Signs of Dyslexia in My Daughter
After sharing signs of dyslexia in my husband in my last email, I want to share signs of dyslexia in my daughter. I do hope that my sharing will help you in discovering the subtle signs of dyslexia that may be going unnoticed in your family members, your students, and possibly in yourself.
I want to preface this piece by saying that my daughter always had excellent and caring teachers—always! To this day, I truly appreciate their expertise, hard work, compassion and the love they gave my daughter!
I shared before that I realized our daughter was dyslexic long before she began school. As you will recall, my first clue was her difficulty with directionality as she drew happy (actually frowning) faces of our family. Another clue in her drawings were birds sitting upside down on branches and upside down in their nests in trees!
Knowing she was dyslexic, we enrolled her in full day Montessori preschool and Kindergarten. After two years in Montessori school, we met with her Kindergarten teacher to discuss placement for the following year.
Our daughter struggled in Kindergarten! She had barely learned any letter names and sounds in two years; she had no interest in reading or spelling. She loved to “write” long stories filled with wonderfully creative ideas and illustrated with the most detailed, exquisite drawings, but the only recognizable words in all of her stories were “mom”, “dad”, her brother’s name, and her name. The rest of her “words” looked like squiggles with a few actual letters. We decided that she would benefit from another year of full day Montessori Kindergarten.
In her second year, she again barely made any progress in language arts, but as that Montessori school did not offer first grade, we enrolled her in our neighborhood public school.
Grades 1-3 were an endless struggle for her. Homework was a necessity every evening and weekend; it took her hours and hours. Practicing spelling words was a nightly affair, but even with nightly practice, spelling tests remained a challenge!
My husband and I read to her daily. We used enriching vocabulary in our family discussions. We had her explain everything that she was doing and what she understood and why. She quickly and easily understood concepts, but she still struggled with reading, spelling and writing.
As she grew, she continued to grapple with directionality, once in third grade, she brought home a learning packet on map skills. She had failed it. The vast majority of her answers were the opposite of what they should have been—north was south, east was west. It was obvious to us what was going on.
We started playing an adding and a multiplication game using license plates on cars ahead us when she was in 4th grade. Most of the time her answers were correct. However, too many times her answers were incorrect. It took me months to figure out that 50% of the time she was vertically reversing 6’s and 9’s!
In 5th grade, she drew a most beautiful, yet unusual map of the U.S. on poster board and labeled the states and their capitals for a Social Studies project. All I could do was smile. Washington was where Florida was supposed to be; Maine was where California was supposed to be. However, all of the names of the states and their capitals were written correctly, and in the correct direction. Can you visualize this!
When she was in 6th grade, I picked her up from school to go to viola lessons. She is a talented musician. One day she was standing on the front sidewalk looking very concerned. She was staring up at the individually cemented letters displaying her school’s name on the front of the building.
I rolled down the window and called to her, “Come on. Let’s get going.”
She turned to me and emphatically said, “I am not going to school tomorrow!”
“Are you ill?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Mr. C. (the principal) is going to be SO mad!”
“Why?”
“Someone took out all of the letters in our school’s name and put them all back in backwards!”
I almost laughed aloud but caught myself in time. “Honey, the letters are cemented into the cement blocks in the building. No one could take them out without bending and breaking them. Your dyslexia is causing you to see them backwards.”
“No!” she insisted. “They really are backwards!”
I got out of the car and told her to stand under the first letter in her school’s name and I stood under the “L” in “school”. It took her several minutes of looking at the letters and looking at where we were standing for her brain to finally reverse the letters and process them correctly. Suddenly she happily exclaimed, “Ok! They’re in the right order now! Mr. C. won’t be mad! Let’s go to viola lesson.” She jumped into the car and off we went!
In high school, she exasperatedly walked in the door after her government class. “Why do teachers do that?” she demanded.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Expect students to correct other students’ papers.
We had to pass our paper to the person sitting behind us, so I had to correct the paper of the boy sitting in front of me. The top of the paper was True/False. I couldn’t tell if he’d written a “t” or an “f” for number 2. I marked it wrong, because his handwriting was messy!
The bottom of the paper was multiple choice. For number 8, I couldn’t tell if he’d written a “b” or a “d”. I didn’t mark it wrong though, because at least he wrote it neatly!”
“Sweetie,” I said, “You need to be an advocate for yourself, and explain to teachers that you are dyslexic and should not be correcting other students’ papers.”
A few weeks later, she became upset with me and tried to express her anger by showing me the hand signal of “Loser” to form an “L”. She used her left hand, so I didn’t see an “L”. I giggled and tried to explain to her that if she was going to call me a “Loser”, she had to use her right hand to do it. She burst into tears and stomped to her room. Later we hugged and had a good laugh!
Even today while riding in cars, I am continually reminded of her dyslexia as she tries to rapidly read street signs and storefront signs. She makes countless errors, because she does not have adequate time to process the words.
To say being dyslexic is a challenge is an understatement!
In my next post, I want to share the flip side of dyslexia.
If you are questioning whether someone in your life is dyslexic and you’re not sure what to do, feel free to contact us.
Linda Katherine Smith-Jones Nina Henson