Signs of possible dyslexia in the early years include:
At secondary level, earlier difficulties may persist and new problems may emerge in coping with the increased demands of the curriculum. Students may show a variety of the following features:
Reading
Writing
Listening
Language
Organisation
General
One of the main things students with dyslexia tend to struggle with is phonemic awareness, which is the ability to discern the sounds and the sequence of sounds within a word. Phonemic awareness is a critical reading skill, and research has found that early success in phonemic awareness is the single biggest predictor of students’ future reading outcomes.
The good news is that there are simple activities you can do with your child to improve their phonemic awareness:
Making their best effort, taking risks and thinking about what they’re learning are the things you want to praise in your child more than simply getting the right answer. And no matter what answer they give, ask them how they got there, then praise the process itself.
“It’s not that I’m so smart,” Albert Einstein once said, “It’s just that I stay with problems longer.” How telling that one of the greatest geniuses of all time explained his success like this, giving credit not to his superior intellect, but to his tremendous persistence.