Our DD8 was diagnosed with dyslexia last fall, and I have benefited from aeh's excellent advice and help in understanding our assessment and next steps. So on top of her professional opinion, here's a few thoughts from the BTDT files:
Dyslexia can be hard to spot in a gifted kid, especially if they have a good memory (which from your FSIQ I'm guessing yours does) and they are only 6. Most of the warning signs I saw on regular websites did not apply to DD, especially those related to early language acquisition and use. While nothing in your description struck as me as immediately concerning in a 6-year old, I am assuming there was more you saw in the stealth dyslexia description that resonated. I certainly wish we had started our journey a couple years earlier, so if things don't feel right to you, keep asking questions.
A great place to start before spending thousands on assessment is Sally Shaywitz's book (
http://www.amazon.ca/Overcoming-Dyslexia-Complete-Science-Based-Problems/dp/0679781595) which really gets into details of what to look for at young ages.
From my obsessive research so far, there seem to be two most common warning signs in young dyslexics who read well:
(1) Unusual difficulty with spelling, particularly if they use non-phonetic spelling, or tend to scramble the order of the sounds, or leave out some sounds ("sik" for "sick" is phonetic, and probably age-appropriate; "ski" would be more worrisome). I should note this common warning didn't work so well with our DD, as she has quite high phonological awareness for a dyslexic, and her spelling was reasonably phonetic (she only fell apart on the kinds of more complex phoneme manipulation tasks aeh describes above). She did have a bit of a tendency to leave off sounds towards the ends of words.
(2) Clear differences between how well they read text in context vs. isolated words vs. nonsense words. We had long suspected that our DD was just guessing at what her books said based on pictures, first letters of the word, and context cues, but we had no idea how to prove it. Turns out we were right. She was reading - in two languages - "on grade level" in grade 2, but when we gave her a long list of isolated three-letter words, we'd start to see errors (usually extra letters, such as "fog" became "frog"). For a stealth dyslexic, more complex texts are easier than short, simple ones. Isolated nonsense words are just deadly.
From our own experience, red flags I can now recognize in retrospect include:
* Being unable to read a word she'd just read correctly several times, even when on the same page.
* Substituting words when reading out loud, with a plausible alternative that starts with the same letter.
* From age 5 - 7 she was able to read increasingly complex levelled texts out loud with a fairly consistent error rate, but they never got easier - and the EASY texts never got easier even when could could read the harder ones (i.e. same error rate regardless of text difficulty).
* Rhyming is often a problem for dyslexics. While DD always loved making rhymes, she could get confused about the difference between rhyme and alliteration (same first sounds) even when probably as old as 6 (or more?).
* She hated reading out loud, even when she seemed quite able to.
* She'd avoid reading voluntarily, even when it seemed difficult to avoid (e.g. bringing home a library book from school without knowing what the title was - but then reading the whole book to me when I required her to)
* Avoiding reading people's name's in a text - which I now realize was avoiding non-sight words.
* Her writing seemed fine at age 5 - but looked the same at age 7.
Our DD has only average working memory (and ADHD-I), and her ability to compensate fell apart by grade 3. However, I am realizing that 99.9th percentile memories may be common in her father's gene pool, and I believe we have several adult dyslexics, including my DH, who read - very well, but slooooowly - through sheer brute force memory of sight words. If DD had that memory too, she might still be as undiagnosed as the rest of them.
