Signs of Dyslexia in Children

Dyslexia is a learning disorder that affects your ability to read, spell, write, and speak. Children who have it are usually smart and hardworking, but they have trouble connecting the letters to the sounds those letters make. Children with dyslexia have trouble reading and spelling even when they’ve had opportunities to learn and have tried very hard to learn.

This disorder doesn’t only affect children. Adults can also have this learning disorder. Some are diagnosed earlier in life, others don’t realize until they are older. Signs of learning difficulties usually appear at an early age, and include;

Difficulty reading

Most children with learning disabilities suffer from difficulty in learning how to read. Despite their natural IQ ratios, or their access to a good education.

Delayed learning some motor skills

Some children with learning disabilities may learn normal motor skills such as crawling, walking, talking and riding a bicycle later than other children.

Delayed development of speaking skill

Some children with learning disabilities may have difficulty speaking, may mispronounce certain words, or may have difficulty distinguishing between the sounds and harmony of words.

Slow to learn sequential information

Some children with learning disabilities may also have trouble learning and memorizing sequential information such as alphabets, days of the week, months, colours, and arithmetic tables.

Difficulty performing visual skills

Some motor and visual skills may be difficult for children with learning disabilities, and these skills include catching the ball. This is due to the inability to coordinate between sight and hand movements, which may be a symptom of another disorder such as indigestion.

Non-discrimination between parties

The left and right sides are a problem for some children with learning difficulties because they are unable to distinguish between them.

Reverse information

Some children with learning disabilities may resort to reversing information such as reversing numbers and letters.

Pronunciation problems

Most children with learning disabilities have problems with pronunciation. They may learn to say a word and forget it completely the next day.

Speech problems

Children with learning disabilities suffer from speech problems, especially in pronouncing words that consist of more than two syllables. They are able to pronounce the middle syllable and do not pronounce the first and last syllables.

Concentrating problems

Concentration problems are among the most common problems in children with learning difficulties. This is because the child’s mind gets tired after a few minutes of trying to focus on a specific thing, and most children suffer from hyperactivity and attention deficit problems.

Infection

The incidence of children with learning disabilities with infectious diseases such as fever, eczema, asthma, and other diseases is high.

Other signs of dyslexia

Dyslexia symptoms are often picked up in the first two years of school, usually when children start learning to read.

Before children start school, it’s a little hard to notice. But there are some early warning signs in preschoolers. Pre-schoolers might have dyslexia if they:

• Mispronounce more words than other children
• can’t play with sounds in words – for example, they have difficulty rhyming words
• Have more trouble than peers repeating long words and sentences
• Slow to connect letters and their sounds.

Once children start school, they might have dyslexia if they:

• Have difficulty sounding out words.
• struggle to remember words even when they’ve read and/or written the words many times
• Have difficulty putting sounds together to make words.
• Have trouble reading and spelling than other children the same age.

Teenagers might have dyslexia if they:

• Struggle to manipulate sounds in spoken words – for example, they find it hard to take the ‘r’ sound out of ‘frog’ to make ‘fog’
• Make a lot of spelling mistakes and disguise them with messy handwriting.
• Get lots of words wrong when reading aloud, including short, common words
• dislike and avoid reading
• prefer to listen to others reading aloud

If your child has some of these difficulties, it doesn’t automatically mean that he has dyslexia.

Causes of dyslexia

We don’t know what causes dyslexia. But dyslexia tends to run in families – it might be a condition that one or both parents pass on to their children through their genes. The genes that parents pass on seem to affect parts of the brain involved in speech/language. Below is one of the causes:

Genes and heredity

Scientists have found some types of genes associated with reading problems and language information absorption. Studies have also found the prevalence of the disorder in the same family by 49%, and between the siblings of the affected person by approximately 40%.

Treatment

Disorder difficulties learning is a disorder that accompanies man throughout his life and has no actual cure. However, early detection may alleviate the symptoms and teachers may help too.