mirror mirror...
Yesterday after we got back from school K sat down at the table and wrote Mike and I a letter... It was perfect and beautiful and she did the whole thing herself including spelling all the words... and writing them completely and totally backwards. Mirror perfect backwards.
Oh isn't that sweet.... oh how cute... tee hee hee. Except that I am mildly dyslexic...
If you don't know anything about dyslexia it wouldn't hurt for you to know... but among the things you would learn would be that writing backwards like the demon spawn from some creepy horror movie is not a sign of dyslexia... So why am I worried? because any impediment on the road to literacy scares the hell out of me.... because I was so befuddled by letters that it took me a very long time to learn to consistently make letters the right way... because when I am tired reading a page of plain English can be like deciphering hieroglyphics to me... because spell check is my best friend... because I did a lot of backwards writing myself... though only single letters would be flipped, not entire words and sentences... because my mom suffers from the same learning disability that I do... because my daughter is precious and perfect to me and even though a learning disability wouldn't make her anything less than the remarkable person she is, it will make her road ahead so much tougher...
There are so many other reasons she could be writing this way... and it isn't an overblown reaction to a one time occurrence... She writes backwards a lot. I often show her which side of the page to start on and it helps most of the time. There could also be 1,000,000,001 different factors leading up to this. For instance: I think she is the only left handed kid in her class. Does that make a difference? I am not left handed I do not know.
Today I had planned to talk to her preschool teacher... see if she had anything to say on the subject... see if she noticed that if you ask K to identify a word she points to a group of them... see if she had noticed that while K can tell you how to spell something, and she can write many words she has a hard time picking out her own name at times... to see if she knew some one we could discuss it with... see see see... but the schools are on a 2 hour snow delay (it only snained in our neighborhood) so preschool is cancelled. Instead I'm talking to all of you out there in internet land...
keep your fingers crossed... ** I talked with a friend this morning who gave me a number for an early educational intervention program. I'll call them tomorrow. If anyone else has a child in the Portland area between the ages of 3-5 and feels they may have a problem learning I'll be more than happy to give you the number**
