Dyslexia is a reading problem many teachers struggle to understand. Left undiagnosed, dyslexia makes learning difficult. Children with dyslexia find it hard to read, but with effective management, dyslexic children can become high achieving students who learn well and build positive careers.
What is dyslexia?
Dyslexia is a problem with reading printed words. Children with dylsexia find reading hard to do. Dyslexia does not mean a child has low intelligence. In fact, the opposite is often true. Children with dyslexia have reading problems which cannot be explained by reasons such as an intellectual disability or other condition. They are usually assessed as having average or above average intelligence.
Signs of dyslexia
In many children, teachers may notice problems like:
- Trouble with automatic word recognition - a sight vocabulary is not easy for the child to build up or maintain
- Hard to blend letters together
- Cannot always find the beginning and end of words
- Skips words when reading aloud
- Loses the meaning of what is being read
- Words may be spelled several ways in a single piece of writing
- Uses an unusual ordering of letters within a word
- Can often remember complex or unusual words easily eg. spaghetti, dinosaur
Teacher Tips
Teachers make an enormous difference to the outcomes for children with dyslexia. Some tips for managing in the classroom include:
- guiding the child and family towards an accurate diagnosis
- working with a child and family to achieve common goals
- learning about dyslexia - try the International Dyslexia Association at www.interdys.org
- providing phonics based teaching through programs such as THRASS, Jolly phonics or Word Wizard which help with providing an explicit, organised program for teaching reading skills
- avoiding forcing a child into situations where they feel they are under pressure to perform or must read in front of peers
- being understanding about managing behaviour problems which relate to frustration and distress at lack of reading skill
About Tom
Tom has dyslexia. He is often disruptive in the classroom, particularly if he is asked to do an activity which requires reading. During silent reading time, he sits with his book open on his table and makes sure he keeps moving his eyes around on the page. He knows that this makes it appear as if he is really reading. Only Tom knows his secret though - he can't actually read the words in front of him. For years now, he has mastered the art of avoiding reading tasks, and a succession of teacher and school changes has meant his problems have not been picked up through regular reading assessments and testing.
