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Reception, he started and there was no problem at all.
He kept up with the other children quite well.
He went into Year 1
and halfway through Year 1 we went to an open evening...
where I happened to look at a few other children's work...
and felt Daniel's handwriting was, I thought, quite bad.
Then we had a phone call from his head, asking us to come in.
She wanted to see us.
I didn't know quite what that was about, panicked
and she actually sat us down
and said that she felt something wasn't quite right with Daniel
but she couldn't put her finger on it.
She didn't know if it was a case of Daniel being lazy,
being naughty,
or if there was a medical problem
to why she had these doubts.
Once she'd actually told us that she felt something wasn't quite right,
I felt I started to watch him a bit more,
and then we did notice he couldn't use a knife and fork properly.
He couldn't ride his bike,
he couldn't swim.
Very, very shaky.
I felt he couldn't even walk straight.
That might sound funny but he did use to walk to the side.
Daniel came to see me when he was seven.
There had been concern in school
because his manipulative skills weren't very good,
and indeed they found him clumsy.
He came to see me with both his parents.
He hadn't walked until he was 17 or 18 months,
they seemed to remember,
but he had crawled normally.
I did a general physical and neurological test
and didn't find anything particular to note,
so I went through a couple of standardised tests with Daniel.
One was Movement ABC,
the Movement Assessment Battery for Children,
and the second was the VMI,
the test of visual-motor integration.
On the first, on Movement ABC,
Daniel's score overall was below the fifth percentile
and I also noted some tremor
when he was attempting to do manipulative activities.
And on the VMI test
his test was just below normal.