Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Question about Dyslexia

Hi everyone~

I have recently found this forum and in reading your posts, have been doing a lot of thinking about DS's strengths and weaknesses.

If you have a dyslexic child, how are they impacted? Just curious because as I think about DS's reading skills, there are some areas where he is stronger than others. He is not uniformly struggling with all reading-related tasks. Wondering if this is typical and what others have experienced.

For example. DS has wonderful comprehension when read to. He has always done well with sight words. This year he is doing well with second grade word study, where he can memorize individual words, and read/spell them. He has always known letter sounds and could easily rhyme sounds and words.

The part he really struggles with is fluency. Like reading a string of words or longer passage. Even if it is "easy" sight words he knows. He also struggles with decoding, not so much of a single word, but in a sentence or passage.

I'm just curious if this sounds familiar to other parents with Dyslexic children? Thank you for reading.

With DD9, her stuggles really began to be apparent in third grade. She cannot decode words, she cannot sound any word out and she struggles with rhyming. Her spelling is atrocious and she makes classic dyslexic reversals (b and d, most notably). She reads well above grade level when she is reading novels and long passages where it is okay if she just skips by the words that she does not know. In an isolated sentence or test questions, her difficulties are blazingly obvious. Her memory has enabled her to memorize thousands of words, yet she does not 'read' them in the classic sense... she recognizes their shape instead.

In my reading on the subject, it seems that there can be differing presentations of strengths and weaknesses within the disorder, but that there are hallmark symptoms. Two resources that I HIGHLY recommend:

http://www.brightsolutions.us/
Take the time and watch these videos!!

Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz
The best book about dyslexia that I found thus far.

The combination you are describing, good phonological processing, ability to sound out individual novel words without context, but difficulties with fluency, sounds a lot like either problems with visual processing or with tracking and convergence. That's where I'd start investigating if this were my child (since this was part of how my son's visual issues manifested.)