Please mark any of the following signs and symptoms exhibited by you / your child.
Before School
History of slow speech development. Difficulty learning nursery rhymes. Finds phonological difficulty with the selection of the odd one out e.g. cat : pig : fat. Slow in name finding. Some dyslexic children enjoy being read to, but show no interest in letters or words. Others have no patience for sitting and listening. Difficulty with two or more instructions at one time (due to weak memory system) but well able to carry out tasks when presented in smaller units. Difficulty keeping simple rhythm. May not crawl but walks early. Persistent difficulty in dressing. Difficulty with shoe laces, buttons, clothes the right way around. Difficulty with catching, kicking or throwing a ball. Difficulty with hopping and skipping. Excessive tripping, bumping into things and falling over things. Obvious ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days for no apparent reason.
At Primary School and Beyond
Personal organisation poor. Poor time keeping and awareness. Difficulty in remembering what day of the week it is, birth date, seasons of the year, month of the year. Difficulty in learning to tell the time. Difficulty remembering anything in sequential order, e.g. days of the week, the alphabet, tables, foreign languages. Poor reading progress, particularly on look-and-say methods. Inability to blend letters together. Difficulty in establishing syllable division, beginnings and endings of words synthesis and analysis of word. Hesitant and laboured reading, especially when reading aloud, often misses out words or adds extra words or fails to recognise familiar words. Making anagrams of words, e.g. tired for tried, breaded for bearded. Undetermined hand preference. Confusion between left and right. Poor handwriting with many reversals and badly formed letters. Difficulty in picking out the most important points from a passage. Poor standard of written work in comparison with oral ability. Losing the point of the story being written or read. Messy work with many crossings out and words tried several times e.g. wippe, wype, wiep, wipe. Persistent confusion with letters which look similar, particularly b/d, p/q, n/u, m/w. Confusion with number order, e.g. plus and minus. A word spelt several different ways in one piece of writing. Badly set out written work, inability to stay close to the margin. Seems to dream, does not seem to listen. Easily distracted. Limited understanding of non-verbal communication. Fine motor skills may be poor leading to weakness in the speed, control and accuracy of the pencil. May become the class clown, disruptive or withdrawn (these are cries for help). Employs work avoidance tactics (sharpening pencils, looking for books etc. Rests head on desk or right over to one side when colouring or writing. Performs unevenly day to day. Excessive tiredness due to the amount of concentration and effort required.
