Our story - reading problems and dyslexia

I'm still amazed that my older son's reading problems went undetected for so long.

I have a degree in English, read to my kids from the time they were babies, was a
classroom helper, repeatedly questioned my son's teachers about his literacy level,
did outside tutoring, and still missed diagnosing a reading problem.

IT ALL STARTED...

It all started when my older son was in Year 2. One day, he quietly started refusing
to do his school work in class. He wasn't beligerent or naughty. He just wouldn't do it.

So I thought maybe he had issues with authority or something and off we went
to see a child psychologist. We put together an rewards program to motivate him
to do his work and all was fine.

It never crossed my mind that his behaviour might be related to literacy problems.

Yet I'd been concerned about his reading, and especially his writing since Year 1.
I'd met with his teachers several times throuh Years 1-3 to express
my concern and ask how he was going. Repeatedly I was told "he's fine".


REALITY CHECK

In Year 3, my first son did a two tests - an optional series of skills tests and
a mandatory basic skills test. The results of these confirmed our concerns that
we had a problem!

But where to turn?

OUR FIRST ATTEMPT AT TUTORING

Our first port of call was to a national tutoring company that offered an assessment
and small group tutoring. My son started the program in Term 1 of Year 4.

At the same time, we started having occassional behavior problems again - outbursts
of anger that weren't appropriate.

One incident prompted us to again seek out a child psychologist.

This psychologist helped us quickly find the source of his frustration and anger
was a learning difficulty.

We quickly realised that the small group tutoring he was doing was not going to
address the learning difficulty he had. So we started 1:1 remedial literacy tutoring
twice a week for two years. He's gone from strength to strength academically and
behaviourally ever since.

AND THEN THERE WERE TWO...

I thank God for the journey we had with my older son because it set us up to handle
much bigger, yet very different, challenges with our younger son.

Our second son is 3 years younger than our first.

His journey started with ear infections, slight hearing loss and
grommits (or tubes in his ears) by the time he turned 1.

At the age of 2, we realised he was behind in speech development. We went on a
waiting list for the health centre program and he finally participated in
group speech therapy with about 8 other kids. It definitely wasn't enough but
that's all that was available.

When he was 3 years old, it occured to me to look for a private speech pathologist.
I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me to look for a private resource before this!

But at the time, our first son was doing fine in kindergarten and we didn't
know there were going to be literacy problems. We'd never investigated language
resources or tutoring. Basically, I didn't have a clue about what the issues might
be or what my options were!

He did 1:1 speech pathology until the age of 5.

At preschool, he was fine for the most part.

When he started "big school" kindergarten, we were told at the end of the year that
he was "a bit immature" and should repeat.

This was at exactly the same time our older son's basic skills test results had come
through so alarm bells were ringing for me that something wasn't right. Until this time,
just thought they were both reluctant readers!

Over the school holidays, I had my younger son's hearing and eyes tested again.
Serious audio processing issues were identified so we started speech pathology
again.

He did speech pathology for 2 years. During this time we also thoroughly
investigated ADHD and tried the Failsafe diet.

Over the two years, he did Year 1 twice because he was struggling with reading
so much.

We had to remediate his language before we could remediate literacy.

Once his audio processing had signficantly improved, we turned our attention to his
literacy and dyslexia.

It's been 1 month now. We finally know the types of dyslexia he has and are working with our tutor and an expert from the leading university in Australia in this field, on a customised
remedial program for him.

It's been a very long and expensive journey identifying our sons' dyslexia and
remediation. And we have a long way to go still.

That being said, I'm so grateful to have found the resources and to have had
the money to get my sons the help they need. I've heard story after story
of kids who haven't been identified or helped. Stories of parents who knew
something wasn't right but didn't know how to investigate it or what to do about it.

Every parent needs to know what to look for and where to turn if they think
there is a problem. And every child deserves the help they need to address a learning
difficulty.