The testing too, a whole day and Lochie and I were exhausted at the end of it. I paid the $800 and was told that the results would be posted to me in the next week.
The results arrived. Two pages stating that Lochie was advanced socially, emotionally and had very high intelligence. He was classified "severe dyslexic" on her scale. I searched through the repoort again. There was nothing in there that indicated any actions I or the school needed to take.
I phoned the lady. She said that she could only diagnose dyslexia, not fix it. Fantastic, so now I had a child who was labelled, and apparently, unfixable.
I began researching dyslexia. The only information I found was about how difficult it was to diagnose properly as most children who had trouble reading, were diagnosed as dyslexic.
Lochie was due to go into grade 2. His teacher recommended he repeat, but the Principal said there is no point Lochie repeating because he would never "get it". I decided to take Lochie to a new school.
I found Beaconsfield Primary. There was nearly 1000 kids at his old school, and Beaconsfield only had 180 students. I spoke at length to the Principal who was very understanding. She suggested puting Lochie in a composite class where he would get the social interraction from the older kids but could do the work of the lower level. I left feeling confident that Lochie would have the support he needed at Beaconsfield.
Lochie and his brothers all settled in quickly to the new school. It was a well run school with a country feel. After the first week, Lochies teacher asked if I would mind if she referred him for testing. I agreed, but told her about the Dyxlexia Centre report. She assured me that it was nothing like that so I signed the form and he was assessed the next week.
The Occupational Therapist explained a lot about Lochie's condition which was extremely helpful to me. She asked if Lochie crawled. I explained about his colic and how he couldn't be left on the ground. She said that many of the kids she sees with learning disorders never crawled. There are vital brain development processes that are stimulated by crawling. Many dyslexic kids are also colic babies. There is no clear research as to whether the dyslexia is caused by the lack of brain development, but it certainly seems to be a trend.
The sessions consisted of Lochie working on letters. We made letters in sand, with giant rope, with all different sensory things. He jumped on a mini trampoline, then climbed ladders, then made the letters again. He couldn't do the same letter five minutes after he had just done it. He had no recollection of what it looked like.
Games with balls, and other tests on motor skills showed that Lochie had no preference for his left or right hand. He also couldn't move one finger without the matching finger on the other hand moving in the same way. As lovely as the therapist was, Lochie was now 8 years old and begining to work out that he was different to the other kids.
Lochie began getting depessed from about grade 3. His love was his football. As one of the stars on the team, they went through year after year as virtually undefeated. Lochie was small, but an absolute gun on the field. He had a lot of friends in football, school and the area in general, but he started hating school with a passion.
Many mornings, he would lay in bed complaining of headaches or tummy aches. As much as I knew it was stress related, I couldn't send him on those days. Those days got closer and closer. His grade three teacher suggested I take him to another centre. This one cost me over $2000 and ended up with similar results. Very clever kid, just wasn't wired right. They gave him coloured glasses because reading black letters on white is the hardest to see, so he had blue tinged glasses.
In this test Lochie said that when he looks at a page of writing he sees black wriggly lines (the words) and white rivers. I didn't understand that until he showed me. He traced his little finger down the page gliding between the words in patterns that did look like water running down a window on a rainy day. It was explained to me that when Lochie looks at a word, the letters are different each time, sometimes turning around, sometimes backwards, upsidedown, so his mind has to go through up to 400 processes to read one 3 letter word. No wonder he was always tired.
The glasses didn't help. Having a tolerant teacher helped a bit, but Lochie would often come home crying with frustration that he couldn't do the work and felt stupid.
The feeling of frustration didn't change through grade 4, 5 and 6. He had a private tutor each day to help him through maths and english and was doing ok but it was still much harder for him than other kids.
Although Lochie's teachers knew about his problem, the Emergency Teachers rarely did. When they took over for the day, they were frustrated with a little boy who seemed clever, who refused to do any work. One day it hit a point where the Releaving teacher told Lochie to stop being silly and do the worksheet. Lochie threw a chair and a few other things and took off. This was the start of his behaviour issues at school...
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