From our own experience, red flags I can now recognize in retrospect include:
* Being unable to read a word she'd just read correctly several times, even when on the same page.
* Substituting words when reading out loud, with a plausible alternative that starts with the same letter.
* From age 5 - 7 she was able to read increasingly complex levelled texts out loud with a fairly consistent error rate, but they never got easier - and the EASY texts never got easier even when could could read the harder ones (i.e. same error rate regardless of text difficulty).
* Rhyming is often a problem for dyslexics. While DD always loved making rhymes, she could get confused about the difference between rhyme and alliteration (same first sounds) even when probably as old as 6 (or more?).
* She hated reading out loud, even when she seemed quite able to.
* She'd avoid reading voluntarily, even when it seemed difficult to avoid (e.g. bringing home a library book from school without knowing what the title was - but then reading the whole book to me when I required her to)
* Avoiding reading people's name's in a text - which I now realize was avoiding non-sight words.
* Her writing seemed fine at age 5 - but looked the same at age 7.
This is a really interesting list. I recently had my 5.5yoDS evaluated for ADHD &etc. He doesn't qualify for ADHD, is probably HG (he didn't really cooperate well with testing so he's kind of up and down). But though I'd asked about dyslexia the evalutor didn't really have much of an answer. He seemed to feel you couldn't really evaluated a 5-year-old for this, and DS doesn't really fit the signs. But his reading is
weird. He's been reading CVC words for at least 18 months and he's gotten better, but... he's weird about it. He seems unreasonably "forgetful". He substitutes words. He doesn't like to read aloud, though he tells me he "reads quietly in his head" and I don't even know when he started doing that. And yes, if I ask him to rhyme, half the time he'll alliterate instead. He is nonetheless reading decently well for his age so of course his teachers see no problem.
