How to use this
This is a structured checklist, not a test. Its only job is to help you decide whether to request a formal evaluation, and to organize what you have noticed so you can describe it clearly when you do.
Answer for your child as they are now, not as they were a year ago and not as you hope they will be. Count an item if it happens regularly rather than occasionally. Every child has bad reading days, and one hard week is not a pattern.
Nothing on this page diagnoses dyslexia. Only a qualified evaluator can do that, using standardized measures alongside history and instructional data. A checklist that told you otherwise would be selling you something.
The checklist
Sounds and words
- Struggles to rhyme, or found rhyming much harder than other children the same age.
- Has trouble breaking a spoken word into its separate sounds.
- Learned letter sounds slowly, and confuses them long after classmates stopped.
- Reads a word correctly on one page and cannot read it two pages later.
- Guesses at words from the first letter or the picture instead of reading through them.
Reading and writing
- Reads slowly and effortfully, well beyond the age classmates became fluent.
- Loses meaning by the end of a paragraph because so much effort went into the words.
- Spells the same word several different ways in one piece of writing.
- Writes far less than they can say, and avoids longer words they can pronounce.
- Handwriting and organization on the page are noticeably harder than expected.
The bigger picture
- Is clearly capable in conversation, reasoning or a practical skill, and the reading does not match.
- Avoids reading aloud, or becomes upset, silly or angry when asked to.
- Is exhausted after school in a way the workload does not explain.
- Has a parent, sibling or close relative who found reading or spelling hard.
- Has already had extra reading help that did not produce much change.
Reading your answers
There is no cutoff score, because there is no science behind a cutoff on a parent checklist. What matters is the shape of what you marked.
| What you marked | What it suggests |
|---|---|
| Very few items | Keep watching, and revisit if reading has not clicked within the next school year. |
| Several, mostly sounds and words | This is the core dyslexia pattern. Requesting an evaluation is reasonable now. |
| Several, plus family history | The strongest combination on this page. Request an evaluation in writing. |
| Several, plus help that did not work | Ask specifically what program was used and who delivered it before assuming the problem is effort. |
| Many, spread evenly everywhere | Still worth an evaluation, and ask that it look wider than reading alone. |
Whatever the pattern, keep this page. Turning it into three specific sentences with dates makes a far stronger evaluation request than a general worry does.
What this cannot do
A checklist cannot measure phonological processing, cannot administer a nonsense word reading task, cannot compare your child against a normed sample, and cannot rule out the other explanations an evaluator has to rule out. It also cannot see the instructional history that decides whether the difficulty is unexpected.
Texas public schools are required to screen students for dyslexia in kindergarten and first grade, which is a genuine advantage families here have. It is also worth being clear about what screening is. Screening flags students who may need a closer look. It is not identification, and identification is not intervention. Each step has to actually happen.
Families need more than awareness that dyslexia exists. They need guidance on what quality support looks like and how to advocate for it.
Key School and Training Center, Fort WorthThe evaluation process walks through how to turn this into a written request, and find help lists who in North Texas can evaluate.
Where this information comes from
This page draws on the organizations below alongside the clinical experience of the therapists who teach at Key School. Where the sources disagree, or where a policy is still changing, we say so in the text instead of picking an answer for you.
- Dyslexia Basics fact sheet International Dyslexia Association
- Screening for reading difficulty, on what a screener can and cannot establish National Center on Improving Literacy
- The Dyslexia Handbook, on the difference between screening and identification Texas Education Agency
- Signs of Dyslexia by age Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity
