I am a grade two teacher. I have 20 students in my class, one of them has dyslexia.
What is dyslexia:
Dyslexia is a learning problem some kids have. Dyslexia makes it tough to read and spell. The problem is inside the brain, but it doesn’t mean the person is dumb. Plenty of smart and talented people struggle with dyslexia.
Dyslexic children and adults struggle to read fluently, spell words correctly and learn a second language, among other challenges. But these difficulties have no connection to their overall intelligence. In fact, dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty in reading in an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader. While people with dyslexia are slow readers, they often, paradoxically, are very fast and creative thinkers with strong reasoning abilities.
Causes:
- A family history of dyslexia or other learning disabilities
- Premature birth or low birth weight
- Exposure during pregnancy to nicotine, drugs, alcohol or infection that may alter brain development in the fetus
- Individual differences in the parts of the brain that enable reading
Dyslexia can lead to a number of problems, including:
- Trouble learning. Because reading is a skill basic to most other school subjects, a child with dyslexia is at a disadvantage in most classes and may have trouble keeping up with peers.
- Social problems. Left untreated, dyslexia may lead to low self-esteem, behavior problems, anxiety, aggression, and withdrawal from friends, parents and teachers.
- Problems as adults. The inability to read and comprehend can prevent a child from reaching his or her potential as the child grows up. This can have long-term educational, social and economic consequences.
Children who have dyslexia are at increased risk of having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and vice versa. ADHD can cause difficulty sustaining attention as well as hyperactivity and impulsive behavior, which can make dyslexia harder to treat.
Symptoms:
- Before school
- Signs that a young child may be at risk of dyslexia include:
- Late talking
- Learning new words slowly
- Problems forming words correctly, such as reversing sounds in words or confusing words that sound alike
- Problems remembering or naming letters, numbers and colors
- Difficulty learning nursery rhymes or playing rhyming games
- School age
Once your child is in school, dyslexia signs and symptoms may become more apparent, including:
- Reading well below the expected level for age
- Problems processing and understanding what he or she hears
- Difficulty finding the right word or forming answers to questions
- Problems remembering the sequence of things
- Difficulty seeing (and occasionally hearing) similarities and differences in letters and words
- Inability to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word
- Difficulty spelling
- Spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing
- Avoiding activities that involve reading
- Teens and adults
Dyslexia signs in teens and adults are similar to those in children. Some common dyslexia signs and symptoms in teens and adults include:
- Difficulty reading, including reading aloud
- Slow and labor-intensive reading and writing
- Problems spelling
- Avoiding activities that involve reading
- Mispronouncing names or words, or problems retrieving words
- Trouble understanding jokes or expressions that have a meaning not easily understood from the specific words (idioms), such as “piece of cake” meaning “easy”
- Spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing
- Difficulty summarizing a story
- Trouble learning a foreign language
- Difficulty memorizing
- Difficulty doing math problems
Statistics in Lebanon:
NIH research has shown that dyslexia affects 20%, or 1 in every 5 people. Dyslexia is one of the most common cause of reading difficulties in elementary school children because only 1 in 10 dyslexics.
Tools and Strategies:
tool that will combine fun and education help children with dyslexia:
applications: all about reading, all about spelling, DYSLEXIA QUEST, SOUND LITERACY
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