Dyslexia & Reading Disorder Symptoms

IMG_7895Red Flags of A Reading Disorder

Parents are all too often told that you cannot diagnose a reading disability or dyslexia until the third grade, and then English tutoring is usually recommended. Actually, that is not the case, and the earlier a reading comprehension problem is detected, the quicker you can put appropriate intervention strategies into place.

Red flags to watch out for in the early years of reading are:

  • They are not consistently recognizing common sight words.
  • They have difficulty hearing all the sounds in a word.
  • They recognize a word on one page but not on another.
  • Naming and writing all the letters in the alphabet is not yet automatic, and may be slow and labored.
  • Confuses similarly spelled words such as then/ than, on/one, was/saw.
  • Has difficulty remembering the spelling of familiar words with irregular spellings.
  • There is a lack of proper spacing between words when writing and perhaps they cannot manage to write a complete word on a line.
  • There is an issue with directionality, i.e., confusing front/back, right/left.
  • Interchanges words like saying ‘in’ for ‘end’ or ‘pass’ for ‘past.’

School-based assessments are limited in scope, focusing only on academic skills. When children are struggling to read and learn, English tutoring isn’t enough. We administer a detailed assessment that looks for weak visual or auditory processing skills, word retrieval fluency, attention, and executive functioning. Then we develop a remediation plan that attacks the problem at the root cause!