I have a dd with a reading LD that isn't exactly classic dyslexia, isn't exactly stealth dyslexia, but is diagnosed as dyslexia (after an extensive reading assessment) and her reading tutors have used a combo of Lindamood Bell and Barton to help remediate. She's in 5th grade now, we started suspecting issues with reading as early as first grade, but it took until 3rd grade (and outside evals) to get to the root of the issues. School staff never did see an issue because she was able to compensate based on her other high level abilities.
Are there guidelines for when compensation is good enough, and when dyslexia should really be remediated?
I don't know about specific guidelines, and I'm not a professional so take what I say with a grain of salt - this is only my experience as a parent speaking
My dyslexic dd is my third child. My oldest never had any issues with reading; my middle child struggled tremendously with reading in 1st-2nd grade until we realized she had a vision issue. Once the vision issue was resolved, she turned into one of those kids who always ALWAYS has her nose in a book and who reads tremendously quickly so we're always dealing with how to keep her happily supplied with books that will take longer than two hours to read. This is what I've noticed re my third dd, who thanks to her challenges with reading - never does it for pleasure and struggles to understand what she has to read for school at times, particularly before she had remediation for reading. In spite of her high aptitude, she doesn't *ever* read for pleasure and she doesn't read over and above what's absolutely required for research type projects at school. The take-away from that - her vocabulary is limited, especially compared to her older siblings, and also compared to her classmates. This wasn't apparent earlier on - when she was in lower grades her vocabulary was comparable to classmates because she was absorbing vocabulary from conversation. As she grew, however, the lack of reading experience compounded from having limited ability to decode words prior to remediation, to now having limited ability to recognize higher level vocabulary words as she encounters new words in reading that she hasn't seen before. There's a bit of a pyramid impact of not having the same background level of reading her peers had, as well as continuing to not read as many words total as they do (most of her classmates read for pleasure as well as read classroom text quicker simply because they don't have the same issues with decoding etc). NOTE - she's had very successful remediation - she's light years ahead of where she was a few years ago, but she's still not on par with classmates just because of that lost time when she wasn't reading and wasn't acquiring new vocabulary through reading. Based on that experience, my recommendation is that *compensation is never the answer* - if you suspect a reading challenge, get an assessment, and if a challenge is discovered, start remediating asap.
Have more to say, but have to run - more later!
polarbear
