inventive spelling. She'll have extreme difficulty with vowel sounds, and often leave them out.

•     With enormous effort, she may be able to "memorize" Monday's spelling list long enough to pass Friday's spelling test, but she can't spell those very same words two hours later when writing those words in sentences.

• She'll continually misspells high frequency sight words (nonphonetic but very common words) such as they, what, where, does and because—despite extensive practice.

•  She misspells even when copying something from the board or from a book.

•  Her written work shows signs of spelling uncertainty--numerous erasures, cross outs, etc.

Sorry if any of those were repeated, I copied and pasted that last one from a list. But you get the idea. If there are a bunch of these symptoms consistent in your child over kindergarten age, you could look into getting them formally tested. Some schools offer tests, so you can look into the local public school district near you to find out more, or you may be able to do it online.

Instead of it being a scary revelation that my daughter has "something wrong with her...", it was rather a huge relief to find out that was the reason she has had so much trouble. I knew it couldn't be that she wasn't smart, this kid is very smart. So to hear that there is a reason for her issues and knowing what it is means knowing the next steps to take to help her better, was a great burden lifted.

  Now I have something to blame her problems on, hahaha... Or rather, something from which to start and help her get better and more confident at reading. We got started back to basics with a phonics reader. She is really good at memorizing. I can help her to memorize small rules in phonics that will make sounding out easier. It's like we reverted back to kindergarten, but there's no pressure, no demand, it's laid back. So much better than before.

If you are worried that you are not getting through to a child in some subject, it might be something like this. Or, as in the case of one of my preschool daycare students, it could be their vision. That has a huge impact on their ability to learn, if they can't see. This kid had REALLY bad vision, and no one really knew.

It wasn't until I'd cared for him for several months that I connected the dots and drew the conclusion that he might need his eyes checked. Now that he has been to the eye doctor and gotten a lot of the problems straightened out, he is doing great in school.

( He is in kindergarten now.)  We had our daughter's eyes checked recently, and they are great, by the way :)

So don't worry, just open up to all the options of what could really be going on with your kids.  Once you have a diagnosis, things are easier to understand and find a solution for.