Parent Hub

Does my child have dyslexia?

Diagnostic Testing

“Far too many children with learning and attention issues are undiagnosed until well into their elementary school years, or even later, at which point they are performing behind their peers and struggling to catch up. Screening students for learning and attention issues — beginning as early as preschool and continuing through early elementary school — can ensure that children have appropriate support and professionals have the tools to better understand and address each child’s needs.” (National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), 2017)

Dyslexia is a language processing disorder that people are born with. It can hinder reading, writing, spelling, and sometimes even speaking. Dyslexia is not a sign of poor intelligence or laziness. It is also not the result of impaired vision. Children and adults with dyslexia simply have a neurological disorder that causes their brains to process and interpret information differently.
Dyslexia occurs among people of all economic and ethnic backgrounds. Often more than one member of a family has dyslexia. According to the National Institute of Child and Human Development, as many as 15-20 percent of Americans have major troubles with reading due to dyslexia. Much of what happens in a classroom is based on reading and writing. So it's important to identify dyslexia as early as possible. Using alternate learning methods, people with dyslexia can achieve success.

Everyone struggles with learning at times. Learning disabilities such as dyslexia, however, are consistent and persist over time. Some of the "symptoms" listed also apply to other learning disabilities as well as other disorders such as Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD), which often co-exist with dyslexia.

Are you concerned that your elementary or middle school child isn’t learning, communicating, or relating to others as successfully as his or her peers? Does your child especially struggle with reading? Is it affecting your child’s confidence and motivation? If so, the following checklist of common warning signs of dyslexia in children in grades 3 to 8 may help clarify your concerns. For at least the past six months, my child has had trouble:

- Understanding instructions or directions

- Repeating what has just been said in proper sequence

- Staying on topic and getting to the point (gets bogged down in details)

- Naming people and objects

- Speaking with precise, accurate language, proper grammar, and a varied vocabulary

- Distinguishing between words that sound similar

- Pronouncing words correctly

- Speaking smoothly, without much halting or use of "filler words" (like "um")

Understanding humor, puns, and idioms

- Reading age-appropriate content with good fluency

- Reading aloud or silently with good understanding

- Feeling confident and interested in reading

- Remembering sight words and other printed words

- Learning and remembering new vocabulary words

- Accurately analyzing unfamiliar words (tends to guess instead)

- Reading words and letters in the correct order, seldom reversing or skipping over them

- Understanding word problems in math

If you suspect that a child has dyslexia, an evaluation can lead to a better understanding of the problem and to recommendations for treatment. Test results are also used to determine state and local eligibility for special education services, as well as eligibility for support programs and services in colleges and universities. Ideally, evaluation results provide a basis for making instructional decisions and help determine which educational services and supports will be most effective.

Wildwood Literacy can provide educational evaluations that include the administration of norm-referenced tests based on standard scores, percentiles, and grade/average-based equivalencies. The evaluation will include:

- Developmental, medical, behavioral, academic, and family history assessments

-Measure of general intellectual functioning

- Information on cognitive processing (language, memory, auditory processing, visual processing; visual motor integration, reasoning abilities, and executive functioning)

- Level of functioning in basic skill areas of reading, spelling, written language, and math

- Single-word decoding of both real and nonsense words

- Oral and silent reading in context (evaluate rate, fluency, comprehension, and accuracy)

- Reading comprehension

Neurobiological in nature, dyslexia is believed to affect up to 20% of the population to varying degrees and is considered the most common language-based learning disability, according to the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity.

Resources

Contrary to long-held beliefs, dyslexia is not a matter of seeing letters backward, nor is it a reflection of intelligence. Decades of research and academic studies have shown that dyslexia is a brain-based condition that makes learning to read and write unexpectedly difficult for millions of individuals around the world.

Dyslexia is a highly variable condition, affecting individuals on a continuum of severity. Research and instructional experience have clearly proven that individuals with mild, moderate, and even severe dyslexia can successfully learn to read and write through intensive multisensory structured language (MSL) instruction provided by a skilled educator.

Recommended resources for more information about dyslexia and tools to help your child:

The Dyslexia Toolkit

The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity

International Dyslexia Association

Nashville, Tennessee

Parent Hub

Diagnostic Testing

Resources