First grade is when reading difficulties first become visible. If your child is struggling to sound out simple words while classmates are reading sentences, do not wait to find out why.
Start Screening ($79)First grade marks the shift from pre-reading to actual reading. These are the skills most children are developing throughout the year.
These patterns suggest your child may benefit from a dyslexia screening. One sign alone may not be cause for concern, but multiple signs together warrant attention.
Our screening targets the specific cognitive skills most closely linked to reading success and dyslexia identification in early readers.
Can your child isolate, blend, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words? We assess sound blending, segmentation, and deletion tasks appropriate for 1st graders.
Can your child read real and nonsense words by sounding them out? Nonsense words like "tig" or "bap" test decoding ability directly, since they cannot be memorized.
How quickly can your child name letters and numbers in sequence? Slow rapid automatized naming is a hallmark of dyslexia and predicts reading fluency difficulties.
15 minutes. Done from home. Detailed report included.
Begin Screening Now Or take the free checklist first →No subscriptions. No hidden fees. Results you can share with your child's teacher or pediatrician.
First grade is when children transition from learning pre-reading skills to actual reading. It is the first time most children are expected to decode words, read simple sentences, and build sight word vocabulary. Children with dyslexia often appear to keep up in kindergarten, but the gap becomes visible in first grade when reading demands increase. Research shows that intervention before age 7 is significantly more effective than waiting, making first grade an ideal time to screen.
Some children do develop reading skills a bit later, and your teacher may be right. However, the "wait and see" approach carries risk. If your child does have dyslexia, every semester without intervention means falling further behind peers. A screening takes only 15 minutes and can give you data to inform the conversation with your child's teacher, rather than relying on hope alone.
School reading assessments like DIBELS or MAP typically measure overall reading level and fluency benchmarks. They tell you whether your child is on grade level, but they are not specifically designed to identify dyslexia risk factors. Our screening focuses on the specific phonological processing and rapid naming skills that are most closely associated with dyslexia, providing a more targeted view of your child's reading profile.