It might be developmentally appropriate, but fwiw we've had the same issues with two of our children, and in both instances it was related to specific challenges that they needed help with (one had severe vision challenges, the other has a significant challenge retaining memory of sight-sound correspondence). My student with the vision issues was actually behind in reading at school in K-1, but my dd who has the issue with sight-sound correspondence was *not* behind - she was actually considered to be ahead of grade in reading skills early on, then fell to grade level, then made a bit of what seemed like a leap in reading again when she reached higher level chapter books - but that wasn't a real leap that meant the challenge had resolved or disappeared, it occurred because she now had enough text to infer meaning from context.
For your ds, I'd consider the following: you already have a potential DCD diagnosis, and it's been suggested that might cause weak eye muscle response. The things you've observed when your ds reads make sense if he has weak eye muscles. A developmental optometrist's eval will let you know if it is or isn't something that's going on with your ds. You aren't going to lose *anything* by going through the eval other than the $ invested in it and the time (which shouldn't be more than a few hours). If he does have issues with tracking or depth perception or convergence or peripheral vision or anything that a developmental optometry eval would typically uncover, you'll be relieved that you *know*. If you sit back and wait because you might not need to worry about it (but you aren't sure).. and then a year from now it's still an issue, you have the eval and you find out there are vision-related challenges, you'll most likely regret waiting.
I'd also consider that it took us 2 full years from 2nd grade when dd's reading challenge was first becoming obvious to 4th grade to get to a point where we understood the challenge and had tutoring in place that was making a difference. Although she's catching up on reading and comprehension skills *now*, she lost at least two years of reading books/words/etc that her peers were reading and it really shows in her vocabulary and in how difficult it is to pick up a book that's appropriately challenging for her and slog through it (again, due to limited vocabulary).
polarbear
