MidwestMom, I agree with others that what you are being told by your child's teacher really does't make sense.

While you certainly should push for further testing, I also think you should intervene right now to do what you can at home to help your child. I suspect your daughter may be similar to many children I have taught. Smart, and with a good visual memory for sight words -- for some reason when learning to read they skip over a lot of the phonemic skills and move right into whole word reading. If their K and grade 1 teachers do a lot of choral reading, or repeated reading, these smart, visual learners can really fool their teachers into thinking that they can decode words, so they don't get the instruction they need. However, the initial problems come in spelling, and then later problems hit around the 3rd and 4th grade reading levels because it is just impossible to use visual memory (along with a few letter sounds and some educated guesses and context cues) to read entire stories.

So--- if I were you I would go back with your child now and make sure she is aware of the phonemes of the English language and can blend and segment them. I would not trust her school to figure out she needs this and to try to remediate it for her. they should do this, but I bet you can do it it much more quickly.

As a reading tutor I do this all the time for students and only very occasionally do they turn out to have a true phonemic processing disorder. Usually they were just confused or behind. It is so much simpler just to catch them up on your own. Even if the kids do have a serious disorder, the extra time you spend working on phonemic processing, encoding (spelling) and decoding (reading- sounding out) is valuable and will help your child in whatever specialized therapy will turn out to be necessary.

I recommend you look into this very effective and cheap program:

http://www.abcdrp.com

It has been very effective with many of my students. The creator of the program runs a Yahoo discussion group and is very generous with his advice -- I have found him to be extremely knowledgable. He has also posted numerous additional files and guideas on the Yahoo group for free. They are designed to target particular skills needed for reading in a very efficient manner. I really can't say enough good things about his advice -- it is exceptionally sound.

http://health.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/abecedarian/

If the above program is too expensive I also think you could look into Reading Reflex -- this is dirt cheap and you can probably get it from your library.

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Refle...ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330801742&sr=8-1


Just reading this book and doing some of the initial exercises with your daughter would, I think, help you get a handle on what her decoding and spelling problems are. This doesn't mean you shoudln't also persue additional testing through the school -- but I would also work on whatever you can first, while you are waiting.

Good luck!