DS5 is fairly good with single-letter phonics, but has a hard time blending. He also can't rhyme to save his life. For example, I'll say "What rhymes with bed?" and he'll guess "house". He'll also throw out random guesses if I try to ask him what a word says and sometimes it's not even close. He'll also sometimes write letters or numbers backwards.
This sounds a lot like my dd who has a reading challenge that is *not* technically dyslexia. There are so many different skills that go into reading - what helped us the most was a thorough reading evaluation by a specialist who works with children who are dyslexia *and* who have other types of reading challenges. I could list out all the tests that were run, but fwiw, I agree with KJP that at 5 it's going to be much more difficult to tease out what's really up than it will be in one or two short years. And to be honest, even now, in 4th grade, it's not all that easy for us to understand our dd's challenge and what the best way to help her is, even though she's been through several evaluations and different approaches to remediation at this point.
The other thing I'll mention - which may sound like it's out in left field, but fwiw: my ds who has an expressive language disorder also had difficulties with this phonics and retelling letter sounds etc when he was just-turned 5 (except for the rhyming - he did nothing but rhyme for most of his 3-4th years lol). We had him work with a tutor to learn the alphabet and beginning reading skills the summer he was five, but he didn't really catch on to much of it. Then halfway through kindergarten he figured out how to read and it all just exploded from there - he was reading college level books within just a few years... but... then we started seeing his *expressive* language disorder kick in. So I sometimes wonder if the lack of progress we saw early on, with him not being able to retell orally things like names of letters or letter sounds, and lack of interest in trying to read aloud, might not have been related to difficulties with reading but instead related to difficulties with expressive language. *IF* there's any chance you think that might be what's up then I'd suggest a speech-language eval.
Best wishes,
polarbear
