Think dd might be dyslexic

I have had a feeling she might be for a few months. Little things have been bothering me like the fact that she has trouble breaking down words phonetically, reading her flashcard words, days of the week & months of the year are hard for her. I thought she was a really good reader but in the last couple of months, it's dawned on me that she has memorised her reader from school. She reads for a good hour every night when she goes to bed & I've noticed that she isn't actually reading the stories but making them up from the pictures.

Her teacher asked to speak to me today and basically told me that Maddy's writing is appalling & we need to keep on top of her over it. This is a problem that her teacher had with her last year too. She also holds the pencil akwardly. She has problems with easy words like and, for, them etc etc . She also has a tendency to write letters backwards although this has massively improved in the last few weeks. She started weekly spelling tests this year. I was very worried the day she did the first one & I told myself that if she didn't do well that I would look into dyslexia but she gets 10 out of 10 every week.

When I got back from talking to her teacher this morning, I had a word with dh and he said he has had his suspicions for a little while too. Dh doesn't do homework with Maddy because most of it is in the irish language so I was very surprised when he said that & I went to look online. There is a very good website called dyslexia.ie that has a list of indictors divided into age http://www.dyslexia.ie/information/info ... -dyslexia/ and all of the above seems to be on there so it has confirmed to me that this is something we need to look into. I think I will talk to her teacher about it tomorrow. According to the website though, only the very dyslexic get assessed through the school & that everyone else has to do it privately & it costs €400

Sorry for going on & on but I needed to get this out & down on a page to sort it out in my head. Any advice & tips will be gratefully received. I would love any advice on what to do about her flashcard words homework especially. They are the things that she has most difficulty with. I am feeling very upset & guilty about all the times I really losst my patience with her over those stupid flashcards I should have realised something wasn't right sooner

For things like days of the week and months of the year try making a rhyme up for them. I do this with lots of words I can't spell and sequences of words I can't remember in the right order for example "never eat cake eat salmon sandwiches and remain young" spells Necessary, 'Never eat shredded wheat" North east south west.

She has every right to be assessed through the school, speaking from experience don't let them walk all over you, you need to push these things if you think there is need.
Some times it is the easiest of words that are the hardest to spell, I often look at Anna's homework spelling and think it is easy but they find it hard and she is generally ok at spelling

Please please dont beat yourself up, its normal to feel guilty, shocked and upset if you suspect something , i look back now at all the times ds1 struggled with his homework and wonder why i didnt pick up on the signs earlier
She may be Dyslexic and if you feel that she may be and the school wont fund a test then you may have to bite the bullet and pay for one yourself, what does her teacher think, they can do basic tests at school but i dont think they are reliable, my ds1 was tested at school when he was about the age of your DD and i kept being told there was nothing to make them think he was Dyslexic ,well they were wrong.
My ds1 was only diagnosed with Dyslexia in the summer and he is 12, i have had a feeling that he was for a while now but i think he had developed strategies to deal with his problems which only really came to a head when his end of year assessments in May were very poor for English ( he got 14% overall which involved 4 45min essays including Poetry appreciation and book reviews).
Basically he has struggled to keep up with the work, he is very disorganised generally and writing 45 min essays just threw him into a panic , he is now having 2 one to one sessions a week to help him with this and other issues that came up from the assessment.
We had to pay £400 for a private assessment and i have to say it was worth every penny, the Ed Psych was here for 4 hours , 1.5 hrs to do an IQ test, 1.5 hrs for the Dyslexia test and then we chatted about the results .
My ds is great at spelling tests and generally gets 10/10 every week but he has a poor short term memory and has forgotten most of them by the end of the week, plus he has sloppy handwriting and writes at a slower rate too.
What is her reading age , her teacher should know or can assess her at school for this, Oscar's was always less than his real age.
Please remember that Dyslexia is not related to IQ, its just that the Dyslexic brain learns things in a different way, Einstein,Da Vinci,Churchill, Steve Jobs (Apple),Richard Branson, Walt Disney...... all famous Dyslexics.
Hope any thing i have said helps,

hi, we are currently going thru the EXACT same thing with our little girl who is 6, have been told that she is technically too young for the official dyslexia test, but the school have been brill and said theyd do an "unofficial" test just to get some kind of a clue!
To be honest tho i think its a given, i have 3 severly dyslexic brothers and my mother in law also! So i wasnt surprised in the slightest!
But if its any reassurance 2 of my 3 brothers (the other only being 15) have AMAZING jobs and earn more than most people i know so dont fret too much
Hope that helps xxx

Dyslexia is in my DH'S family too, dh's brother is and his 2 sons (ds1's cousins)

I'm dyslexic and wasn't diagnosed until I was 11 and had just passed my eleven plus and got into grammar school. It's really important it gets diagnosed and you and her teachers can begin to teach her coping mechanisms.

There are dyslexia charities who may be able to help with a diagnosis, and who can also help with extra lessons etc.

A word of warning, don't keep on telling her she's normal, or reel of lists of famous dyslexics. I had that from my parents and it was so unnatural, it was a case of protesting too much, and just made me feel worse.

Thanks ladies.

I've been thinking about this all morning &, the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. She is a very intelliegent little girl who is a whizz at maths but we have been struggling with homework for a while. She has reader, words & writing in both english & irish every night so homework can be a real struggle. When she gets very frustrated she tells me to forget it because she's just stupid. That really breaks my heart.

My ds is great at spelling tests and generally gets 10/10 every week but he has a poor short term memory and has forgotten most of them by the end of the week, plus he has sloppy handwriting and writes at a slower rate too.

This is so Maddy. It didn't dawn on me about the short term memory thing until I read what you said but it makes perfect sense. They don't do "reading age" here but I imagine they will when I talk to them about this. Personally, I would say she is a slow reader. She enjoys reading which helps alot but she has to spend time breaking down the smaller words to figure them out & she gets frustrated so that is probably why she just makes up the story herself. She is great at reading her readers from school but they go over that a few times during school so she possibly has it memorised.

There hasn't been anyone in mine or dh's family diagnosed with dyslexia but I know a few in my family more than likely are & dh said the same. Have to go get her from school now & try to arrange a meeting with the teachers.

Thanks for the support everyone. It helps to hear from people that have gone through the process

I can't comment on dyslexia as have no knowledge of that.

But regarding the handwriting, I don't know that alarm bells should necessarily be ringing yet. When I was a child we used to have to prove that we could write well then we'd get a 'pen licence'. I was the cleverest in the class, but could not get my pen to do what I could see in my head. I was the last person in my class to get a 'pen licence' because my writing was so poor...about 6 months behind the last child. I remember the day that something just 'clicked', and my pen did what I wanted. It wasn't just writing that was affected, I couldn't draw pictures beyond stick figures either. Again, it just didn't come out how I wanted.

I've recently looked into it a bit because ds is clever in many ways, but the poor boy has inherited his mothers hand-eye coordination. Even at this young age, his writing is far behind his peers as is his drawing. But when I've looked into it, it seems that it's perfectly normal for children not to get this until around 7-8years. It's just part of normal development. It doesn't mean ignore it, and let it drift on forever, but there is still time for her to become ready to write.