first grade....does this sound like LD?

My son had all the characteristics of yours in first grade plus he couldn’t memorize sight words. His auditory processing problems were responsible for the problems you mention. He is now classified as having a specific language disability. Make sure that the testing includes blending, segmenting ect. One test is the LAC test. There are others, although I can’t recall at the moment. The reading expectations at his age are low but your child clearly does have the reading readiness necessary. You don’t want to wait until he is really behind to get him help either.

I would recommend you get the book Reading Reflex by Carmen and Geoffrey McGuiness. It has lots of information on how to teach your child to read including blending. My son has needed a lot of other intervention as well (his problems are in several areas and particularly severe) but for many children, this approach is enough. In any case, it would teach you how to work with him while you wait to see what the school has to say. My son was classified as having a specific language disability in first grade but he was already in the special education system and had been since he was 3 due to speech and language delays. I have heard of other cases where the child had to be 2 years behind to qualify.

In our case, the school has been little help, despite the LD classification. We have done everything on our own. But our son is reading on a mid second grade level now and is beginning third grade. Given the extent of his disabilities and the fact that he was hardly reading even a year ago, we feel like this is a big accomplishment.

I am not an expert by any means, but our story sounds similar. My son who is in the 4th grade is gifted/ld, when in first grade he could write his spelling words but could not read them and had difficulty even in telling us the letters in those words. He also had 3 years of speech therapy, so his speech problems make it difficult to say the blends. By age 7 his speech was corrected. Like your son he has an excellent memory which is how he compensates. My son’s problem with reading seems to stem from his eyes, while he has 20/20 vision he has trouble focusing and tracking. He has just completed vision therapy and is now reading on grade level.

There has been several postings in the past on vision therapy that might aid you and will give you the website to get more information and names of doctors in your area. We were able to do his vision therapy through the state university which has a school of optometry at a fraction of the normal cost of VT.

I hope this helps it not you can at least take this possibility off your list of possible causes.

Heather,

Your son sounds just like my daughter when she was in 1st and 2nd grade. My advice to you is to buy the book Reading Reflex and teach your son to read. The lessons are easy to follow and you can do it yourself with your son. Your son just needs to understand what letters represent what sound or sounds and how to blend them correctly and segment them. Reading Reflex will help him a lot.

Your son is young and all this may change. Some children walk later than others, some children read later than others.

In the meantime, what does his teacher say about this?

Heather,

Get your son into speech therapy a.s.a.p. no matter what his other problems are a good SLP teacher will help. It all takes time and there is no magic. A SLP teacher will help him understand the sounds of the letters they don’t teach reading but without the knowledge of the sounds they are stuck.

The school should provide this service for you.

On top of everybody else’s comments, I’ll add that you may want to get a CAPD evaluation for him. This is often covered by medical insurance. Difficulty with blending is one of the signs of an “auditory decoding deficit”, which is often helped by FastForWord (http://www.scilearn.com). A CAPD eval is not usually done until age 7 or later, although it can be done earlier when symptoms are severe, by CAPD audiologists who specialize in younger children.

For more information about CAPD, check out http://pages.cthome.net/cbristol/

Mary

To Heather;
I read your letter and that sounds exactly like my daughter when she was in the first grade. She is now in third grade. At the time in first grade I found myself very frustrated. I had gone to the teacher and principal and they would not test her saying she was too young. I went ahead and took her for testing on my ownand found that she is dyslexic and has central auditory processing disorder and emerging language disorder. I was told some kids that talk okay but may not understand the language they are speaking. Allison has a wonderful memory and that is what gets her through. We do have her in a speech class and the resource room and tutoring. This past summer I had her tutored and she made real progress! I am now going through the same similarities with my 6 year old son. He has already been tested and he too has CAPD and emerging language disorder. He is really struggling with writing letters and reading. He is also in speech class and is starting tutoring real soon. I hope you can get to the root of your childs problem. I always try to remember to praise my children daily and just ask them to try their best!

Tammyheather wrote:
>
> my son is 6 and in first grade. he cannot blend a sound
> together if his life dependned on it. he cant read at all.
> now , he can momorize his spelling words to spell them but if
> i show him the falsh card and ask him to read the spelling
> word he doesnt know it. now his spelling words and sight
> words are only words like “are, all, at, come, the ect.” he
> also can memorize lists of sight words but cant read them in
> print. he has speech problems and is in a remedial reading
> class. we are shortly undergoing testing for an underlying
> LD but i was wondering if anything rang a bell with someone
> who might say “this is my son/daughter!” and be able to shed
> some light on this now. he is becoming more and more
> withdrawn from reading. he wants me to read but he cant.
> now he can memorize a story and “read” it to me …but he
> isnt looking at the book while hes reading….he has it
> memorized….where do i go now….help!!

If you suspect your child is dyslexic, don’t wait. Have him tested and get help right away, even if you have to pay for it yourself. The way children with untreated LD suffer socially, academically, and psycologically is terrible and unnecessary. The younger a child is when they receive help the faster they will be back on track. I wish I had known the source of my children’s reading problems earlier, I could have saved them and myself a lot of heart ache.

I agree with Ann. Don’t wait to get help from the school. Keep pursuing every avenue you can through the school, but in the meantime get your child help. Get a tutor that specializes in reading problems and phonemic awareness now.

My greatest regret with our dyslexic child is I just didn’t get him help in his early school years. I just didn’t understand what was going on and because he was a sweet quiet child, his teachers just didn’t worry about him. But his self-esteem really hit rock-bottom due to his reading, spelling, and handwriting problems. Now I spend as much time worrying about getting his self-esteem back up as I do worrying about his academic issues.

I cannot say whether this sounds like LD or not. I can tell you that neither of our boys were able to read until the end of second grade. One is dyslexic; one is not. But either way, your child is showing some emotional strain from the situation and it can’t hurt to provide him some additional help.

My daughter despite the school having the private test results in front of her - could not blend sounds (5th percentile), didn’t have sound/symbol down (the sounds the letters represent), poor finger tapping or something like that - all things that I researched on my own that said “dyslexia” - compared to a pretty high IQ (I know IQ has little relation to learning to read, but the discrepencies I thought were severe). She did have probelms memorizing her sight words (attentional and they just didn’t mean anything or make sense to her).

The school had this information and gave me a reason to the effect of “well, there’s no ABSOLUTE proof that Orton Gillingham would teach her to read better than the methods we have here.” Note, they only offered OG to a select handful (of thousands of students) who were severe - several grade levels below on reading. I was not going to wait around to see that happen and I believe it could have for her. They knew we were taking her to a OG tutor and expressed a millisecond of interest in paying until they heard how expensive it was. There are other ways to do this more cheaply, good reading clinics at universities which have sliding scales or Reading Reflex as someone here already suggested.

We were told by her tutor that she was moderately dyslexic, not “true” or severely dys. Suuposedly that is a controversial label in some school district and therefore not used because in its broadest definition, it simply means “difficulty learning to read” too vague to act on.

Anyway, I’m rambling now……..but the point is I’m glad we did something about it early. This early intervention saved my daughter’s plummeting self esteem. She still has other issues like writing and spelling (some math too), that she gets resource room help for at school, but she feels good that she reads pretty well now and that saved her confidence. Her math, spelling and writing has not taken off in resource room nearly as much as the private tutoring helped her reading and I remain thankful we took the steps we did for her.