Dyslexia WA

We suspected that Riley had dyslexia from when he was about six years old, but were not able to get a diagnosis until he was seven, even then we had to beg. Most clinical psychologists believe that dyslexia can't be disagnosed until a child is eight. I have since learnt that indicators for dyslexia are present at an early age and that you can accurately screen for dyslexia as early as four years old.

Riley had many dyslexic indicators before we even suspected that he had dyslexia, he struggled to ride a bike, made simple phonetic errors in his speech, such as 'bisgusting', rather than 'disgusting'. We just thought these words were cute, but errors such as these are early indicators of future problems with the written word. Other early indicators include poor ball skills, mixing up which foot goes in which shoe (Riley still struggles with this), difficulty remembering nursery rhymes, clumsiness and many, many more. We can tick almost every box in the early indicator list.

What bugs me is that we could have started intervention much earlier if we had known. We are seeing an improvement in his reading thanks to his reading tutor and lots of hard work at home, but I have to wonder if the gap would be even less if we had started working with him earlier. Dyslexia WA have just opened their doors and they provide early screening for dyslexia. Early screening is common in the US and the UK, where they have dyslexia friendly schools, but is not done in Australia. The early screeing test can be used with children from four to seven years of age. It is not a diagnosis, but does give a very good indication of whether there are the early markers for dyslexia which then leads to much earlier support and intervention for a dyslexic child.

I wish this was around when Riley was younger, we would certainly have got Riley screened.