Reading and Writing Disorders
About Reading and Writing Disorders?
Reading is one of the most important skills for children to learn. It’s correlated with academic success, self-esteem, concentration, vocabulary, memory, and critical thinking skills. It’s never too early to start exposing children to literacy. According to the American Pediatrics Association, even reading to infants has been shown to improve their later academic success.
What are the signs of a reading and/or writing disorder?
In Preschool
- Delayed speech – not talking at all by 1 year
- Mixing up the sounds or syllables in long words such as “aminal” or “busketti”
- Constant confusion of left versus right
- Late establishing a dominant hand
- Difficulty learning to tie shoes
- Trouble memorizing address, phone number, or the alphabet
- Can’t create words that rhyme
In Elementary School:
- Dysgraphia (slow, non-automatic handwriting that is difficult to read)
- Letter or number reversals continuing past first grade
- Extreme difficulty learning cursive
- Slow, choppy, inaccurate reading—guesses based on shape or context, skips or misreads prepositions (at, to, of) ignores suffixes, can’t sound out unknown words
- Poor at spelling
- Often can’t remember sight words
- Word decoding – Difficulty sounding out written words and/or struggles to match letters to their proper sounds
- Fluency – Difficulty reading quickly, accurately, and with proper expression (if reading aloud)
- Poor reading comprehension. Have trouble understanding what they read
