Tell my how your bright dyslexic kid fared in school/college

[Anonymous]

My 3rd grader was just diagnosed with dyslexia. I'd love to hear stories about how things went for your kid. My daughter is bright and had some very disparate results on her neuropsyche--99th percentile in non-reading focused activities like reasoning and 6th percentile in things like rapid picture naming and phonemic awareness.

At school, she's having a ton of problems with finishing assignments in the time allotted, and giving her extra time just means that she misses other stuff. For example, the kids were working on essays and she finished one paragraph in the time the rest of the class finished 5 paragraphs. The teacher gave her extra time, which meant that the rest of the class moved onto math while she sat to the side and worked on her essay (half listening to the math lesson, which meant that she neither got the math lesson nor finished the essay). I'm really not sure how she's going to get through school successfully like this! I'd love some stories from other families. How did your kids do in school if they are bright....but reading takes a looooooong time.

We are working on finding an excellent reading specialist for remediation (all suggestions welcome). In the meantime, I'd love to hear how other kids with a similar profile (bright, but a very slow reader) did in school. Was your kid able to excel in things like math or did the reading issues mean that all subjects were a slog? What helped your kid? How is s/he doing now?

[Anonymous]

My DS is a HS junior and does fairly well. He’s in a mix of honors/AP/regular classes and gets mostly A’s. His SAT score is going to be fine. Not the best ever but good enough for a decent university. He does use his extra time.
He didn’t do great in foreign language and switched to ASL.

It’s somewhat annoying now because his special ed counselor doesn’t believe he has dyslexia at this point. He still does and always will but he also had about 5000 hours of a 1:1 OG tutor plus a stint at an OG certified SN private school. I guess that’s a win if it’s no longer detected to her. She’s not exactly an expert though.

[Anonymous]

Mine has a different LD in written expression rather than dyslexia but I hope our experience is reassuring for you. He struggled with spelling, grammar, organizing his writing and handwriting. He had low processing speed but was very bright and a whiz with math. He was very behind at the start of 3rd grade when diagnosed and was shutting down in class. With the help of an advocate and neuropsychologist (who agreed to attend the meeting), we put a good IEP in place. We had really kind and caring teachers. Because he didn’t have dyslexia, he wasn’t provided with OG or a specific program so we did what we could on our own. We did speech, OT (realize this is probably irrelevant in your case) and an intensive summer writing program. I worked with him a lot at home. We saw progress. His LD was considered resolved at the end of ES but some weaknesses remained. He went to a mainstream private school for middle school where our sole goal was for him to gain confidence and reduce anxiety around academics. Miraculously, he had teachers who just really got him and addressed his weaknesses through more personalized instruction (not something they promised but something we were lucky happened). We never expected such a positive outcome. He did great in HS and now he is at UMD and doing great (with accommodations).