Dyslexia

I have a son who has mild dyslexia.  We are working with him and one thing that I’ve found to be really helpful is Handwriting Without Tears’ wooden letter pieces.  However, you can make the wooden pieces from laminated card stock.  Anyways, they are wooden pieces that you can put together to make letters so that he can feel how they go together rather than try to remember how to write them which is confusing.  He also does better with bigger print.  Does anyone else have a dyslexic?

My neighbor’s son is dyslexic.  He’s 16 now, but it was really difficult for him to function in school as a result.  He’s also afraid that his dyslexia may stop him from enlisting in the military (his dream) but I don’t know if that’s the case.

Usually they work around disabilities like that or so I’m told.  My son is twice exceptional—that’s the spiffy word for both gifted and learning disabled at the same time.  So he does fairly well in school work.  You just can’t read any of his answers!

Getting him diagnosed on either end was an issue because the prevailing thinking is, “Surely he’s not gifted. . .he writes everything upside down and backwards.”  Or, “Surely he’s not learning disabled, look at how gifted he is.”  There’s not a lot of good information on either.

That has to be incredibly frustrating! It’s not like a deficit in one area doesn’t mean that there aren’t huge advances in others.  I don’t get why people would think that a person with dyslexia can’t be advanced in other arenas.

Yes and no.  It was frustrating but we’re not working with a school district to find accomodations and so going through the process wasn’t the end of the world.  Truthfully, the dyslexia was very obvious so that wasn’t too bad.  The giftedness is very obvious too. . .but to get them recognized as simultaneous conditions was a pain.

There’s not a lot of good research out there on giftedness so when a gifted child does have a learning disability—you’re kind of up a creek without a paddle.  Interestingly, I personally believe that having autism spectrum disorders recognized actually helps as Asberger’s and giftedness often go hand in hand.