Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Teacher mentioned dyslexia today, opinions wanted!

My son is finishing up first grade this year. He is in the midst of testing into the GT program (his CoGAT scores qualified him for further testing which will be happening in the next few months). His teacher for this year is the lead teacher for his grade who has 20 years of teaching experience and seems to work with him in detail on things so I trust her judgement that something is unusual. A few times this year she has told me that she's surprised at the difference between my son's reading abilities and his spelling abilities. He's currently reading at maybe a 4th grade level but his spelling is still pretty rough (ie, sqware for square, taey for they, lots of phonetic spelling and skipping letters sometimes). It's not so much that he's a bad speller for his grade level, more that he's a bad speller for his reading level. She said she'd considered putting him forward for further assessment but said she knows they wouldn't recommend doing anything for him since he's reading so well. She basically that she's not worried about him in a 'life achievement' sort of sense but that dyslexia might be a thing that comes up in the future.

Other possibly pertinent information: My son also had a LOT of trouble with handwriting last year and this year. During kindergarten and at the beginning of this year, he was still 'drawing' his letters instead of having a good internalized idea of how to write each letter correctly. He's made lots of progress and looks a lot better but definitely doesn't have 'good' handwriting yet. The other aspect of things is that he wasn't an early reader although he's doing great now. He entered kindergarten knowing his letters, letter sounds and a couple of sight words but put it all together last year. He also has had 3 sets of ear tubes in his life - the last set was during kindergarten half way through the year. His math skills are strong and he's aced all his assessments so far although he still writes some numbers backwards.

I see two possibilities for him - one is that he's got some sort of 'stealth dyslexia' working but he's able to compensate for it in his reading. The second is that since he's had so much trouble with handwriting and hasn't really been reading for very long he just hasn't put the spelling part of things together yet and it'll naturally click in the next year or two. Has anyone else seen a similar pattern in their own children? Is it common for spelling skills to lag significantly behind reading skills or do these things usually develop together? Any tips for helping my son along with this skill?

I can attest that spelling is far more difficult than reading. In fact, the program we use as remediation with DD completely separates the two, recognizing that reading need not be bogged down to the pace of spelling (DD finished All About Reading several years ago. I think we'll be working on All About Spelling forever....). Eventually, you can learn and apply all the rules of reading in English. Most of spelling, however, is just memorizing. (For instance, you can learn to recognize/ read the many ways to spell the sound "oh", but it's usually random whether it's spelled mote or moat.)

With respect to your DS, here are the possibilities that come to mind:

1) His spelling is perfectly normal, just not keeping up with his highly-accelerated reading

2) His spelling is developing normally, just more slowly/ with more difficulty than some

3) He is dyslexic

4) He is dysgraphic - as spaghetti flags, definitely worth looking into given what you are seeing

5) He has auditory processing weaknesses related to the ear tubes, which can cause dyslexia-looking problems connecting sounds (which the brain isn't processing quite properly/ consistently) to symbols

Given those possibilities, you might want to look into testing for phonological weaknesses, handwriting automaticity, and auditory processing (not a normal hearing test, requires an audiologist who specializes in this). Note that any of 3, 4 or 5 could be present in combination, which makes things harder to tease apart. Acting sooner is way better than waiting, so it's worth paying attention to your and his teacher's gut feelings.

Some things you can consider at home with respect to (1-3): is his spelling consistently phonetic, or is the order of sounds often a bit scrambled? Does he spell the same word differently at different times? Does he read aloud happily, or with resistance? Reading aloud, does he skip small words, prefixes/ suffixes, people's names; substitute words with plausible alternatives that start with the same letter; or not recognize a word he read earlier when the context changes? Can he read a list of individual words as easily as a story? How about nonsense syllables? I would note that it's amazing how well a kid that age can fake reading, using a mix of memorizing word shapes, context, pictures, etc., so it's important to look into the underlying skills when stripped of all those helpful hints.

For (4): Does his spelling seem better when he types? For (5), does he often seem to mishear things people say to him? Is it worse in a crowded environment? Does he consistently spell certain sounds in odd ways, like he is hearing them differently? (here's a good APD intro: https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/central-auditory.html)

Something to think about: a good phonological-based reading program like All About Reading can be really helpful for all kids, not just those with dyslexia. About 40% of people actually need to be taught sound-symbol correspondence in a more explicit and systematic way than schools usually do, in order to become good readers. So regardless of whether it's a lag, a slight weakness, APD or full-blown dyslexia, you may find it helpful to use an explicit approach to teaching reading and spelling. One thing I really like about AAR is that it builds in the ability to do as much repetition as needed, but is easy to move on when you don't. The worst that can happen is he blows through the program at light speed, and you shorten the frustrating period in which his writing can't keep up with his ideas.

Wow, thank you platypus and spaghetti, so much helpful stuff to think about.

To answer some of your questions: I would say it's mostly phonetic although sometimes the phonemes are a bit mixed up (f instead of th or something like that, especially at the ends of words). Spelling is consistent within a document but not always day to day. He reads out loud mostly happily, although he definitely prefers for me to read to him and likes for me to reread things to him even if he's read them before. I feel like in general he's more fluent on more difficult texts, surprisingly. Part of that's because when he's reading easy books he tends to use silly voices and stuff like that. He definitely misses a lot of small words and 'fills in' things that he thinks makes sense rather than reading what's on the page sometimes. That's my most common 'correction' when I'm reading with him. It's usually small words that he knows like 'for' and 'from' that don't really change the meaning of the sentence. I haven't had him read a list of nonsense words or anything like that so I'll have to check on that. He definitely can sound out long words but does tend to make some big jumps sometime and just guess.

For 4 & 5, he doesn't know the keyboard well enough to type and definitely misspells things that way as well, although he has very little experience with it yet. For 5 (mishearing), that aspect of things has improved a ton since he got his eartubes last year. I'll need to pay attention to that over the next couple of weeks though. He is currently in speech therapy at his school for pronunciation issues ('r' and 'l' and 'sh' and 'th').

The dysgraphia angle is a definite possibility, since writing is by far his largest difficulty in school. I'll look into the reading and spelling programs you've been using as well. Thank you so much for all of your input and thoughts, it's very appreciated!

On the dysgraphia front: As others have said regarding handwriting, it could be dysgraphia, or it could just be an indication that more practice is needed. My DS6 has been weak in handwriting due to a lack of interest in arts and crafts as a younger boy, and had a similar pattern. As it turns out, neither his kindergarten teacher nor his current teacher was requiring him to do ANY practice handwriting in class!

I've since intervened and had him practice letter formation and writing regularly. We originally sat down with lined journals each and practiced writing letters and words for 10 or 15 minutes a day to master the basics. DS is progressing through the "Handwriting Without Tears" books, and his handwriting is now quite good. Three months ago, I was considering dysgraphia as a possibility, but I've since ruled it out. In your DS' case, if the issue resolves with limited writing instruction, it's not dysgraphia.

On the spelling front, I will put in a shameless plug for "All About Spelling" (the OG spelling program linked to the reading program Platypus mentioned). My DS doesn't have any 2E diagnosis to date, but with some family history of dyslexia on the paternal side, I figured an OG spelling program was a good idea, regardless. If your child is dyslexic, it can be a helpful remedy; else, it's still an excellent spelling program for neurotypical children!

I think it's excellent that your DS' teacher is so attuned to his abilities that she's considering a less understood possibility and bringing it to your attention now. What a great ally to have in your child's education.

Aquinas, thanks so much for your input. I think I'll try to get AAS for our summer work for sure.

My son works on handwriting at school quite a bit. They went through handwriting without tears both last year and this year and he's still getting handwriting worksheets (not sure if the whole class does these or just a few kids). Last summer I spent a while working with him on handwriting. So it's definitely not an easy thing for him. However, he definitely wasn't into crafts or drawing before he started school, and still isn't into it. He writes a little bit around the house but it's mostly making flags for play dough roads or labeling pieces of tape on his hot wheel tracks. He definitely has made some major improvements this year but it's clearly not as easy for him as reading or other school skills.

I do agree that my son is lucky to have this teacher. His whole school is quite nice actually. Lots of sweet supportive teachers with good information, etc.

My son is very similar. He has been diagnosed with small muscle weakness that plays into his writing difficulties. It seems like he is spending *so* much of his cognitive effort to even form letters that he has nothing left to worry about spelling, punctuation, etc. We're still trying to find solutions as well.

I don't want to belabour the dyslexia possibility, but I will throw out there that counterintuitively, reading better when the text is harder is quite common among dyslexics (especially gifted ones). The more complex the text, the richer all those context cues are that help them guess their way through it. Dyslexics commonly skip over all the little words and excess syllables (which all tend to look the same) and instead jump from one "meaty" noun or verb to the next. The bigger those words, the easier they are to tell apart. (I was pretty shocked on page 1 of AAR, when DD made multiple errors on a list of three-letter words.... she kept guessing - as she always did - but here, finally, it showed.)

I'll also throw in a plug to think about trying AAR first, and not just the spelling program. In our own experience, because reading is far more rules-base than spelling, and has a finite number of rules, it was much easier to learn and made far more sense than spelling. Several people on the forum here have used only AAS successfully, but I confess the thought makes me shudder. I'm really glad we did AAR first.

The other possibility is that his working memory may be average but he has better language based skills. So once his reading became automatic he was fine but spelling is taking a bit longer. As long as he is not behind (and it really does not sound like he is), I would give it another year working diligently on those skills. Deficits do not always show up in bright younger children. The standards to have average achievement scores on standardized tests are relatively low and often weaknesses at his age really do work themselves out. Unless the problems are extreme I would be hesitant to evaluate a younger child.

Cnm, it feels to me like this is part of what's happening with my son as well. He still has to concentrate so much on the writing portion that he's not thinking about spelling at all. He still tells me sometimes that he forgets which way the p and q or b and d are supposed to be pointing.

Platypus, ah, that's interesting. We usually read these easy books for 5 minutes at bedtime and he's clearly bored and tired so it's hard for me to tell how many of the mistakes are 'real' and how many are because he's being silly. We also end up repeating the same stories a lot because he doesn't switch guided reading books often so he's much more engaged with his new harder material. When I tell him to slow down and read every word on the page he tends to get them. I'm gonna go get the AAR and AAS books today if they're in our local store.