6 year old might have reading issues?

[Anonymous]

Read Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz - much better description of dyslexia and associated strengths/weaknesses.

Also read “Stealth Dyslexia” by Eide.

Dyslexics can be very bright and still struggle to read. They have deficits in rapid automatic naming with the symbol/sound relationship and sometimes also in segmenting sound.

My DC has reading difficulties yet tested in neuropsych with an verbal reasoning IQ subscore over 130, but also a reading disorder by the time he got to 3rd grade (when reading expectations have increased). His reading disorder was not technically dyslexia but probably due to underlying ADHD Inattentive. His coding subscore on IQ was very low/discrepant. Several years of OG helped him. I wish we had done more OG and earlier.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If she is not reading CVC words fluently, what is she reading to you?

She can sound them out. Her reading specialist said she would like DD to be able to read them more “automatically” (aka without having to decode them sound by sound). She’s reading Starfall books at levels D and E.

She needs prompting for the first sound for words like “this” and “what,” but she can sound out the CVC words. She also knows a good number of the sight words in the books, although sometimes she reads “it” as “at.” When I ask her to look at it again, she gets it.

To me, I think you could consider more OG. How many hours a week is she receiving OG and on what setting (small group / one on one). If she can sound out CVC, that sounds like progress. For this, she needs to know - th which she may not have been taught yet. If she has been applying what she has been taught, I would suggest being patient and possibly adding more tutoring.

She’s doing 1 hour one on one. I don’t think her school covered th last year in K, and she can’t say it right (she says it as f), so it’s definitely tough for her.

1 hour a week of OG for someone with dyslexia is nothing. Most dyslexic kids I know are doing 3-5 hrs/week.

She hasn’t been diagnosed with dyslexia.

[Anonymous]

Thank you everyone! Sounds like we will continue with what we’re doing. Good to see OG has worked well with kids with dyslexia. Again, not sure if that’s what’s going on … hoping we will find out more when we do the neuropsych eval.

[Anonymous]

One more thing: This morning at camp drop off, she wanted to write down the time I dropped her off on the sign-in sheet. I told her it’s 9:05. She wrote the 9 backwards. Once I told her “Oops, other way!” she corrected it, but she does reverse numbers sometimes (especially 9, 4, and sometimes 2).

[Anonymous]

At that age, reversing letters and numbers wouldn't be a red flag when taken on its own. But I agree it could be part of the pattern.

[Anonymous]

OP, here are a few things I would assess if your child were my student:

1) Does she know a basic (most common) consonant sound for all the single consonants? And can she supply the sound automatically? I.e. show her a m and she immediately says /m/? Does she automatically know qu=/kw/ ands x=/ks/?

1a) (also does she know the next most likely sounds for "c". (k,s) and g (g,j) and s (s,z)? I explicitly teach these alternate sounds immediately with my beginning readers so they have more chances to decode words earlier, but some teachers don't teach that way so if they don't know the alternate sounds, I'm not concerned... I just teach them right away!)

2.) does she know the short and long vowel sound for a,e,i,o,u and can she produce them very quickly when asked? I.e something like "A says /short a sound/ and /long a sound/". For sure she should have all the short vowels down automatically - no mistakes - by age 6. Long vowels are just the names of the letters. To decode well students need to be able tp produce both sounds.

3) Does she know that the letter y represents three sounds - /y/ at the start of a word (yes), and /long e/ or /long i/ at the end of a word (happy, sky).

4) Does she know the sounds made by the consonant digraphs: th, sh, ch, ph, and ng? (Most teachers don't teach ph early on, and some teach ng in the context of the vowel "welded" onto it - ing, ang, ong, ung etc. but she should know all the others - again automatically.

5) If you say three sounds to her, separated by a second, can she blend it to make a syllable? EG with a real word (not writing - this is only orally). /p/.../i/..../g/,,, can she blend quickly and automatically to say /pig/? If she is slow to do this orally, then even if she does know all her letter sounds, she will be slow to decode words because she is not proficient yet in blending phonemes.
If she can blend to make a real word, try doing the same thing with nonsense words. Eg. /m/.../i/.../p/. Sometimes kids who cant blend well will blend half the sounds, and then guess a word that makes sense. By observing her blending nonsense words, you can identify if there is a blending problem, and underwhat conditions there is a blending problem. Some kids just cannot blend an initial consonant with a medial vowel sound. But they can blend a vowel sound first, then a consonant sound. Helping students learn to blend sounds orally is a big part of reading remediation.

6. If she knows all her letter sounds, and can blend orally, then try giving her nonsense words to decode. They should be CVC like "mip, ret, lon, ting, chob" etc. So she isn't using her knowledge of words to guess the word, she has to totally decode the whole thing. If she knows all her letter sounds easily and automatically AND she can blend sounds orally, she SHOULD be able to decode words automatically and quickly; she just needs some practice. Some kids need to sound out words 3 times and then they can decode automatically; some need to decode the word 30 times before automaticity. Some very slow decoders may need 300 times. But, once they start decoding some words automatically, that skill then transfers to other words - they don't have to decode each and every word that many times.

There's no good way to skipp over the decoding practice part of reading. Yes, you can use real words, but there is a danger that the child will only decode part of the word and then guess the rest, and that's find for reading for meaning, but it doesn't exercise the decoding "muscle" that needs to activate for decoding to become automatic. So, decoding nonsense words is a very effective drill to help students become more fluent at decoding automatically.

As soon as she can decode CVC words proficiently and automatically, it is time to repeat the process with words with consonant clusters i.e. CCVC and CVCC. spit, bend. or nonsense words eg... filt, slep

You can decode these words and spell them. Ideally this is what the reading interventionist is doing. If they are working on sight words, though, they probably aren't doing enough of this practice as well, because there just isn't enough time for both.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The WPPSI scores being good and her high math performance means she's unlikely to have a problem like, say, poor working memory. I would investigate a language-based learning disability.

How is her speech?

She’s always had an advanced vocabulary, which makes this even more difficult to figure out for us.

Our child 2E with dyslexic has an incredible vocabulary. Dyslexia can be a very specific learning difference centered on decoding. In fact, the vast difference between our child verbal skills and reading ability in first grade was the first tip off they may have dyslexia.

See what the full testing panel shows.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The WPPSI scores being good and her high math performance means she's unlikely to have a problem like, say, poor working memory. I would investigate a language-based learning disability.

How is her speech?

She’s always had an advanced vocabulary, which makes this even more difficult to figure out for us.

Our child 2E with dyslexic has an incredible vocabulary. Dyslexia can be a very specific learning difference centered on decoding. In fact, the vast difference between our child verbal skills and reading ability in first grade was the first tip off they may have dyslexia.

See what the full testing panel shows.

+1 - our DC is also gifted in verbal comprehension/vocabularly and dyslexic. Reading comprehension well above grade level but spelling and written expression way below.

[Anonymous]

SLP here. The reading decoding issues may be related to her articulation and weakness with phonology. She needs to have a strong foundation in letter sound and her ability to manipulate the sounds in words to become a strong reading decoder. Play alliteration and rhyming games with her and find an SLP or reading specialist who can work on these skills.