Earlier this year, at parent-teacher conferences, it was brought to my attention that Autumn was struggling in school. Struggling so much that there was talk of her repeating Grade 2. Apparently spending three years in "Flex" (the Grade1/2 combo class), is somewhat common in our bilingual school but still, I was a bit surprised. Like, did they mean she is struggling more than the other bilingual kids? Eek! Initial thoughts were that she might be struggling because "she is so young" (the 2nd youngest in her grade...her bestie is the actual youngest.) Or, perhaps struggling because she is newly bilingual (most of the classmates were raised bilingually). And then of course I blamed myself in that I did not do anything at all academic with her between finishing up at her Montessori preschool in Colorado and beginning Grade 1 here (so, more than a year off). I did not want her to be too far ahead of her peers when she started school like her brother was (ha!!). I only wanted her to focus on learning German. Which she did.
Eventually Autumn's English teacher learned of somebody within the school that she wanted to evaluate Autumn. Jason and I had to both sign an official agreement and back on May 9th, this woman came to pull Autumn out of class and did a battery of tests with her. It was another 10 days before I heard anything at all from her but when we sat down to meet, she informed me that Autumn has dyslexia. That honestly was not something I was suspecting. Mostly because I did not understand what dyslexia really is. I never learned about it, because I never had to. I walked around mistakenly thinking that dyslexics basically just see stuff backwards: words or letters (both of which Autumn does, I just thought they were age appropriate). Autumn can read. She started reading at age 4 in her Montessori school. That's early, right? But she was not making expected progress in school with her reading. And her spelling is TER-RI-BLE.
This evaluator filled me in on some of Autumn's difficulties, things that I did not necessarily realize were not age appropriate anymore or that I did not realize as signs of dyslexia.
After I left, of course I began all kinds of reading. All day I looked into it and flag after flag after flag kept hitting me smack in the face to where--in hindsight--of course she has dyslexia. She does this and this and this. And it also made me go, "huh, Easton might have it too."
Now, with Easton...he is in Grade 6 right? 12 years old. Surely it would have shown up by now, right? So when his English teacher mentioned a few weeks back at his conference that she thought he might have some "mild dyslexia" I was like, "Um, no...this is why he spells bad...." and went into the "why". My reasons are legit, actually: at the school we had the boys at in the States, Easton's reading ability, vocabulary, and comprehension were so high that they had him in a higher reading level than his grade. So, he'd be getting spelling words like "tsunami" and "avalanche" but could not spell "because" or "could". He skipped over the level when he would have learned that. Further, this particular school had every student using a laptop. Computers have spell check, right? So again, while he might be able to learn his spelling words from his list every week, he continued to be a very very poor speller over all. Dalton often corrects Easton's spelling mistakes and questions. His teacher showed me some of Easton's recent work and many many times he wrote "I've" like "I'v". A few times it was correct, a few times it was wrong. When I came home and asked, "How do you spell 'I've'?" he could do it. But recently he wrote an essay for English and, while his thoughts were okay on "How We Can Change to Save the World" his spelling mistakes were so very distracting that I could not get past them. Like, his spelling had gone downhill big time. It was shocking.
Easton had also brought up the possibility of dyslexia in the past. He learned about it from Percy Jackson, but because he never struggled in reading, and because he did not--you know--write stuff backwards and his grades and tests were still fine, I was like, "Dude, you do not have dyslexia. There's no way."
Oops.
We will be having Easton evaluated now. As I have been doing reading regarding this "label" for Autumn, so much more is making sense about Easton.
But back to Autumn, she still makes tons of errors when writing: "htat" for "that". "cos" for "course". "sbed" for "spend". She often leaves sounds out of the middle of words when writing. And she transposes a lot which I though was still age appropriate. And writes stuff backwards a lot: z's, c's, b/d, p/q...the regular ones. She mixes it up in math a lot too but I blamed it on math being in German and it's confusing: to say "58", for example, in German one says "eight and fifty". Like, that's the literal translation, I mean. So, I can see where she would make that mistake. Seems like a lot of people should.
When holding up a sight word, she might say "ate" for "eat" or "saw" for "was". She will leave off endings of words when reading aloud like "duck" instead of the plural "ducks" or leave out small little words all together like "to" or "a". She would get a word on one page, but not know or recognize it on the next. Even if I said, "Autumn you just saw that word" or flip back to it on the other page and point out how it was identical it would not 'click' right away. I thought that was all part of being a new(ish) reader (Easton did it too!) but apparently there was more to it.
However, there have been some other clues that I did not quite get. Like her left/right reversals. Again, I thought it was a bit age appropriate. But, if you know Autumn, you probably remember laughing about how her shoes were ALWAYS on the wrong foot. Not even a 50% gamble sort of thing, but that she always did it wrong. Till she was at least 6. She has gotten it right in this past year BUT, if I give her an unfamiliar pair of shoes: often times, she will still do it wrong. She tried on some dress shoes at a store recently and did it wrong. And I whipped out some Keen sandals from the box of summer stuff we had packed away and she did it wrong then too. I always dismissed it as an age thing or not being so focused on details which is not necessarily a bad thing.
When I watched her in ballet a few months back, I was horrified to watch her spinning opposite everyone else or stepping with the opposite foot. Like, I was just thinking, "Oh bless her heart, I should take her to a better ballet school." But this is mostly when she's mimicking or looking in a mirror. I took video of it but cannot find it. If she's at home just dancing about, she is not as "awkward" looking.
She falls down a lot. Just in a clumsy way. We joke on her way home from school when she trips and I'll go, "Oh, Goose! You okay? How many times did you fall down today?" Or on our way in to school, "Two trips already today!" but with a laugh. :( I guess that can be a sign. I'm sure its a sign of bunches of things, of course, like--you know--just being clumsy. Not everyone is as graceful as a swan.
She is also extremely disorganized. I know many people are just like that, of course, but again, it can go along with how her brain works.
Many dyslexics are prone to motion sickness. Autumn's has been quite severe at times. City buses. Driving through the mountains. Or in a weird way: throwing up in the middle of the night on a Disney vacation vs. right after the ride.
She does some funky stuff with math, she can get to an answer but when I ask her to show me how to make sure she understood the way the book wanted her to do this particular set of mental math, she can't do it. And we'd have a big fight and tears of frustration. Or she'd finally get a concept, get through the rest of a section and I'd reward her with a small break to go dance and sing in her room. Then she'd come back to continue the page and completely forget everything we just "learned". Or "left to right" has been so drilled into her with reading that she has a hard time going "right to left" (ones to tens) when doing math.
She is EXCELLENT with remembering names. Spoken names. With faces.
I can't even finish what I want to say with this other than Autumn has dyslexia and she's not going to get appropriate support for it here in Berlin, unfortunately.
