Just finished 5th week at LMB!

Good job for both of you! I don’t know why Seeing Stars would not improve fluency. True it is not the usual way of going about it, however, the whole idea from my understanding is to take what are basically decodable words for the child and make them sight words (I don’t mean this term in the typical sense, but that the words will be immediately recognizable). *If* a child would go from decoding every word to reading many words more automatically it sure as heck *should* make him/her more fluent.

—des

How wonderful!!

The interesting thing is that fluency programs work on the premise that repeated exposure to the same text increases fluency (which it does in my experience) which then transfers to new texts (which I have found much more problematic). Guess it depends on what the underlying cause of lack of fluency is. Seeing Stars works on orthographic processing—making sight words more automatic.

I found that when my son started to automatically recognize words after only a few exposures to them it made a big difference. Of course, he still reads though as through and things like that….. If you ask him to read it again, he always gets it right. Any ideas of how to eliminate these kinds of errors.

Beth

Beth,
My personal belief or experience which is based on my own child and having tried a large variety of methods to remediate him is that kids with orthographic recognition (RAN or general slow processing related) reading difficulties need a lot of intensity in whatever program is being used.

I think something like Seeing Stars or PG intensives are going to be the most helpful. Even when I worked an hour a day with my son (and that didn’t include extra reading), it just wasn’t enough. Nothing seemed to “stick.” No matter how much I tried. The best I ever was able to accomplish was an at-home one month 4 hour a day “PG-intensive” I did with my son a couple of years ago. We were on a multi-track school schedule and I spent 4 hours a day, every day - including weekends! (broken in 2 hour increments) on PG. My son made some good progress. Unfortunately, he slowly lost it. He had never become fully automatic with what he had learned and even an hour a day of daily decoding, fluency and extra time spent on general reading wasn’t enough to help him retain it. He slowly lost it all. It was like he slowly became “blind” to the words.

Even Seeing Stars seemed to take a lot of time for my son to finally show some facility with what he was being taught! Unfortunately my son is still not automatic. If I can somehow come up with a way to keep him going there for a couple more weeks, even just 4 hours a day, I think there’s a chance he may make that transition to being much more automatic and possibly this whole thing might actually start to click. It’s a lot to hope for, but I can’t help feeling we’re getting close. I could be wrong, but I think for my son, and possibly yours too, intensity may be the key.

Excellent! I’m so glad for both of you.

I agree that intensity is important for kids with slow processing like mine. I think that’s why LMB worked for us as well.

Laura,

When I read your story with your son, you could have been writing about my son!! The most frustrating thing about my son is how he actually forgets how to decode. He will retain the words he learns but when faced with a new word with the same pattern, forget it. Linda, with Read America, characterized him as having inconsistent code knowledge—he knew some code in isolation but not in a word and vice versa.

Like your son, he made a big jump in an intensive framework. The scary thing to me is that I can see he isn’t now, only weeks later, not quite as good as he was when he came home. Like you, I am thinking of doing this again, in hopes that we can totally automate it.

Where did we sign on the dotted line for this kind of kid?

Beth

Des and Laura — yes, I agree totally, fluency that comes from mastery of reading skills is real fluency; it will be retained and it will transfer to other texts and it will continue to develop. Fluency scores increased by repeated reading make me very very doubtful; it’s like coaching/cramming for any kind of test, sure you get higher scores right after the cram course, but how this will transfer to real life is a big question.
There is the usual “instant effortless results” promise problem, here too; I say you should spend a year or two gradually developing reading skills, with fluency coming along as one part of a multistep program, and someone else comes along and says they have a new miracle cure that will instantly provide fluency in six weeks or your money refunded, and it’s also fun, fun, fun! — guess who gets the customers. Of course if the results don’t transfer or if they fade, the money is already spent and anyway the clinic will then sell you another instant cure.

Beth — the problem of mistaking similar words like though and through — It would be best to prevent this problem in the beginning by not letting the kid guess, but once the habit has ingrained itself, you’re right it’s a really hard one to root out. You have to be ready for a little conflict — dropping old easy-way-out habits and changing to new ones that require effort is never going to be an easy sell.
Get a book that he likes and would really like to read, maybe one that’s a little difficult for him so he’s glad of your help (Harry Potter is one possibility; or a fact or how-to book about an activity he wants to learn — you can learn how to install a ceiling fan along with him …) Have him read aloud to you as you follow along under the line with a pen point. When he stumbles on a new or difficult word, help hom sound it out syllable by syllable, pointing as you go — no stress, not force, but just gradually increasing vocabulary in a natural way on material he wants to learn. Now, here’s the issue — when he gets to a word that he guesses, stop him. At first you may have to say “stop, stop, stop!” and lead him back to the point at issue. He may fight you because you are breaking his flow (Tough, you’re breaking the flow of errors.) As time goes on he will respond to smaller and smaller cues, an “ahem” or just a tapping with the pen point. Have him say the correct word, and then re-read the sentence with the correct word in it.
In really severe cases, where the student decides he prefers guessing and sees how far he can push me by refusing to look and saying the word wrongly five or six times, until he gets the point that I really mean I won’t let it slide (remember, everyone else has let it slide up to this point, so he thinks he’s got a winning program), I have started to be just as pushy back; if he says the word five times wrong, I tell him to repeat it six or more times correctly. I also watch his eyes and make sure he is actually *looking* at the word while saying it. This is not fun and it is tiring for both teacher and student; however it is truly amazing how errors reduce in just a few days. Twenty minutes at a time, three or four times a week, is enough at first; you build up as the frustration decreases. If the student really does have basic phonic skills and really is familiar with the words in question, errors reduce 90% over a very short time (if the student honestly does not have a clue that “of” “from” and “for” are three different words, you have to teach each word separately, moving from left to right across it, tracing the letters while sounding them out, etc.) Once the errors have reduced, DON’T STOP! You have to drive out the bad habit with the good habit. If he practiced wrongly for five or six years, don’t expect three hours to undo that work. You have to keep working with him regularly, minimum of twice a week (and three or four times is better) for six months to a year before you are sure the new habit is established.
This is also reinforced by writing and spelling. Have him say what he intends to write before writing it, and then sound out as he writes. Kids resist this at first because it goes against what they are shown in school (shut up and sit in your seat and fill in the worksheet while the teacher works with the other group). However once they realize how easily writing flows onto the page once they are just encoding speech, they start to like it. Tell him in school he can just whisper very quietly to himself.

I have a suspicion that the key for many of our students is in coaching. We can teach, practice, teach, etc., but I suspect these students fall down on the independent application. They revert back to their inefficient “wholistic” pattern of looking at the general shape of the word and guessing. If we can get enough 1:1 coaching time where we can teach, then engage the student in guided practice where we don’t let them become sloppy and revert, but demand that they practice the skills with adult guidance, I think we can establish new behaviors.

This is where, I believe, our public education programs really fall down. In my elementary and high school classrooms, I have spent hours teaching and providing guided practice. When I am gently guiding, they CAN decode words like “aquanaut,” however when the student is “just reading,” the tendency is to revert. So, it can be frustrating to me as the teacher to teach and teach and to know that student CAN succeed with a few well-placed comments from me, but in the testing situation, I sometimes find very little is carried over to the independent reading situation.

I believe this is because we are not allowed the time. I also believe that few people, but parents of dyslexics and some teachers of dyslexics, really understand what is involved in teaching this group of learners successfully. The push to have eveyone on grade level, fast, the push to teach grade level standards undermines our ability to do our work.

If I were permitted, free of the pressure to meeting grade level standards, to teach to the needs of my students over time, I could get many students much further along. But, we want (in our culture) fast results for the least investment and since few people understand the dyslexic learner, we fight an uphill battle.

NCLB is one more factor that is hindering our ability to do what needs to be done.

Beth,
I’ve always thought our boys were remarkably similar (although yours is MUCH better at soccer than mine! :wink: ).

This ability to lose decoding skills and completely forget how to read is VERY frustrating and it may be that our children are just going to need regular “intensives.” I keep thinking, gosh, at some point after seeing and hearing and doing this 50 billion times…at some point…it just has to “stick.”

Here’s one good thing I’ve learned from LMB:
When my son used to make an error I’d point to the word and tell my son to try it again. At LMB they believe it’s important for kids to learn to self-correct their own errors. So instead of pointing these out, I now have him reread entire sentences to find and correct his own errors.

a year ago we saw a big jump in DS’s ability to decode after completing 4 weeks of LMB. Honestly, nothing much has changed since then, despite twice weekly tutoring all of last school year.

In Shaywitz’s new book “overcoming dyslexia” she says that in order to bring a typical dyslexic child up to grade level it will take 2-3 years of daily , multiple, teaching sessions , preferably in groups of no more than 3 students. How many parents or teachers can make that happen?

We are fortunate to live near one of the private schools she mentions in her book, and my son is now getting reading/spelling lessons 3X a day in a group of 6. Then he comes home with reading homework that repeats what he did in class. He had homework over the winter break too. He’s held his ground in decoding (still refers to what he learned at LMB) and I *THINK* I see some gains in fluency. He is starting to read spontaneously a little more - not books, but during board games, advertisements etc.

Its always 2 steps forward, 1 step back, so yes, you may need to jump start things with an intensive intervention, but I bet the overall direction of progress is positive. Even normal readers lose proficiency over summer break, right? But our kids have farther to go so the effort has to be greater.

LMB’s error correction strategies are very useful! Hard as heck to learn because you need to get out of the habit of telling kids everything as teachers are wont to do. However they are rewarding. It’s great to watch kids correct themselves. I like to reinforce self-correction more than right answers even.

—des

>”Laura in CA”]Here’s one good thing I’ve learned from LMB:
When my son used to make an error I’d point to the word and tell my son to try it again. At LMB they believe it’s important for kids to learn to self-correct their own errors. So instead of pointing these out, I now have him reread entire sentences to find and correct his own errors.[/quote]

AGree totally, Anitya — the thing that made what I did at the LD school work was that the “transfer” of skills was given every bit as much attention **ant time** as the teaching. Every student *still* had 50 minutes of intensive Language Fundamentals even after reading had improved, with guided reading, practice, applications… and this was high school.
Daily reading with emphasis on accuracy can go a long way with this — keeping a notebook of missed words and practicing decoding the list before reading is what we did as part of each day’s lesson, no matter what your reading level. (Granted, some of my kiddos didn’t usually have any words on their lists for long :))

I’ve always liked the “pencil correction” — we follow along with pencils, and my pencil stops if you’ve made a mistake. No discourse, usually, because you usually give it a closer look and read the word and we move on (or start again at the beginning of the sentence if we need that for comprehension/flow of the story). I might scoop out the syllables to give you a hand… or if you’re stumped in a second or five (depending on your general speed) I”ll read the word and make a little mark by it and we’ll learn that one.
It tends not to be popular at first if for no other reason than the student doesn’t want his reading that closely evaluated. Doesn’t take long for the student to get accustomed to higher standards.

I think the helpful element in LMB is it’s not just a reading program but a cognitive processing program. Also a major goal is developing independent reading skills.

Karen, I’m glad to hear your son has retained his skills. My biggest worry in a public school setting, my son may feel pressured to read more quickly and therefore revert back to guessing and in time forget the skills he has learned.

At home I can focus on slower reading, self-correction and use all the great tips posted here. But in school I don’t have control over these and that could potentially undo some of the progress he has made.

Thanks for sharing, Sue. An example from yesterday’s literacy class. An 11th grader who is surely dyslexic does well when I teach and engage students in guided practice of reading multi-syllabic words. I require students to look for affixes, to chunk the word, to read the chunks, from left to right and to blend the first and second chunks together, then the third, and so on. With coaching they do fine.

Yesterday my junior was reading a challenging selection about bacteria. There were words that really were not too difficult, “prolonged” for example. She totally mispronounced this word, and others, in the typical dyslexic fashion of looking quickly, noting several prominent letters and trying something that did not match and made no sense. This repeated about five times. EAch time I stopped her and reminded her to use the techniques I was teaching, tnen coached her. She can do it,then.

I suspect that many of our students need a great deal of this guided coaching. However, to give this we must have the chance to hear each student read daily for a few minutes when we can stop and guide them to apply what they have learned.

There is a discussion on the teaching reading board about intensive clinics and reading skills rising dramatically. I would like to suggest to those parents that the maintenance is very important. This group of students has memory difficulties. They are very apt to know how to do something correctly when they have been blitzed with it, pull back and fail to maintain and many times this type of student will lose skills.

Also, I question where this progress is seen. Is it seen when reading lists of words? I have often seen students focus intently on appropriate decoding strategies correctly applied when decoding was the only demand being made. When reading connected text, this may go out the window. Or, allow the student to read connected text to you, lending support as needed.

I continue to believe that too many people trivialize the extent and intensity of instruction that many dyslexics need to become good readers. Many teach the skills correctly, but he guided practice that may need to be in place for a long, long time does not happen, so the transfer is never complete. I think this is where my elementary program, good as it was in many ways, fell down simply because I could not possibly lend the coaching support that many needed so desperately.

So, the danger is that students have more sight words in high school, yes indeed. But, for many application of decoding to unknown words is no better than it was in 4th grade, despite all the teaching.

Of course I hope that my former students will be in much better shape when they see me again in 3-5 years. We shall see.

I agree with Anitya; the expensive reading clinics need to be followed by YEARS of guided reading of connected(and interesting) text. We read aloud with my son(now in 7th) in 1st to 6th grade(5 YEARS) and still every now and again I ask him to read from his literature textbook to check on his reading. Not one teacher or tutor ever told us it would take so long…however we enjoyed many, many fun books together(esp. those 4-5th grade books Sign of the Beaver, Great Gilly Hopkins, etc.). We did the pencil technique and it improved his reading hugely. We still use it with his Spanish homework.

Sue,
For the pencil correction technique do you hold the pencil? Or both you and the student each hold pencils? It seems like a good tracking exercise that might help with word skipping problems.

I’ve been working really hard on having my son discover his own errors. At LMB they repeat the sentence over with the correct word and the student has to then say what the corrected word was. More often when my son doesn’t automatically correct, I’ll ask him if the sentence makes sense. He’ll then self-correct. Or, sometimes I’ll ask him to try reading the sentence again so he can find the error on his own (which he almost always does). I know this isn’t fully independent, but I do see him stopping and making more corrections on his own.

I like the pencil idea, but I’d worry that it might make him dependent on me. For a few years I used to use my finger and I’d stop it on a word that was incorrect so he’d have to take a moment to try and decode it. I liked that I didn’t need to use words, and if he was having a lot of difficultiy decoding I might question him with something that would help like “What vowel team do you see?” or “What other sounds might the vowel make?” For my son, he seemed to have difficulty moving beyond this level and getting anywhere near independence. I kind of feel like I have to be very careful how I approach his reading difficulties. It’s just such a huge undertaking to get him to make any progress.

You are all soooo right about the importance of daily “maintanence work.” It is so incredibly easy for these kids to slide back down. And LOTS of daily reading (much more than what’s required for the typical student).

I just wanted to chime in and say I agree very much about the need for long term reading tutoring to maintain decoding skills and to improve fluency. Every time I hear someone say they tutor PG for 12 hours and that’s it, I think, come on!!! I’d tell parents up front that it is a long term proposition.

Janis

WE SHOULD! It is ludicrous to expect the school to do this. But I did it — and I still monitor his daily reading amount (ensuring we have AT LEAST an hour each day!), read aloud to him, and have him read aloud to me (tho not as much, cuz he IS fluent now — needs more time on spelling!)

A parent may not be able to tutor…but ANYONE, with a bit of good advice, can ‘snuggle up and read’! I believe that my dyslexic son (no RAN or memory issues, visually dyslexic with WISC coding subscore of 4!) is a fluent 5th grade reader because we spent minimum half hour EVERY DAY reading aloud, underlining with my finger first, then him using my finger as a pointer, throughout Grade 2 and 3. He WOULD NOT use his own finger, but that was our compromise.

In spring of Gr. 3, he improved dramatically, and by mid Grade 4 he was truly an independent reader, even though his decoding is not yet where I believe it should be. He is a certain ‘LD profile’, of course, and although this result may not be possible for every kid, I believe that daily assisted reading WITH THE PARENT is essential for every LD/struggling reader. It sure can’t hurt!

Anitya and others, what do you think would be the outcome if EVERY one of your students had half an hour of assisted reading (out loud with a parent helper) each day? I BET they don’t…My opinion is, that if they DID, your excellent work would finally be supported with enough practice to make a real difference.

I know it is hard for parents…maybe it was easy for me cuz I love to read and was very motivated to do whatever I could do to help, but if I could do it working 40 hours a week, most people could do it…

Elizabeth,

I can top your son’s coding score - mine got a 1!!

Laura,

I think your concerns about making your son dependent on you as you try to make him a more accurate reader are valid. I have done some of the same things others suggested and those techniques, combined with his poor decoding, helped make my son not expect text to make sense. And frankly, I don’t know if he became more accurate because of those techniques.

Last year we did some visualization exercises that worked on causal relationship (x because y) and my son finally started self correcting. Our NN therapist told me to let misreading go unless it is essential to the meaning—because he needs to learn to monitor himself instead of me doing it for him. So I am looking for techniques that might help accuracy without increasing dependence. Do you think the LMB technique of you correctly reading the sentence and having him find the word he read incorrectly is more effective than him rereading it? MY son almost always can read the word correctly and I haven’t noticed having him reread the sentence makes any difference. I think he then knows he did something wrong so he is more attentive.

I did like Sue’s idea of putting words on cards–I think my son doesn’t pay attention to details and this is a check on him.

I also wanted to tell you about an interesting conversation I had with our NN provider, that helps explain why our boys benefitted from intensive formats. She told me that memory formation is based on synaptic strenthening (doubling of dendritiz spines). Post-synaptic depolization is the essential pre-requisite for synaptic strengthening. There are two mechanisms: intensity and anticipation. Anticipation is anticipation of what and/or when. Anticipation is preferred neurologically over intensity.

Now she was showing me all this diagrams ect. in neurology journals and I don’t understand it all (I was a social science not hard science type in school!!) What I do understand is that my son with severe and global LD’s has become a relatively normal learner (anticipation) pretty much everywhere except reading and spelling. There still are neurological kinks here that get in his way of acquiring reading skills. The intensity of the PG intensive really seemed to allow him to make a big jump that I really don’t think the same time in therapy spread out would have done. He even started to sound like a very competent 10 year old reader—smooth, intonation, and natural speed. That part we haven’t maintained—perhaps because it wasn’t consistent, even then. But our experience makes me think that it may take another intensive shot in the arm to get him to “normal”, in addition, of course to regular reinforcement at home. I am just not convinced, given that I have read daily with this child for over three years, that reading alone will do it.

Beth

…our kids are very different profiles. I hope my post didn’t seem to say that I thought this was the ‘answer’ to reading problems, cuz I know better, but it has to help. That’s why I mentioned some of the jargon from the testing — my very beef with the schools in my son’s case is that they saw certain symptoms and then ASSUMED he fit a certain profile — I felt they were way wrong.

The best advice I ever got from this board was to go to wrightslaw and read the ‘understanding tests and measurements’ and then get my son’s subtest scores…then, almost 4 years on this board and I now understand that your kid and mine, while similar in many ways, have very different ‘learning profiles’. I still maintain that your kid would be WAY worse had you not put in that time with him…maybe others will not agree, but I’ll be interested to hear the local ‘expert’ opinions, which I highly regard…!

And I wanted to add, to KarenN, that the coding score of 4 was two months after 6 weeks of intensive remediation with Spalding via a highly skilled teacher, mostly one-on-one, plus a good dose of Davis clay work from another about 5 months earlier…had they tested him in Feb. of Gr. 1 when I got ‘the phonecall’ from his teacher (who kindly did this because we knew each other through our scout group!) I bet he wouldn’t have scored at all!!!! Of course, I am barely an informed amateur, so my opinion may be ludicrous…I have read that remediation won’t affect these scores, so then maybe he’d be a 4 even now, but I wonder…I wish I could afford to have him re-tested just to see!

This difference in learning profiles, and ‘what works for which kid’ is fascinating to me…I think that if we could match methods that work to profiles, we’d beat reading failure for once and for all…

I don’t believe for a minute that remediation won’t affect these scores. I believe that you can’t prep for an IQ test in the sense that you can’t change your basic intelligence level. But I also believe that with LD, the IQ test may be flawed in the first place.

My son’s extraordinary score of 1 on coding, was I’m sure not only due to his slow processing speed, but also his anxiety and his poor visual processing skills. I ‘m willing to be the VT and the therapy and his better understanding of his own strengths and weaknesses will result in different results when he is ultimately retested. I bet there will still be a gap between verbal and performance , but I bet he’ll do better on coding! : )

Coding is a meausure of visual motor quickness and has little relationship to reading or how quickly kids will learn to read; my own son had a coding scaled score of 10 when first tested and could not read at all. I think the intensive reading programs are also targetting the elements of ADD(inability to keep things in short term memory, and inconsistent output) that make it extra hard for some kids to learn to read. Reading ability has little relationship to IQ, and IQ scores do change over time, the bonus pts for speed that kids need to get as they get older make P scores lower as kids get older sometimes. Work towards a functional kid, one who can read, works well in school, gets along with agemates, etc not towards improving scores.

Elizabeth, I think daily parent reading with a finger following underneath the words is excellent to do regardless. With both my kids I started doing this type of thing when they were probably about 7 or 8 months old — and I’m a very animated and phonetic reader (varying speed, slowly pointing out and blending words). My non-LD child is an amazing reader with a wonderful vocabulary. So I do believe this technique can be helpful.

Unfortunately, with my son, something like this by itself isn’t enough, but gosh I sure wish it had been! That would have been much easier.

SAR, You make a good point about striving toward functionality. That really is the most important thing. Also, looking at strengths and what career paths that could possibly offer in the future.

Beth, If you get a moment can you email me? I have a quick Balametrics question for you and some LMB stuff I’d like to share.

Karen, How is VT going?

Elizabeth, that would be heavenly. How about small group skills instruction and some number of minutes of coached reading at instructional level daily. It is possible that 10-15 at school would make a difference. This would be when the teacher makes certain the student uses the skills, coaches like you stated. This would be where the adult models how people figure out words and then guides the student to following the process, correctly and w/ rushing.

Of course we are working with him to give him life skills, but that’s not to say I won’t be curious to see the results … I found the huge scatter in his subtests fascinating and revealing.

When we decided that the ‘IEP’ and SPED help available were not appropriate for my son, it happened that my sister was not working. To help him, since he had a most uncooperative teacher, she volunteered to take a small group including David and do just that — they worked on phonics patterns and spelling, mostly — helped him a great deal, and the other three as well, I hope.

One thing that bothers me SO MUCH is that the general ‘parent population’ does not do this (assisted reading with elementary school aged children) as a matter of fact. I have heard people say, “WHY should I do THEIR job for them!” meaning teachers…this upsets me.

The parents and schools need to find some way to work together…it doesn’t seem that the Govt. in Ontario is facilitating that, nor does it seem that Mr. Bush and ‘NCLB’ is doing so either…

SAR…I didn’t mean that we should work to improve test scores — although I find them interesting and informative, like KarenN, I really do focus on the real world.

I disagree with your comments about the WISC, provided I understood your point correctly. IMO, a poor score on the coding subtest IS some sort of key to the ‘root cause’ of reading failure…but obviously, in your son, his reading difficulties were NOT caused by any deficiencies in the skills tested by the ‘coding’ subtest…coding is obviously not the only area of deficiency that could cause academic difficulties.

In my son, I believe that the skills tested by this subset are the main problem area in his academic skill set, along with developmental vision anomalies (mostly resolved but still working in this area), gifted imagination, a self-directed ‘creative expressive’ personality and a general dislike of academics, plus a poor SK experience, that made him unable to ‘get it’ like most of the others in Gr. 1, although he was verbally very advanced for his age.

Given the difference in coding scores, I bet your son and mine do NOT have similar learning profiles…would you agree? So would it be no surprise that perhaps the same methods of remediation would not work equally for both of them? What did work for yours, if you have time to expound…I really do find this fascinating!

Elizabeth,
I believe that coding is a measure of graphomotor speed and accuracy and symbol search looks at mental processing speed and accuracy; both measure executive control and functioning. I can only speak for my own son who was more typical of kids with language-based LD(on the WISC verbal scores were lower than performance)…he did not have problems with attention, eye contact, socialization or behavior…he is very bright but couldn’t read-the school did Wilson and we had him tutored and worked at home for years. He still does not perform in school like a very superior student but gets A’s in middle school-yes his deficiencies are apparent in spelling and writing and will probably always be there.

My son , as mentioned, scored very low on coding, but average on symbol search. His testing overall showed great gaps and discrepancies. There was one test (the Cognitive assessment system or CAS) where in the 4 sub groups he either scored in the 99% percentile or the 10th. yikes. But the neuropsych was reluctant to label him as dyslexic b/c he didn’t score with a typical language based LD profile. On paper he looked more NLD, and does have difficulty with eye contact and attention.

However, in real life, he has poor decoding, abysmal spelling and excellent comprehension. His experience of reading looks very dyslexic, and the school he attends agreed and accepted him. In the final analysis it doesn’t matter what the scores are - it only matters as a way of choosing the appropriate forms of remediation. In our case his testing looked like he would “crack the code” without needing a classic OrtonGillingham type of teaching. But the testing was wrong because that is exactly what he needs. So we try and try again.