Does anyone know of the "proper" age that Dyslexia can be diagnosed? My DS7 has dyspraxia and we have been concerned lately about possible dyslexia. His handwriting is horrible along with his spelling which has been attributed to his dyspraxia. Lately though I have been seeing more than just letter/number reversals, I am now seeing whole words written backwards. When I speak to him about this he says that is the way he "sees it in his brain" and he gets really upset whenever someone points out that a letter/number is backwards - he KNOWS what the letter/number is supposed to look like and to him when he writes it, he says in his head it looks correct.

Then this week, I did a county assessment on him to help me prepare for our upcoming meeting tomorrow where we are trying to open the door for grade acceleration. The child is basically asked to read a passage in one minute and the score is based on how many words he read in that minute..then there is a section for comprehension. DS7 is supposed to go into 2nd next year.

He went past the required benchmarks for both end of 2nd,end of 3rd grade and end of 4th grade. Then I got confused...he read both the 5th and 6th grade passages just fine and on one asked to keep reading it past the timer because he got interested in it. He almost made the end of the year benchmarks for both - just missed them by a few points but he read the entire passage, scored passing on the comprehension, but just because he didn't read enough words per minute it is not considered "mastery" which I don't understand. He is getting speech services, so I know his speech slows him down and when I asked him to read another 6th grade passage silently to himself in that one minute time - his words per minute doubled and he still scored passing on comprehension. My husband and I talked about this and to us we would consider this mastery because I don't know many 6th graders who go around reading passages out loud...all of us read silently...so should it matter that he reads slower orally than he does silently when the comprehension is completely there? Is reading out loud an issue that could go along with dyslexia?

It's certainly possible to diagnose children with dyslexia before the age of 7; I can think of two off-hand who've been diagnosed at 6. The insistence on your son reading aloud at a certain speed seems rather rigid especially given that he's getting speech services! Do you at least get a report that points out that that was what stopped him reaching the higher standard? I've never heard of slow reading aloud (as opposed to slow reading) being particularly a problem with dyslexia, indeed, one dyslexic I knew used to read aloud much later than other people because it helped him keep the words straight, he said - he could do that fine but found reading in his head hard. OTOH, from the little I know about dyspraxia I would guess that that could be a factor, and actually it wouldn't surprise me if it explained the backwards words as well. Obviously you need an expert, though, and that's not me... I hope one will be along shortly.

Perhaps this website may help re: dyslexia?

http://www.dys-add.com/myths.html

It states it can be identified as young as 5.

My DS (10) was formally diagnosed at 8, however the indicators where there from when he started formal schooling.

By what you discribe above, I wonder if your DS has dysgraphia, rather than dyslexia? My DS has both. Dysgraphia is a disorder of written expression. They can "see" it correctly but can't scribe it correctly.

My son who has dyspraxia and dysgraphia only writes individual letters and numbers backwards, never entire words, and when I asked him yesterday if he saw them backwards, he said he didn't. It would make sense to me if he wrote backwards if he saw it that way, but I can't understand how my son still occasionally writes things backwards when he doesn't see it backwards.

It doesn't make sense to me at all that a child who has a speech difficulty would be required to read out loud to show mastery of a reading level. My son didn't have as much difficulty with speech but he had an accommodation and tracking problems. At age seven he couldn't read more than a few sentences before his eyes got tired, but he easily read out loud the first few sentences from an article in a Newsweek magazine that the optometrist asked him to read after we told the optometrist that he could read at a high level even with his vision problems. I don't think he believed us until he saw my son read. My son started skipping lines after those first few sentences. When he was tested by an educational psychologist the month he turned seven, we told him about the vision problems but I guess he couldn't just start my son out at the level I told him I thought my son could read at. I could hear my son taking the test. I think he could have read at an even higher level if he had been allowed some accommodation for his visual accommodation difficulties.

I would think dyslexia would make reading even more difficult than what my son was dealing with at that age. I find it amazing what our kids are capable of even with their difficulties.

I just found this on childrensvision.com.

Visual Spatial Orientation helps us with letter reversals. Many parents and educators considered letter reversals after age seven to be a symptom of dyslexia. While this can be true, the most common cause of reversals in older children is a lack of visual spatial development--consistently knowing left from right, either in relationship to their own bodies or in the world around them. Children with poor visual processing have not developed adequate skills in visual perception and spatial orientation, such as laterality and directionality. Also, children who experience frequent double vision deal with such visual confusion that their brains often misinterpret their visual input.