Symptoms of Dyslexia :

As a Preschooler

• confusion between different sounds
• may not have developed a preference for left or right-handedness
• enjoys being read to, but shows little or no interest in letters or words
• difficulty with learning rhymes, and other phonological skills
• has difficulty ,or takes a long time, acquiring letter names and sounds

When in kindergarten or primary school

Reading

• slow and hesitant reading sometimes with little change of intonation

• difficulty tracking – may miss words or skip lines
• read from middle of words
• numerous errors in reading

Some Common Reading Errors

• confusion of short vowel sounds  lid-led
  • transposing of letters – left – felt
  • misreading words of similar visual appearance help – held
  • either missing out or adding in little words such as the – and – but
  • reversing letters or whole words —
    • was – saw
    • on – no

• b/d reversals
  • dad – bad
  • buffy – duffy

• unable to sound out or blend unfamiliar words
• wild guesses eg. musk for music
• omit
  • Suffixes eg ing, -ed, -ly / Prefixes eg un- (unhappy read as happy)
• substitute words of similar meaning
  • road for street

• Tend to mumble when reading multi-syllabic words

• Struggle – slow laborious reading
• Lose track of reading resulting in poor comprehension or inability to follow sequence

Spelling

• Greater difficulty with spelling and writing
• Bizarre eg. spelling morke for smoke
• Phonetic but unable to internalise spelling rules
• Poor auditory discrimination of vowels
• Spelling words without vowels
• Omit letters limp – lip
• insert letters  what – whant
• Transpose letters  bird -brid
• Reversals b/d, p/q

• Invert letters n/u, m/w, d/q, b/p
• Very often not able to match letters to their sounds
• Spelling tends to remain poor or unreliable often into adulthood

Writing

• Difficulties in expressive writing, organising thoughts and ideas into words
• Difficulty finding right words
• Grammatical structure
• punctuation
• Illegible handwriting, various sized letters floating between lines

• Inability to write against margins
• Difficulties copying from board
• Often scolded for untidiness, carelessness, inattentiveness

Dyslexia in older children or teenagers
The types of problems experienced in reading might be:

• Hesitant and laboured reading, especially out loud
• Omitting or adding extra words
• Reading at a reasonable rate, but with a low level of comprehension
• Failure to recognise familiar words
• Missing a line or reading the same line twice
• Losing the place or using a finger or marker to keep the place

The types of problems in written work might be:

• Poor standard of written work compared to oral ability
• Poor handwriting with badly formed letters
• Good handwriting but production of work extremely slow
• Badly set out work with spellings crossed out several times
• Spells the same word differently in one piece of work
• Has difficulty with punctuation and grammar
• Confuses upper and lower case letters
• Writes a great deal but loses the thread
• Has difficulty taking notes in lessons
• Finds organisation of work and personal timetable difficult
• Clearly knows more than he can commit to paper

Types of problems associated with Math:

• Difficulty remembering tables and formulae
• Finds sequencing difficult
• Confuses signs such as + and x
• Can think at a high level in mathematics, but needs a calculator to remember basic facts
• Misreads questions that include words
• Confuses directions – left and right
• Finds mental arithmetic at speed very difficult