Dyslexia Clues to Watch Out For

Dyslexia can present in different ways depending on age, but there are a few key indicators parents can look out for if they’re concerned their child may be dyslexic.

Signs to watch for in kindergarten

Dyslexia can be suspected in kindergarten if a child:

• fails to recognize and write letters or their own name, and doesn’t attempt inventive spelling
• has trouble breaking spoken words into syllables (for example, splitting “bobcat” into “bob” and “cat”)
• has trouble recognizing words that rhyme, such as “cat” and “bat”
• fails to connect letters with sounds (asks what sound the letter d makes)

Signs to watch for at age 7 and older

Dyslexia can be suspected at age 7 and older if a child:

• mispronounces long or complicated words, like saying “amulium” instead of “aluminum”
• confuses words that sound alike, such as “tornado” and “volcano”
• guesses wildly at multisyllabic words instead of sounding them out
• spells terribly and has messy handwriting
• has a deep fear of reading aloud

As Dr. Sally Shaywitz notes in Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level (2003), these patterns are consistent and identifiable well before a child falls far behind.

A classic example from the classroom

Here’s a real example from a grade nine science class. The textbook sentence read: “All organisms are made of cells.” The student, working hard to sound it out, read it aloud as: “All orgasms are made of cells.”

What happened is a decoding error, not a careless one. Broken into syllables, the two words look deceptively similar:

• or‑gan‑ism → vc / cvc / vc(c)
• or‑gasm → vc / cvcc

The student was trying to decode a multisyllabic word and split it into two syllables instead of three, collapsing the middle syllable in the process. That’s a textbook example of a phonological decoding breakdown, not a reading or comprehension problem: the student knew what an organism was, but couldn’t reliably sound the word out.

This is exactly the kind of pattern our Visual Match lessons are built to fix. Structured decoding practice trains the brain to automatically recognize the syllables inside multisyllabic words, building the “word analyzer” circuitry in the brain’s left parieto-temporal region.

If any of these signs sound familiar, it’s worth finding out for sure. Take our free 10-minute screener to see where your learner stands.