Comprehensive Dyslexia Therapy: Empowering Children with Reading and Writing Skills
What Is Dyslexia?
Dyslexia is a specific learning disability, which affects literacy areas such as spelling, reading, writing, or math in spite of average or above average intelligence. Such problems affect almost every part of the school curriculum. It is essential to seek help as children may feel frustrated, dejected, or develop low self-confidence because of their reading difficulties.
Causes Of Dyslexia
Neurological
Dyslexia has been found to have a neurological basis. Brain imaging studies have shown anatomical differences in the way the brain of person with dyslexia functions.
Genetic
Dyslexia may also run in families. Nevertheless, people with Dyslexia are very bright and gifted, especially in areas such as music, physics, drama, art. Some famous people with Dyslexia include Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci and Tom Cruise.
Symptoms Of Dyslexia
Reading
- Has a poor understanding of sound (phonological) awareness, such as identifying individual sounds in a word, matching letters to corresponding sounds.
- Skip, add or leave out letters during reading (e.g. “lion” as “loin”, “fingers” as “fringe”)
- Has a slow reading speed, for instance: sounding out each individual letter rather than reading a word as a whole.
- Experience difficulty with reading comprehension such as identifying the main ideas of the story
- Confuse letters such as ‘p’ and ‘q’, ‘d’ as ‘b’ or numbers 128 as 821.
Auditory or Visual problems
- Has difficulty remembering series of numbers (e.g. telephone numbers) and multisyllabic words.
- Has difficulty discriminating different sounds in words.
- Has difficulty passing verbal information accurately.
- Has difficulty tracking or loses place in the text easily as this requires fine movement and muscle control.
- Experiences texts that appear to move, jump or blur together.
Writing
- Has untidy handwriting
- Has weak punctuation (e.g. missing full stops, omitting capital letters)
- Has difficulty planning and structuring thoughts into writing, such as planning a mind map for a composition.
- Grammatical problems (e.g. likeing, lookd)
Spelling
- Spell the same word differently in a single piece of writing.
- Display letter reversals (e.g. “p” as “b”, “ 21” as “12”) .
- May not remember how a word sounds or looks like.
- Grammatical problems (e.g. likeing, lookd)