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Know the signs of dyslexia

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The dyslexic child sees every word as if for the first time; it simply isn’t in her memory bank. And correcting a dyslexic is like telling a child with a stammer to talk properly or a deaf child to open her ears.

According to the International Dyslexia Association it’s a language-based learning problem that makes writing, reading, spelling and even the pronunciation of words difficult. People with dyslexia struggle to link letters to the sounds the letters represent. The exact cause is still a mystery.

Here are the symptoms and warning signs that a child might be dyslexic:

  • Struggles to associate a letter with its sound
  • Reads slowly and loses her place
  • Fails to remember what she’s read
  • Sounds the letters of a word but can’t put the sounds together to form a word
  • Confuses letters, such as "b" and "d"
  • Leaves letters out, such as writing "vat" instead of "vast"
  • Struggles with sentence structure, punctuation, syllables and capital letters
  • Struggles with language. Warning signs include an inability to pronounce words correctly, being behind in vocabulary, persisting with baby language, swapping syllables in words and adding or removing bits of words
  • Struggles with perceiving things. Good hearing and eyesight are essential. The inability to see similarities and differences in jigsaw puzzles, pictures and symbols could point to a problem.

Dyslexia: the broken link

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