Healers or Money Grabbers?

Mr 7 has had some difficulty in learning to read.  The older 3 never had a problem with reading so this is new territory for me.  I figured if I just read to him all the time and got him to read to me all the time, he would improve.  So we bought the flashcards and the learn to read books and such.  There was a slight improvement but not much.  So I took him to the doctor who thought it might be an eyesight problem.  He referred us to the optometrist who said that Mr 7 doesn't have a problem with his eyes but the reading could be causing eyestrain which would make him not want to read so I should buy $200 reading glasses so he can focus on the words without straining.  So I bought them.  He wore them for a few weeks then lost them.  They didn't improve his reading anyway.

I thought maybe he had ADD because he seemed to lose focus while we were reading together and he always wanted to go off and do something else.  But then I realised who wouldn't want to go off and do something else?  He was already struggling with it and the fact that I can't quite explain how to read words that you can't spell out (ie. boy, love, one etc - I mean you spell out one oh un eh - how can you get one from that?) didn't help matters at all.  I wanted to be somewhere else!

So I took him back to the doctor who referred him to a specialist who said he probably has dyslexia and that will cost $750 to assess him.  Wow!  I should have gone into psychology.

But last night, he read me a book from front to back and got all the words right, words he was having difficulty reading before.  Maybe the solution isn't to throwing money at things....maybe its just taking our time.