It does seem to be common perception that dyslexia can't be identified in young kids, but Shaywitz is quite adamant that signs are there at the earliest times (though perhaps a lot harder to detect in an HG kid, I would suspect).
NikiHarp, it sounds you you are right on top of things, and should be able to obtain the info you need. It might help, though, to give your mom and others warning that they might not find what they expect to see. I am a broken record on this one, but do not underestimate the amount of masking and compensating a gifted child can pull off.
DD had a full psycho-education assessment at age 7.5, where psych diagnosed dyslexia. The big give-away was the CTOPP results, which when mixed with the other tests, beautifully demonstrated that she had been doing exactly what we thought - superb guessing instead of reading - but had never been able to catch her at. She could get 80% of the words right without being able to read - I still can't quite wrap my head around how she did it, nor can her teachers. I don't know what part of the results made DD's teacher's jaw drop further - the 99th percentile VCI, or the 1st percentile sentence building in the WIAT. DD was a classic case of the two combining to make her look very average.
We then had a detailed assessment done by a dyslexia reading specialist: reading, writing and spelling (in two languages). After the first one-hour session, specialist hauled me on to the carpet and demanded "you DO know that dyslexia is a phonemic deficit, right?" With tone. Much tone. She made it clear she thought we were nuts to be there, wasting her time and our money. Our psych had led us astray. (In the reading specialist's defence, she only got DD's report that afternoon - and DD's phonemic awareness is 88th percentile. She doesn't tank until the phonemic manipulation tasks start getting a lot more complicated than simple recognition. Her spelling is surprisingly phonetic as well.)
After 2nd hourly assessment, I'm called to the floor again, and this time she's waving DDs writing sample, again telling me in no uncertain terms that it's perfectly reasonable, quite phonetic, and she's seen way worse in her breakfast cereal that morning. I just nod and keep my mouth shut this time.
But after she finished the assessment - tacking on a fifth session/ hour instead of the planned four - she tells me, "oh yes, totally dyslexic" like there was never any doubt in her mind, only ours. Once she got past the masking, it was obvious, but it took her a long time to get past the in-your-face ability, and dig down to find the underlying deficit. She was looking for the classic signs that everybody has, and she couldn't find them. Instead, she had to create tasks that couldn't be compensated. (This is what I found amazing in DD's psycho-ed evaluation - moving through from the WISC to WIAT to CTOPP etc, you could clearly see where, as each subsequent task stripped away one more compensation mechanism, the scores dropped, dropped, dropped.)
Now, my DD is MG, and she has average working memory. If you add in the extra ability of HG, you will undoubtedly crank up the hiding ability too. And if the experience of others in my family can be extrapolated, if you add in off-the-charts memory and visual spatial skills, you have people who can't decode to save their life, but can memorize the shape of every word they use, and "see" it in their head to read as well as to reproduce on paper (backwards, forward, upside down, it doesn't matter to DH. It's a shape, not a word, and he can flip and rotate in his head at will).
So all that to say, your mother may well not find what she's looking for, and not see any of what she's used to seeing, without being really, REALLY persistent. While Shaywitz emphasizes reduced speed, not accuracy, as the key hallmark of dyslexia, there are a few on this board with dyslexic children who read fast and in great volume - by-passing phonemic deficits through verbal ability and perhaps prodigious memory, I would guess. The Eides in contrast really point to spelling as the big tell for stealth dyslexia. But even that... I have never seen DH mis-spell anything. But he doesn't spell words, he draws them (I guess the same way dysgraphics "draw" letters, come to think of it?). And I was quite shocked recently when I asked, and he admitted that he regularly changes what he was going to write in order to avoid having to put in a word for which he can't come up with a picture.
Sorry to write a book! As for phonics, If you're doing All About Spelling, you may want to try out a first level of All About Reading too - if your older DS blows through it, its still a great learn-to-read resource for the younger. And if, like mine, he manages to read a nightly page of our current novel and yet stumbles on the level 1, lesson 1 list of context-free three-letter words, well, you'll know you've come to the right place. Even after all the assessment, I still didn't really believe she couldn't do it until I saw it - and I had had her reading books to me every night for two years. I think for DD, the biggest learning is that the program forces her to look at every. single. letter. in a word, and and every. single. word. in a sentence. I have to be ruthless in not letting her scan for broad meaning and just wing it, as she has accustomed herself to doing. It's really easy to see, still, how hard it is for her to pay attention to linking words and word endings, but she's come a huge way. Again, sorry about the book. I'm still a tad evangelical about all this, I know!
