Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Reading issues - dyslexia - need Neuro recommend

We know my 9YO is gifted by IQ testing and suspect same for our 7YO guy. What we are really interested in however, is resolving reading issues. My youngest son is a very capable reader, has no trouble with spelling, even complex words. He is grade-accelerated +1, so in 2nd as a just-turned 7YO. He is reading words like mystified, salutation, and plague without stumbling.

But, he hates reading. He absolutely abhors it. This started over the summer, and is getting worse. Recently, he has started to not read at school during reading time, and as a result, is getting into trouble (wiggly, noises, distracting other kids).

I've noticed for some time now that he tends to mix-up or change word order as he's reading. "Sally shouted" becomes "shouted Sally". He's getting the words right, but stumbling on reading as the author intended which sometimes is fine, but other times makes the passage not make sense. He also word-skips and substitutes words of similar meaning.

So what we would like to do is evaluate for reading issues. I don't know where to start with this. He's well above appropriate level in phonics, decoding, vocabularly, but when asked to read aloud, he just cries. I spent some time yesterday looking into dyslexia and he has a lot of markers. The type of doctor needed for diagnosis is a neuropsych.

The worst part is that we are a family of readers. We've read to our children daily since birth. He loves literature when being read to. This current strike against reading is getting to be too much.

Looking for a recommendation for a neuropsychologist in the Vancouver, WA area. We used Dr. Linda Verlinden at The Children's Program in Beaverton, OR for our oldest, but it's an hour drive, and a lot of missed school / work for non-value-added drive time.

Feedback on a recommendation or this reading issue is welcome. Thanks in advance.

I can't speak to specific recommendations for professionals in your area, but I would say generally that if you found the psych for your older child to be comprehensive and helpful, that there is value in using her for your younger child as well, as finding an appropriate psych for 2e kids is not as easy as for other types of learners.

WRT reading, what kind of markers for dyslexia are you seeing? And what kind of data indicates that his phonics and decoding are above average? Some apparently capable readers are not using phonetic decoding, but read almost exclusively by sight and context--which may look like whole-word substitutions that retain meaning, changing the word order, and inconsistencies between reading skill/cognition and the effort needed to read orally. Or finding reading unusually aversive.

Especially if he really does have cognition-appropriate phonetic decoding/phonological processing skills, it may also be that his reluctance to read aloud is not a function of reading skill, but of some other factor, such as performance anxiety or perfectionism. Some other posters here have had children who were challenged by reading because of vision problems (which would also be consistent with skipping, substituting, and reversing whole words, with one or more of acuity, tracking, or visual processing affecting reading). The appropriate professional for vision problems would be a developmental optometrist. This appears to be a legitimate post-secondary institution with expertise in this field located in your general region: (https://www.pacificu.edu/our-resources/clinics/eyeclinics/services-offered/vision-therapy) Incidentally, they also appear to have a learning disorders/neuropsych clinic https://www.pacificu.edu/our-resources/clinics/psychology-clinics/assessment-testing-services, with income-tested discounted fees. I don't know anything directly about this institution, other than what one can find out on the internet.

You've challenged me to really think through his decoding, phonics, etc. I don't know that I have evidence other than by all appearances, he can read. We aren't struggling with him being able, it seems to be more a struggle of willingness.

When he makes errors in reading aloud, we do correct him by asking "does that make sense?" "What does that (nonsense word not sounded out correctly) mean?" I don't correct him when it doesn't matter (Sally said vs. said Sally).

Your comments about performance anxiety / perfectionism ring true. He actually said to me yesterday "the kids will make fun of me when I mess up".

He does seem to understand the texts he reads, despite the word swaps and skips. I think his comprehension in fine for his age.

From Davidson on Stealth Dyslexia:


Looking at this passage, the first paragraph, where I've bolded, is absolutely what I see. Also, for his iReady test last year, he performed very poorly, to the point his teacher was shocked and had him re-take the exam. She said the results of the test absolutely did not reflect the child she knows and interacts with every day. The last paragraph of this Davidson passage would support that we'd see trouble in testing.

As a parent and reader, I'm heartbroken that he "hates" reading so much, to the point of avoiding it and crying. Something is wrong. For a kid that is capable, I just don't understand.

His eyesight is fine, we had his vision checked less than 12 months ago at an ophthomologist.

Maybe this is simply reading reluctance. I've tried to not force the issue, but school is in-session. He needs to be reading to improve his skills. If he simply never reads, we'll be in a world of hurt shortly.

I've never heard of this Pacific U, but I'm going to check it out. Thanks.

On vision, it's not necessarily a question of acuity, which is primarily what is checked in normal vision exams. Other vision factors include divergence/convergence/teaming and tracking. Also, it may not have been a problem 12 months ago (after all, he wasn't resisting reading as severely as you describe now, at that time); he is young enough that significant functional changes as the visual system progresses wouldn't be surprising.

His iReady results do tend to support the idea that his reading is not typical. Especially in the primary grades (through grade 3), a test like iReady is heavy on phonemic awareness and naked decoding skills (that is, not read in context), as deficits in these areas are critical predictors for reading failure. That tends to back up the possibility that he is not truly decoding (using phonetic reading strategies to sound out words), but is word calling (whole word sight reading) instead. You've been reading to him since he was little, so he probably has a great oral vocabulary base, and has seen many words read aloud, which makes it more likely that a child with good memory could have powered his way through memorizing a fairly extensive reading vocabulary visually. But this would likely be more effective for large, complex words, which often have unique shapes, than for small utility words, with their indistinct or nonessential meanings and common forms. And at some point, even the best rote memory runs out of space for storing all of these arbitrary images. Plus, retrieval of those pictograms is inefficient when many of them aren't tagged morphologically, semantically, or orthographically.

One quick and dirty test is to write down some isolated (not in a sentence) pseudowords, and see if he can sound them out. (I.e., words that follow the rules of English spelling, but are not real words.) If he has phonics skills, he should be able to sound them out easily. If he is predominantly a sight reader, he will have difficulty (either in accuracy or in speed) with more complex phonograms. (I used to pull out an old King James Version Bible and have them try out some of the names from the Old Testament, to see what they came up with.)

Welcome to the forums, MamaRachel. I'll start my reply with a *hug* disclaimer, I'm a parent, not a professional. As a bit of background, I have two 2e kids (one has a reading challenge) and a 3rd child with vision issues (great eyesight but issues with tracking, double vision, peripheral vision etc). I'm going to offer up a few thoughts, but please read them for what they are, thoughts from a parent, not the recommendations of someone who has a background in this


I'm a huge fan of neuropsych evaluations and a global look at what's going on when our kids are struggling. OTOH, the *most* valuable evaluation we had for our dd who struggles with reading came through an SLP who specializes in working with students with dyslexia. My dd is not classically dyslexic - she has a challenge with associating sight and sound... but the evaluation from the SLP / reading specialist was much more thoroughly centered on reading specifically than a neurospych evaluation will be. The *only* reason I'd contemplate doing this type of evaluation first for your ds is that you haven't mentioned anything that points to an issue other than reading, there aren't concerns with teachers/others thinking there's more to it, etc. Although a neurospcyh eval will be extremely helpful in understanding your ds, I'm guessing the neuropsych eval will also end with a recommendation to see a reading specialist for either a closer reading eval or perhaps for remediation if there's an issue. The wait to see a private SLP may be less than the wait for a neurospych. The other thing you can do is request an evaluation through your school district (you'll want to be sure that an oral reading test is part of the evaluation).


I wouldn't assume that it's willingness - it might be, but so many of us here who are parenting kids with learning challenges have seen what looks like unwillingness in our children's behaviors when they are in early elementary when really it's inability to complete the task they're given, but they are too young, don't have enough life experience to understand that it's not the same for everyone, or are unable to communicate that there's a challenge. My 2e ds still has this same "look" sometimes even though he's in high school.


The thing I'd note here is that he seems to have the same issue when he reads aloud to you at home, and his teacher has noticed an odd result on testing that she thought he'd do well on. Performance anxiety and perfectionism might not be expected to cause issues under those different scenarios. With 2e kids, it's so easy to be seeing them as the very bright children that they are that it's easy to chalk up something that's not quite what we expect to be either anxiety or perfectionism. I can remember very clearly adamantly explaining to my ds' 2nd grade teacher that my ds wasn't writing anything down because he was a perfectionist... and I was soooo wrong.



He's probably getting the context of what he's reading without having to read all the words correctly. My dd with vision issues reads in chunks and and has no difficulty flying through novels and remembering every single detail... but reading for knowledge in something like a math or science textbook is much more taxing because she has to purposely focus in a different way than reading fiction. It's not a comprehension issue, it's the effort to get the visual information into her brain. That said, your ds sounds more like my dd who has an actual reading challenge than my dd who has vision issues, because you haven't mentioned anything else that points to a vision issue. One thing you might consider re vision is - how does your ds sit when he's reading or writing or drawing? Does he have relatively good posture or does he bend his head around or contort his head/body while looking at a book? Does he look at you and make eye contact when talking or look to the side? Does he seem clumsy at all? What does his handwriting look like (my ds is dysgraphic, and my vision-challenged dd had handwriting that looked basically like my ds' before she had vision therapy).


Try not to be heartbroken over this - instead, give him audiobooks and read to him. He can still love reading, even if he doesn't read the same way you're used to reading. If he has dyslexia or another type of reading challenge, he can have accommodations at school. A few years after my ds was diagnosed with dysgraphia I ran into one of his preschool teachers (he was diagnosed in 2nd grade). She'd never known him to have a struggle of any kind because she'd known him when he was 3-4 years old in a play-based preschool. I was holding a book I'd been reading about dysgraphia or something like that, and she asked me why I was reading it, so I explained ds had dysgraphia, and I will never forget her reply - because she was so sad... she was sad because he wouldn't ever be able to use handwriting... and honestly, I didn't say this outloud (I said something much more polite lol).. but I was thinking - why on earth does it matter if he never uses handwriting? Why be sad? He can still write. He's not sick. He's not dying. He's not going to not be able to do anything with his life. He doesn't have to be unhappy or not achieve greatness because of it. He did have a tough time throughout most of elementary school and parts of school beyond that, but overall, he's doing really well and he's got a great life. I realize handwriting may be a little less of an issue since most of us in today's world rarely use handwriting but... I feel the same way about reading. My dd with the reading challenge loves loves loves audiobooks and uses audio text books for school work.


He won't "never" read. The key is understanding what the issue is. There are many different programs for teaching reading - my reading-challenged dd was tutored in a Lindamood-Bell with a twist type of program and made tremendous progress. She still doesn't like to read though and much prefers audiobooks, so for her, the challenge isn't going to just evaporate - but she's doing great in school and she reads by listening. It's not all gloom and doom

I'm also not a huge fan of the concept of "the gift of dyslexia" but if you find out your ds does have a reading challenge, you might want to read about the strengths that many dyslexics share. For my 2e kids, there was a lot of work we had to focus on when they were in elementary school to remediate and figure out how to best accommodate, but once we'd gotten through that first slug of getting things figured out, they had access to a world in which there strengths were able to be nurtured and their talents were able to shine. Your ds will get there too

Best wishes,

polarbear

Polarbear has really covered everything I would say, but I still want to send hugs and empathy and strength. My Mom claims I came out of the womb with a book in hand. Yet I found myself with two non/ reluctant readers. I get the heartbreak and the fear and the confusion and the bafflement. Here's a bit of what I've learned getting through this.


I don't think I have learned anything more critical than "a child will do well if they can". No child is born wanting to fail, or wanting to let down their parent, or teacher. If they won't, it is usually because they can't. Something, somewhere in that task, is an element they just can't do, at least not without pain. The problem may be hidden by lots of pieces they can do, but somewhere in there, there is also a "can't". And while we can sometimes muster up the resources to work through pain, we usually avoid it if we can.

For two years, I had knock-down, drag-em out battles, for literally hours every night, with my DD over her daily reader from school. In so many ways, it was obvious she could read the book - after all, eventually, she always did. And yet, every night, battle to the death. What kind of kid brings home a library book without reading the title, and yet demonstrates she can read the whole book when forced to? Answer: a kid for whom reading hurts enough to fight to the death to avoid it if she can - but yet has the compensation skills to fake it, using tremendous effort which causes considerable pain, if we really make her do it. The most important thing I have been able to do for my kids is to believe that they are trying as hard as they can, and if they won't do it, it's my job to figure out what's in the way, so we can make it not hurt anymore.


It sounds like you are already in a world of hurt, but trust that there are so many ways in which it will get better. As polarbear says, there are many ways to read other than using your eyes, and they add great richness to our lives. Books are books, however you take them in.

And if you provide proper remediation, kids with dyslexia will learn to read far better. Maybe they'll still always be slower at it and have to work harder than others, maybe not. But for one for instance, that same DD of mine, now 10, now writes poetry - for the sheer joy of it - in which she describes how much she loves to read and write. She'll always be dyslexic, but the pain is gone. Every night, she curls up for an hour or two with her books. When she gets tired, she switches to audio, which yes, still makes me fret. And then I look at the giant stacks of books all over her bed, and remind myself that all books are good, and she reads with her ears as well as with her eyes. And when her new teacher asks, "What are your favourite things?", her first answer is "reading". So get the right diagnosis, start remediation, and hang in there, and know we're here for you.

With respect to vision changes, it's true that changes can occur at any time, and reading can impact that. My DD went through a year of reading frustration around 6-7, and ended up in a mild Rx glasses for eye fatigue during that time. She wanted to read more advanced text, but her stamina was low, particularly as text got smaller. After a year, however, she was stronger and didn't need glasses any more. Had her checked by a developmental optometrist after that period, and all was well.

ETA She to this day does not read as voraciously as her brother, and that is okay. I wish she were willing to enjoy some of the books he has, but she is selective and has other interests.

Check out Cynthia Arnold at New Leaves Clinic in Hillsboro, OR. Not exactly your area, but Hillsboro might work for you.