Current availability (school-day and within AL5 only or via Zoom): Tuesday at 9.15am
WHAT DO Dyslexic tendencies LOOK LIKE?
What might I observe in my child?
Children with dyslexic tendencies may be highly creative and demonstrate artistic flair, evidence good visual and spatial awareness abilities, have strengths in problem and puzzle solving (for example, verbalising an alternative and equally effective strategy to solve a maths question), enjoy thinking 'outside of the box' and are often innovative, entrepreneurial and resilient. Although the widely accepted definition of dyslexia refers to difficulties with reading and writing, it is the processing and memory skills involved in these aspects of literacy that often underlie the challenges in acquiring reading and writing skills. These may include difficulties with the auditory or visual processing of information, challenges with short-term or working memory in terms of holding and/or manipulating information, the ability to automatically recall information stored in long-term memory, or with self-organisation skills.
Reading skills development
- Challenges learning and retaining phonics knowledge or making correct grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs).
- Difficulties with reading fluency because of lower than expected decoding or blending skills.
- Difficulties recalling irregular 'sight' words from memory.
- Slow reading speed.
- Reading too fast and skipping tricky words or substituting words that look similar.
- A focus on decoding the text rather than understanding it: lower than expected comprehension skills, particularly for inference questions.
- Incorrect reading of verb tenses, suffixes and determiners.
- Mispronunciation of age-appropriate words.
- Lack of intonation/expression.
Writing skills development
- Higher verbal than written ability.
- Confusion between letters that look similar: b/d, p/q, m/w, n/u.
- Same word misspelt in different ways.
- Reversal of letters.
- Over reliance on spelling words phonetically as child progresses through KS2.
- Lack of application of spelling patterns and rules.
- Poorly formed letters / repeated crossing out of words.
- Slow writing speed.
- Difficulty documenting ideas in writing.
- Little evidence of inclusion of age-appropriate punctuation and grammatical concepts.
- May have poor pencil grip and/or demonstrate difficult to read handwriting.
Memory/concentration
- Difficulty remembering/following instructions.
- Forgetfulness.
- Slow to start a task/activity.
- Challenges recalling correct words when speaking.
- Difficulties recalling spellings accurately despite repeatedly overlearning these.
- Low levels of concentration.
- Excessive fatigue due to intense levels of concentration.
Numeracy skills development
- Challenges with working out which calculations to use in reasoning questions.
- Confusion when recalling the meaning of mathematical symbols (+, -, x, /).
- Difficulties recalling the meaning of written terminology, e.g. 'plus', 'add', 'total', 'find the sum of'.
- Confusion when faced with mathematical terminology also used in every day life, e.g. 'take away', 'mean', 'average', 'pi'.
- Difficulties telling the time and a preference to use a digital rather than an analogue clock/watch.
- Challenges with sequencing, e.g. days of the week, months of the year, seasons, chronology.
- Difficulties with laterality: learning left from right/up from down.