Dyslexia Clues to Watch Out For

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

Dyslexia can be suspected in kindergarten if the child:

• fails to recognize and write letters, their name, and fails to use inventive spelling

• has trouble breaking spoken words into syllables, such as bobcat into bob & cat

• has trouble recognizing words that rhyme, such as cat and bat

• fails to connect letters with sounds (asks what the letter d sounds like) 

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

• mispronounces long and complicated words, like saying amulium instead of aluminum

• confuses words that sound alike, such as tornado and volcano

• guesses wildly when reading multisyllabic words instead of sounding them out

• spells terribly and has messy handwriting

• has a deep fear of reading aloud

 Shaywitz. S. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia: A new and complete science-based program for reading problems at any level. New York: Knopf.

Here is a classic sign of dyslexia from a student in my grade nine science class:

The sentence from the text read, “All organisms are made of cells.” But the student read, (with difficulty and attempting to sound the letter out), “All orgasms are made of cells.”

What is going on here?
or gan ism = vc cvc vc(c)
or gasm = vc cvcc

You can see that the student was having trouble decoding the multisyllabic word. They attempted to break it up into two syllables rather than three.

The Visual Match lessons in our app train the brain to automatically recognize the syllables in multisyllabic words. Visual Match decoding exercises wire the “word analyzer” in the parieto-temporal lobe on the left side of the brain.