As a professional that works with Dyslexic students everyday and have now had a lot of specific trainings on the disability; the symptoms of my own child’s disability are clear in hindsight. I am sure that every parent that isn’t familiar with dyslexia can look back at those early years and say “ If I had known what I know now all the symptoms were there.” Looking at the list of 10 preschool symptoms my own child had roughly 8 of them for sure. I consider us one of the lucky ones since we were diagnosed before age 6 and it was not because I was a previous public school teacher with training on what to look for . Actually, I was taught nothing about dyslexia in my 4 years of college that was preparing me to teach in a classroom. It was pure luck and just being in the right place at the right time.
We knew we wanted to homeschool so we started a year before kindergarten year with preschool at home. She is super smart and had been singing her ABC’s since she was about two, so teaching her letters and sounds at four should be a peice of cake right? I mean my older 2 childeren were reading by 4 an 4&1/2. So we started introducing basic letters sounds and the beginning sight words. Except she didn’t pick them up quickly. She could read them well with a session of practice but the next day it was like we had never seen those words or sounds. She didn’t do great with rhyming words and patterns more complex than ABAB were a struggle. My breaking point was one day working on counting. She could count to 10 and almost to 20 but the teens were a little scrambled. She always skipped 14 for some reason. One day we were working on this by having her repeat single numbers then repeating them as groups back to me. 13….13…. 14…14… ok say 13,14,15….13,15,16. I walked away crying that day. I thought “Ok she is just late 4 she just isn’t ready” I knew that some kids aren’t developmentally ready to read until up to 7 years old. Therefore, we dropped things and didn’t push as much but the cute little speech things didn’t clear up by 5 .Her main word I remember today is she said “batainer” for container. There were a few others but that is the one I will always remember. She also still wasn’t right or left handed. She would get tired of writing with one hand and would just swap hands.
Fast forward to the 5 yr old check up we get a referral to speech. She almost doesn’t qualify becasuse she can say all the sounds and the /th/ and /f/ issues are still “developmentally appropriate.” Luckily we had a SLP that understood the concern and seen the things she was doing as things that could benefit from intervention and wrote it up as an articulation issue to qualify her for at least a couple of months of services so she could work with her a little bit. Luckily, during one of her speech sessions they were cutting with sissors and she has always been a little delayed with fine motor skills. So we got a referral for an OT evaluation. This is where a lot of things were answered and I heard the term dyslexia for the first time. She was 5 and a half and now I had a term I could research. I quickly learned that I knew nothing about the disability and I was a first grade teacher just a few short years before this. I would never have been able to identify a single student that I had in my classroom becasue I actually had no clue of a single symtom except for B & D reversals. Now though 5 years later an all I have learned I can see all the signs she had.
- Delayed speech
- Mixing up sounds and syllables in speech (batainer)
- Constant confusion of left vs. right (she was probably 6 before she could do this with confidence)
- Late establishing a dominate hand (She spent 2 years in OT and this is where that happened with practice along with a few other skills
- Difficulity learning to tie shoes ( she is almost 11 and still can’t tie her shoes )
6.Trouble memorizing things like alphabet, adress, phone numbers ect.
7.Trouble with rhyming
8. Close relative with dyslexia
You only need 3 of the 10 symptoms to warrant testing and the only 2 she didn’t have were chronic ear infections and severe reactions to childhood illnesses and this was all present before the age of 5 and this was before she ever would have stepped foot in a classroom.
The amazing thing I have learned over the last 5 years with her is this disability bleeds into so many other areas of her life both good and bad. We learned to read using Barton and now is in 5th grade now and can read well. However, she still can’t spell very well. She still has trouble with multi step directions and her hand writing is awful most of the time but give her a pencil and markers and she will be good for hours.She can draw really well for 10 and her creative side is amazing. She can take an amazon box and turn it into a full dragon head puppet or mask. Most dyslexic kids are good with creative, visual or hands on things and they generally shine in these areas too. I am still learning and teaching my own child each day and amazed at how her brain works, but as I learn and study the disability more and more I do know that these kids are trying so hard and are amazing at what they are overcoming just by learning to read. Its like a child learning to walk from being in a wheelchair as their brains are not wired to decode language without systematic instruction that actally teaches new brain pathways. Dyslexia is also a spectrum disability that ranges from mild, moderate, evere or profound. A child with mild dyslexia may make it through school without intervention but will just be slower to aquire skills,where a profoundly dyslexic student will not learn to read without systematic multisensory instruction and this can still take years of remediation to get them to be able to read proficient and they may never be a “good” or “fast” reader but they can learn to read.
