Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional The dyslexic brain post remediation

Great question. I can only speak for my own DD. She is MG, if that, but at the very least very bright. She took 3 years to reliably learn the alphabet. She started yr 2 not reliably able to say both the name and sound of every letter and unable to read. She had intensive intervention at school for 3.5yrs starting at the beginning of 2nd grade and was still receiving remediation at the start of 5th (though less).

At the beginning of 5th we had her assessed by a psych/speach team, they declared that "there's no question she's dyslexic", almost all her scores were now at least age appropriate. But key areas were not (nonsense words, phonemic awareness, etc), or were still well below her verbal IQ even if not much below age. And in their words "We can tell it's not natural, she can do it - but manually / laboriously. She tests like a dyslexic kid who's had intensive intervention". That was 9 months ago.

She's just had another round of assessments (don't ask). And her reading accuracy is now 18-20 months advanced, her reading comprehension 2+yrs advanced and her spelling is age appropriate (not in her writing yet, but it's getting better there too). This most recent assessment did not cover any of those finer grained tools for looking for dyslexia and there is no way in the world this evaluation would have lead to a dyslexia diagnosis, even though only 9 months ago a different team said "there's no question".

I think if she'd started that intervention at 10 instead of 7 she probably could have gotten through it in 1/3 of the time... but we'll obviously never know.

She moved schools half way through 5th to a public school, so lost all her support hours and I am not seeing anything going backwards literacy wise. I don't know yet if she will keep progressing as quickly without the support. I suspect she will. I think I have done more for her spelling than school has and that the other skills learned will not be lost because they are developed enough to progress somewhat independently given she now reads well enough to be using them constantly.

My feeling is that I would be scared to loose the support in your shoes but I am guessing that while she clearly needed to be explicitly taught those skills, she's gifted enough to take them and run with it. Yes her brain will always be different, but she's a gifted child and those gaps that didn't come naturally are being filled...