Signs of Dyslexia in Primary School Children

• Personal organisation poor.
• Poor time keeping and awareness.
• Difficulty in remembering what day of the week it is, birth date, seasons of the year, month of the year.
• Difficulty in learning to tell the time.
• Difficulty remembering anything in sequential order, e.g. days of the week, the alphabet, times tables, foreign languages.
• Poor reading progress, particularly on look-and-say methods. An inability to blend letters together.
• Difficulty in establishing syllable division, beginnings and endings of words synthesis and analysis of words.
• Hesitant and laboured reading, especially when reading aloud, often misses out words or adds extra words or fails to recognise familiar words.
• Making anagrams of words, e.g. tired, for tried, breaded for bearded.
• Undetermined hand preference.
• Confusion between left and right.
• Poor handwriting with many reversals and badly formed letters.
• Difficulty in picking out the most important points from a passage.
• Poor standard of written work in comparison with oral ability.
• Losing the point of the story being written or read. Messy work with many crossings out, and words repeated several times e.g. wipe, wype, wiep, wipe.
• Persistent confusion with letters which look similar, particularly b/d/, p/q,n/u,m/w.
• Confusion with number order, e.g. plus and minus. A word spelt several different ways in one piece of writing. Badly set out written work, inability to stay close to the margin.
• Seems to dream, does not seem to listen.
• Easily distracted.
• Limited understanding of non-verbal communication.
• Performs unevenly day to day.
• Excessive tiredness due to the amount of concentration and effort required.