Could this be Dyslexia?

[wendyroo]

My youngest is having some learning challenges that are making me slightly concerned about dyslexia...but she is young, so maybe it is within the range of normal?

She is 5.5, and is quite a strong reader. She is reading Frog and Toad, Henry and Mudge, Little Bear, etc.

However, she still has A LOT of letter confusion. She can't differentiate b, d, p or q...when she runs into any of those, she randomly guesses between b and d. We have been working on this consistently for a year now, and I am seeing very little improvement. We have used sandpaper letters, writing in salt and shaving cream, put up all sorts of visuals of bats, balls, diapers, etc. We have gone through thousands of nonsense and context-free CVC words with b or d in them, and once she is faced with a word on its own, her accuracy is no better than random guessing.

Her phonics is very strong, but once she starts reading at any sort of fluent pace, she starts reading letters all out of order. "Frozen" is read as "rof-zen", "alone" is read as "lane"; "thump" is read as "hut-ump".

She is my least pencil-phobic child, but even after two full years of "writing" for fun, and one full year of focused handwriting work, she still reverses many letters and numbers. She can write a line of 3's, and start every single one looping in the wrong direction. She catches herself, and corrects mid-stroke, but then seconds later starts the next one incorrectly...and the next and the next. I can write a model of a capital N, and have her write one right next to it, and hers will be backwards...and even when prompted she will not see a difference.

What do you think? Red flags or just signs of immaturity?
If they are red flags, what would be my next step?

[sweet2ndchance]

Yes, my dyslexic does all those things. I would certainly suspect possible dyslexia given the examples you have given. I don't think it would hurt at all to have her evaluated for dyslexia if eye tracking problems have been ruled out by a developmental ophthalmologist.

 

[Not_a_Number]

2 hours ago, wendyroo said:

We have gone through thousands of nonsense and context-free CVC words with b or d in them, and once she is faced with a word on its own, her accuracy is no better than random guessing.

OK, so you say you've used both context-free CVC words and also nonsense words. Which ones have you seen more of? 

For DD5 (she turned 5 today!), only nonsense words helped appreciably. And we had to spend literally months on each pair she confused, without ANY context clues to whether it's a b or a d. 

DD5 does all these things, too, by the way. I don't know if she's dyslexic or not, but I know we've remediated it successfully without needing any outside intervention. And it was hard work. 

[kirstenhill]

I've read from multiple sources that b-d confusion and other similar reversals can be "normal" up to age 8, but a lot of kids who turn out to be dyslexic do struggle with this.  Like others that said, checking with a developmental ophthalmologist might make sense to rule that out as a reason.  I would also look at her phonemic awareness.  This is one of the primary measures that is used to diagnose dyslexia, and you could get a feel for it by doing a screener with her like the PAST (direction and test are at this site):  https://www.thepasttest.com/

Have you tried any spelling?  My oldest never got a dyslexia diagnosis, but the more I have learned about dyslexia with my youngest having a dyslexia diagnosis, I'm pretty sure she is mildly dyslexic.  However, it didn't show up for her until we did any spelling.  Then, despite being able to read at grade level or above, and being taught using decent phonics methods (not as robust as what I used with my boys, but not terrible), her spelling bore very little resemblance to reality.  Like, phonetically regular words were totally missing sounds that belonged in the word, or were represented in her writing by letters that didn't at all make those sounds.  At the time I didn't really know that dyslexia could present that way, and we just worked really hard with Logic of English for a while to get her spelling to the point where spell checker might be helpful.   But she was in 2nd grade when it dawned on me that her spelling was not improving anywhere close to how her reading was improving.

It sounds like you've tried a lot of things for the B-D confusion, but if you haven't tired the MA Rooney foundation's method, it might be worth a look.  It was totally the thing that worked for my DS9 when everything else I tried failed.  In summary, instead of just having a student make a b with their left hand (a method I had seen elsewhere), you have them make a b with their left had and a d with their right hand, and do a lot of practice exercises always associating making the b hand sign in the b hand when seeing the b, and the d hand sign in the d hand when seeing a d.  A year and a half after working on this my DS9 still has to use his b and d hands semi-often, especially when writing (a lot less often now with reading).  The one downfall of this method is it doesn't work with upper case D.  😁  I just avoided upper case D with him for a while, and now he's got the association for that one correct even though it doesn't fit the hand pattern. 

[Terabith]

Since dyslexia is primarily a disorder of phonological awareness, I don't know that letter reversal is necessarily a sign of dyslexia, but there is a fairly high correlation between reversals and dyslexia.   You're certainly not going to get a dyslexia diagnosis at 5.5 if she's reading well, but I would wonder a great deal about difficulty with visual memory.  My youngest did struggle with learning to read, but once it clicked (around 7 ish), she read very well.  However, even with a great deal of remediation, she spells at MAYBE a third grade level at almost 16.  She simply has no visual memory at all.  Her on paper diagnosis is dysgraphia, but she doesn't have issues with composition or letter formation; it's purely about inability to spell.  In practice, we went through pretty thorough dyslexia remediation, which got her from not able to spell "what" after literally 10,000 repetitions over the course of two weeks, to about a third grade spelling level.  

When she was about 5.5, we had an occupational therapy evaluation, and the OT gave a test of reversals and she got every single one wrong.  Chance would have gotten her 50%.  

I would definitely want an evaluation from a developmental optometrist.  www.covd.org is the gold standard website for finding one who will look at visual skills and not just acuity.  That said, we drove 2 hours each way for nine months to do vision therapy, but she made no progress, developed PTSD, and when after nine months, we said, "We're seeing no progress; we're going to quit," the optometrist told us that if we quit, she'd become a juvenile delinquent.  But I think there was the potential for progress there, if it had been a better fit.  

[Not_a_Number]

7 minutes ago, Terabith said:

You're certainly not going to get a dyslexia diagnosis at 5.5 if she's reading well, but I would wonder a great deal about difficulty with visual memory.

For a slightly counterpoint, DD5 has TONS of trouble with this and has really excellent visual memory. Almost too good -- so good that it's way too easy for her to reverse and rotate things in her head, and they just look the same to her. 

We've remediated this for b's and d's and all the other rotations, but I'm currently steeling myself for doing this for 5s and 2s -- she's persistently confusing them, at least in their less recognizable digital formats 😞 . She's also still occasionally writing numbers with the digits reversed. 

[EKS]

Dyslexia is definitely a possibility.  Google "stealth dyslexia."  Also, you may want to have her assessed for developmental vision problems.

[City Mouse]

It could be signs of a disability, but it could also be signs of immaturity. If you are concerned, I would focus on phonemic awareness activities and take out the reading and writing and see how she does. Lots of kids her age are not strong readers and mix up letters when they write without being dyslexic.

[wendyroo]

2 hours ago, sweet2ndchance said:

Yes, my dyslexic does all those things. I would certainly suspect possible dyslexia given the examples you have given. I don't think it would hurt at all to have her evaluated for dyslexia if eye tracking problems have been ruled out by a developmental ophthalmologist.

 

Okay, it sounds like the consensus is a developmental ophthalmologist, so that will be my next stop.

2 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

OK, so you say you've used both context-free CVC words and also nonsense words. Which ones have you seen more of? 

For DD5 (she turned 5 today!), only nonsense words helped appreciably. And we had to spend literally months on each pair she confused, without ANY context clues to whether it's a b or a d. 

DD5 does all these things, too, by the way. I don't know if she's dyslexic or not, but I know we've remediated it successfully without needing any outside intervention. And it was hard work. 

At first we worked through a bunch of Elizabeth's nonsense words. DD was getting very frustrated, so I created a bunch of CVC nonsense words with b and d. But, realistically, there are only so many nonsense CVC words...many 3 letter combinations are real words. So then I randomized a list of all the phonetically regular (real and nonsense) 3 and 4 letter words that include b or d. We have been going through 20 a day for the last year (obviously repeating after a while, but I re-randomized the list). The one improvement I have seen over the last 6 months is that she isn't confusing p for b or d nearly as often...still occasionally, but not frequently. But b and d we haven't seen any improvement on in over a year of dedicated practice.

1 hour ago, kirstenhill said:

I've read from multiple sources that b-d confusion and other similar reversals can be "normal" up to age 8, but a lot of kids who turn out to be dyslexic do struggle with this.  Like others that said, checking with a developmental ophthalmologist might make sense to rule that out as a reason.  I would also look at her phonemic awareness.  This is one of the primary measures that is used to diagnose dyslexia, and you could get a feel for it by doing a screener with her like the PAST (direction and test are at this site):  https://www.thepasttest.com/

I have administered the PAST. She can do levels D-G easily. Level H is a complete disaster - no way, no how. Levels I and J are hard, but doable. She can't do anything after that. Some of those issues are probably attributable to her significant speech delay. She has been in speech therapy since 18 months and I expect is still a year from being graduated. Blends with l and r are very hard for her to say. But, according to the PAST scoring, she is at an age-appropriate level.

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Have you tried any spelling?  

She is a strong, phonetic speller. She can accurately spell pretty much any CVC, CVCC, or CCVC word I throw at her. She makes reasonable guesses about using "oo" and "ee". She can hear and encode "ch", "sh", and "th". And she can spell silent e words as long I tell her ahead of time that that is the form the word should take. She wrote valentine cards for Alex (Alecs) and Sydney (Sidnee). She was independently free writing a list of things birds have: "wings", "beek", "strips", "names", "nest".

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The one downfall of this method is it doesn't work with upper case D.  😁  I just avoided upper case D with him for a while, and now he's got the association for that one correct even though it doesn't fit the hand pattern. 

She has no problem differentiating capital letters. She writes about half of them backwards, but she never mis-reads them.

1 hour ago, Terabith said:

Since dyslexia is primarily a disorder of phonological awareness, I don't know that letter reversal is necessarily a sign of dyslexia, but there is a fairly high correlation between reversals and dyslexia.   You're certainly not going to get a dyslexia diagnosis at 5.5 if she's reading well, but I would wonder a great deal about difficulty with visual memory. 

Sometimes she seems to have a strong visual memory. She will see a word like "strawberry" in a book, have to really slow down to think it through and sound it out, but once she has done that a couple times she has it. For the rest of the book she reads it by sight, and in most cases if we read a different book with that word the next day she will still remember it. BUT, if she then runs into "strangely" she will almost certainly read that by sight as "strawberry". Right beginning, right end, right length - so her visual memory is not too detail oriented.

[Not_a_Number]

1 minute ago, wendyroo said:

At first we worked through a bunch of Elizabeth's nonsense words. DD was getting very frustrated, so I created a bunch of CVC nonsense words with b and d. But, realistically, there are only so many nonsense CVC words...many 3 letter combinations are real words. So then I randomized a list of all the phonetically regular (real and nonsense) 3 and 4 letter words that include b or d. We have been going through 20 a day for the last year (obviously repeating after a while, but I re-randomized the list). The one improvement I have seen over the last 6 months is that she isn't confusing p for b or d nearly as often...still occasionally, but not frequently. But b and d we haven't seen any improvement on in over a year of dedicated practice.

Do you know how she's trying to tell apart b and d? Does she have a method to do it, even if it's sloooow? With DD8, she just noticed the difference, but with DD4, I had to constantly repeat "b is looking forward, d is looking backwards" for the 2 months we had to remediate this for. 

[Not_a_Number]

4 minutes ago, wendyroo said:

Sometimes she seems to have a strong visual memory. She will see a word like "strawberry" in a book, have to really slow down to think it through and sound it out, but once she has done that a couple times she has it. For the rest of the book she reads it by sight, and in most cases if we read a different book with that word the next day she will still remember it. BUT, if she then runs into "strangely" she will almost certainly read that by sight as "strawberry". Right beginning, right end, right length - so her visual memory is not too detail oriented.

Yes. That sounds exactly like DD5. I think high IQ kids will compensate for wonky stuff, and this is how they do it. 

For us, remediating each confusion really slowly one at a time has been what got us to strong phonics when reading on her own time. And we slowly made the nonsense words longer and longer as we did it. I have something like a year's worth of nonsense words on my computer right now... 

[wendyroo]

1 minute ago, Not_a_Number said:

Do you know how she's trying to tell apart b and d? Does she have a method to do it, even if it's sloooow? With DD8, she just noticed the difference, but with DD4, I had to constantly repeat "b is looking forward, d is looking backwards" for the 2 months we had to remediate this for. 

Over the last year we have tried many visuals...I don't think any of them have clicked.

"Forward" and "backward" confuse her. She can't articulate the problem, but it seems to be that both b and d have parts at the front and the back. So how do you know which way they were facing or looking?

This was the same problem with "b has a big belly" and "d has a dirty diaper". To her the letters don't always seem to be marching left to right, so d could have a big belly if she is walking the other way.

I have settled on the method that worked for all my boys...though their confusion was fairly short-lived, on the order of a couple months. When you come to a b it tries to block you, but when you come to a d you can climb over on da step.

But at this point that is just the method that I articulate when we get to b's and d's. She cannot independently use that method to distinguish them for herself. Her preferred method is guess and check. If she comes to "bend", she randomly tries one at the beginning and one at the end and sees if it makes a word that will logically fit the sentence. She doesn't even readily see that they are different letters at the beginning and the end, so she may guess "dend" and then "benb" and then "denb" and then finally "bend". This obviously leads her astray frequently.

[EKS]

30 minutes ago, wendyroo said:

Right beginning, right end, right length - so her visual memory is not too detail oriented.

Not paying attention to the insides of words is a common problem for dyslexics.

[Not_a_Number]

9 minutes ago, wendyroo said:

Over the last year we have tried many visuals...I don't think any of them have clicked.

"Forward" and "backward" confuse her. She can't articulate the problem, but it seems to be that both b and d have parts at the front and the back. So how do you know which way they were facing or looking?

This was the same problem with "b has a big belly" and "d has a dirty diaper". To her the letters don't always seem to be marching left to right, so d could have a big belly if she is walking the other way.

I have settled on the method that worked for all my boys...though their confusion was fairly short-lived, on the order of a couple months. When you come to a b it tries to block you, but when you come to a d you can climb over on da step.

But at this point that is just the method that I articulate when we get to b's and d's. She cannot independently use that method to distinguish them for herself. Her preferred method is guess and check. If she comes to "bend", she randomly tries one at the beginning and one at the end and sees if it makes a word that will logically fit the sentence. She doesn't even readily see that they are different letters at the beginning and the end, so she may guess "dend" and then "benb" and then "denb" and then finally "bend". This obviously leads her astray frequently.

So if she can't independently check, I would say that it's not surprising that she doesn't have any progress. I'd probably keep playing with visuals until she can actually CHECK. Maybe you could draw eyes on them until she can actually see which way they are looking? Maybe actually draw the belly? I am just throwing things out here, but I would say getting her to a place where she has some reliable method of telling the difference would be the first thing I'd do. 

Edited April 14, 2021 by Not_a_Number

[PeterPan]

11 hours ago, wendyroo said:

it sounds like the consensus is a developmental ophthalmologist,

developmental optometrist. Opthamologist sometimes does it but usually there's turf war.

And yes, she clearly has some vision and midline issues. So dev. optom. and OT evals. Does she have retained reflexes?

There are worksheets for the reversals. Therapro has some stuff under their visual processing section and I used some stuff from http://www.cdfieldtrips.com/choicemenu.html  Their ordering doesn't work so I made screen shots. You can bug me if you want the files. 

My ds was assembling lego sets backward at that age. I think it's just neurological immaturity. Doesn't mean I would do nothing, but I wouldn't go crazy either. OT is always good, especially anything crossing the midline. S'Cool Moves (which some OTs do or you can buy the book for) has activities for directionality. We did some of that. Those were in motion, gross motor. Then we went back recently and worked through those Burton books on reversals and directionality.

Ds has had a full developmental vision eval with the dev. optom. Really, the only thing he had issues with was VMI. We did this after the OT work, after a lot of the major reversals had improved. So you should check her vision, just to be sure, but it can be only the visual processing and VMI components, which can be worked on either by a dev. optom or an OT. So an OT eval and therapy will be more efficient, possibility eliminating the need for the $$ dev. optom. work. And it's more likely to be covered by your insurance. What you can do is see the dev. optom and ask them to *screen* for the developmental stuff (convergence, etc. etc.). If nothing is flagging on the screening, assume it's visual processing and VMI and do OT. There are multiple ways to skin a cat, but that's one way, the way that might get it covered by insurance.

My ds is dyslexic btw, but I will repeat what the others said that dyslexia is NOT a vision problem and is NOT reversals. You're talking about commonly comorbid situations. Dyslexia is phonological processing and SLD Reading (the larger umbrella) has more components. It doesn't yet seem like her errors are out of range for her age. I mean, she's performing so well above grade level and you seem to have zero concerns about phonological processing. It could happen. Like my ds' spelling goes back to some funky issues that they'll call auditory processing which are really, for him, just poor language processing from his autism. He learned language whole to parts, so the parts like SYLLABLES mean nothing to him. So skipping them and reading only the beginning and end makes sense if your working memory is low or your language processing is poor.

So it is *possible* you're seeing some language processing issues. But it's not clear based on the bit you've shared. That would be something in the whole context and it will become more obvious with time. If you have concerns about language, you could pursue it. If you don't have concerns, you could just watch it but do some evals in a year or two if things don't proceed the way you're expecting. Therapro sells a terrific series for working on that btw, and you can look at it to see skills covered. https://www.therapro.com/Differential-Processing-Training-Program-Acoustic-Linguistic-Tasks.html  This is part of a 3 part series. When you first look at it, you'll think oh that's the same as the phonological processing for dyslexia. And it sort of is, but the point is doing it completely with auditory vs. with print.

So I would definitely do OT, definitely do activities (both gross motor and with print) for midline and directionality, and I would get a *screening* for vision with a developmental optometrist.

[PeterPan]

16 hours ago, wendyroo said:

Her phonics is very strong, but once she starts reading at any sort of fluent pace, she starts reading letters all out of order. "Frozen" is read as "rof-zen", "alone" is read as "lane"; "thump" is read as "hut-ump".

This is concerning. There *can* be some vision issues that explain that. Has she had any language issues? If you use a card and cover the word and reveal it left to right what happens? 

The index card would be the first place to start. You're trying to figure out where/why the jumbling is occurring. You want to start with the simplest explanations/solutions and work up, lol.

[wendyroo]

54 minutes ago, PeterPan said:

This is concerning. There *can* be some vision issues that explain that. Has she had any language issues? If you use a card and cover the word and reveal it left to right what happens? 

The index card would be the first place to start. You're trying to figure out where/why the jumbling is occurring. You want to start with the simplest explanations/solutions and work up, lol.

If I cover the words and reveal then left to right she can read them just fine. If I take the word out of the book and isolate it on a card or white board, she can read it just fine.

In books, though, her eyes just flick, flick, flick, even if I entirely cover the pictures to prevent distraction. She can be reading the second word of the sentence, I can have my finger under the 2nd word, she can have her finger under the 2nd word, it doesn't matter, her eyes are skittering around - up a line, down a line, forward a word, back a word, to the end of the page, to the next page, etc. Her eyes only land on that second word for a fraction of a second and make a split second guess.

Today she repeatedly read "protect" as "pretend". More concerning to me, she came to "tonight" and started sounding it out as "not...". She did the same thing with "panic" - reading it "nap-ic".

Some of this could be her not-yet-diagnosed ADHD. She is very flitty in general - short attention, very impulsive. My second son had a lot of reading issues until he was diagnosed and medicated. But he was very different in that any letter reversals and confusion were corrected quickly and easily, but he just couldn't make the jump from reading individual words to reading lines of text. DD's reading is much more advanced than that, but she is still showing a lot of issues with reversals and directionality.

[domestic_engineer]

12 hours ago, EKS said:

Not paying attention to the insides of words is a common problem for dyslexics.

I hope this isn’t derailing the thread, but how do I get them to pay attention to the insides ... or ends... of words?  I feel like I’m constantly saying “look carefully” but it doesn’t seem to be sinking in. 
 

eta:  OP,  my dyslexic does everything you describe. 

Edited April 14, 2021 by domestic_engineer

[Terabith]

30 minutes ago, domestic_engineer said:

I hope this isn’t derailing the thread, but how do I get them to pay attention to the insides ... or ends... of words?  I feel like I’m constantly saying “look carefully” but it doesn’t seem to be sinking in. 
 

eta:  OP,  my dyslexic does everything you describe. 

In my experience the index card and covering up everything other than what they're supposed to be reading at that moment was the only thing that worked.  My oldest struggled to read, partly because of the eyes flitting issue, but once that improved (around 7.5), she took off and was quickly above average.  The Dancing Bears approach with the notched index card made a huge difference here.  

[ElizabethB]

All uppercase for a few months. B/D. Then, B/b follows the same pattern. Write and read everything all uppercase.

Don Potter has versions of his programs all uppercase, or you can easily change the case of things in a word processing program.

Then, have her write a B/b on the top of what she is going to read once you move back to mixed case. Take a blue highlighter and have her find and highlight all the B's. B buh blue.  Then, write D/d on top, have her highlight all the d's in a different color. The, read the passage. 

Edited April 14, 2021 by ElizabethB

[PeterPan]

9 hours ago, wendyroo said:

her eyes just flick, flick, flick, even if I entirely cover the pictures to prevent distraction. She can be reading the second word of the sentence, I can have my finger under the 2nd word, she can have her finger under the 2nd word, it doesn't matter, her eyes are skittering around - up a line, down a line, forward a word, back a word, to the end of the page, to the next page, etc. Her eyes only land on that second word for a fraction of a second and make a split second guess.

So she has a developmental vision problem. You need a developmental optometrist. And she needs a good OT eval to screen for retained reflexes, etc.

9 hours ago, wendyroo said:

Some of this could be her not-yet-diagnosed ADHD. She is very flitty in general - short attention, very impulsive.

No, that does not explain what you're seeing with her eyes. 

If she has retained reflexes, they will lead to behavior problems and vision problems. 

Fwiw, I would address the academic concerns AFTER you deal with the vision. She'll probably need to relearn some things after her eyes are working properly together. Things you're worried about may click at that point. Fix the vision first so she can actually process.

Edited April 14, 2021 by PeterPan

[PeterPan]

8 hours ago, Terabith said:

My oldest struggled to read, partly because of the eyes flitting issue,

And Terabith will share her stories on VT. I want to say again that OT *could* help significantly in clearing this up. The vision reflexes develop after the retained reflexes are integrated and the other reflexes (vestibular, postural, etc.) do their thing. So you fix the glitch earlier in the process (primitive/neonatal reflexes) and sometimes the cascade rights itself. Not always, but sometimes. If you want the bare minimum to do, there you go, OT. And if you want to plow both directions (OT and dev. optom.) that could be good too. 

[Not_a_Number]

10 hours ago, wendyroo said:

If I cover the words and reveal then left to right she can read them just fine. If I take the word out of the book and isolate it on a card or white board, she can read it just fine.

But she still confuses b and d in those contexts? Or no? What happens with single words if you don't reveal then left to right? Does she ever read things as rofzen then? 

[wendyroo]

29 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:

But she still confuses b and d in those contexts? Or no? What happens with single words if you don't reveal then left to right? Does she ever read things as rofzen then? 

Oh, yeah, she still confuses b and d in those contexts. Those she always guesses at.

Today she "read" the word "backyard" in a book. She glanced at it momentarily, said "cad...", but then trailed off because she couldn't come up with a good guess that would logically fit the sentence. So she decided the problem much be the "d", and immediately, without even looking at the word again, jumped to reading it as "cabin".

I immediately closed the book and wrote backyard by itself on a piece of paper. As I wrote the "b", I paused and walked my fingers up to it left to right and said that this letter was trying to "b-b-block" me from getting through to the next letter. Then I wrote the rest of the word, pausing again at the "d" to mention how I could climb on "da step" to get over. By the time I finished my explanation, she had correctly sounded it out as backyard.

Just to see, I then flipped the paper over and asked her to write "backyard". She produced "BAcYArD"...though her "c" was written backwards. She did not seem to rely on visual memory to spell. She said the word to herself over and over emphasizing each of the sounds sequentially. She asked me if she should use a "c" or a "k" for the /k/ sound, but I demurred and told her to just make her best guess...I wanted to see if it would strike her as wrong when she looked at it. But it didn't seem to, she seemed perfectly content with it the way she wrote it.

Out of that whole saga, the most worrying thing to me was the initial inversion of the "b" and "c". Clearly, guessing in and of itself is not ideal, but I think it is a very typical bad habit at this stage that I would be remediating but not worrying about. If she had guessed "basement" or even "daylight" I would chalk this up to just standard in-a-hurry guessing (plus persistent b-d confusion). But the fact that she is routinely swapping the order and orientation of letters seems more concerning.

[Not_a_Number]

1 minute ago, wendyroo said:

Out of that whole saga, the most worrying thing to me was the initial inversion of the "b" and "c". Clearly, guessing in and of itself is not ideal, but I think it is a very typical bad habit at this stage that I would be remediating but not worrying about. If she had guessed "basement" or even "daylight" I would chalk this up to just standard in-a-hurry guessing (plus persistent b-d confusion). But the fact that she is routinely swapping the order and orientation of letters seems more concerning.

It sounds to me like she hasn’t really internalized that reading is meant to be entirely letter-by-letter and sequential. DD5 was like this as well. 

I’m really not an expert, since I’ve only worked with one child with similar issues. But we did also have tons of reversals and not paying attention to letter orders. We spend 3 months on ia versus ai just a few months ago — it was HARD for her to tell those apart. She still can’t really sound out by sliding her finger under a word. But we’ve been sloooowly remediating her ability to read each letter in order, and I think this did retrain her brain in a way that enabled her to use this more and more confidently when she came across new words.

DD5 isn’t ADHD or anywhere near it, though. So that almost certainly made that easier.

I’m not sure if it’s exactly the same issue or anything — however, the failure modes do sound REALLY familiar!

[bluemongoose]

I have 3 dyslexic kids. All three had/have variations of what you described. One was also an earlier reader. Mine have what is called "stealth" dyslexia. They read above grade level but they still have these issues. One of my kids also had a convergence insufficiency and had to do vt for it. He had headaches after reading a paragraph. Struggled with comprehension because the words would start to blur or go double as his eyes were fatigued. He also struggled to stay on the correct line while reading. 

The other areas I see in their dyslexia:

1. spelling issues: this is a big one!

2. sequencing issues: learning the alphabet in order, the days of the week and months of the year, even telling what happened in an event

3. saying syllables/sounds out of order while speaking as well as reading such as vigenar instead of vinegar, pasghetti for spaghetti, aminal for animal

4. Not "hearing" sounds correctly like dr they hear as /j/, tr is /ch/ etc. 

5. Yes they reverse numbers and letters too

6. Things like tying shoes are challenging

7. Directional issues. They are string players and often get confused between up and down bow. 

8. Reading just the beginning and end letters of an unfamiliar word and replacing the word with something familiar. They may know the word in speaking, but have not encountered the word in print, they will sub it with a word that they know in print that is similar. They have good spoken vocabulary, but their reading vocabulary is less. 

9. Struggling to remember the names of things. 

 

Some of their issues boarder on Dyscalculia and Dysgraphia too.

1. They struggle with messy writing. They put capitals in the middle of words but rarely where they belong, like at the beginning of a word. 

2. One of mine confuses math signs and symbols.

3. One of them also struggles with losing something he learned before when you add a new type of math fact. IE: completely understood addition, but then you introduce subtraction and they forget how to do addition. A spiral curriculum has helped immensely with this. 

 

Not sure if that helps at all. I know when I was trying to figure out what I was dealing with and if I needed to go get an evaluation (which I eventually did), it was helpful to see other things that other parents saw with their dyslexic kids. 

Edited April 16, 2021 by bluemongoose

[AmandaVT]

I'm in the middle of an Orton Gillingham associates level course and practicum. Some of the activities I've seen help with the b d reversals are using a lego board and having the student trace the letter b, like 3 times with their finger while saying b - b says /b/. and the same with d. Also, when writing the letters, having them practice to start writing the d with the circle (if that makes sense). Start where the top of the circle meets the line, draw a counterclockwise d bottom, the tail and then the line. Then for b, start with the line, down to the tail and up and over for the circle. Learning how to write them totally differently can help them not reverse them.