Teachers may make various assumptions about the problem the child is having regarding its cause. This can often be stressful or even confusing for the parent, as the difficulties in question may be due to many other factors.
Before contacting diagnostic services, it is advisable to make sure that both the child's vision and hearing are not restricted.
Many times children's difficulties in communicating or reading may be due to visual or hearing problems that are not so significant that they have an impact on everyday life, but are significant enough to affect a child's learning.
How do we recognise the first clues?;
Some characteristics that you can identify in your child during preschool and early school age are the following:
Attention! The following symptoms should always be interpreted with the help of a specialist!
Preschool Age:
- History of delay in speech development.
- Delay in vocabulary development.
- Difficulty in recalling vocabulary.
- Difficulty in articulating multi-syllabic words.
- He has difficulty expressing his thoughts verbally.
- He does not complete his proposals.
- Difficulty learning sequences (numbers, days of the week, alphabet).
- He has difficulty following instructions.
- Has difficulty with fine and gross motor activities.
- He has difficulty staying focused.
- Has difficulty interacting with peers.
First School Age:
- He has difficulty organising his thoughts when he speaks.
- Unstructured-unstructured speech.
- He cannot recount events in the right order.
- He has difficulty with naming and recognizing letters.
- Poor phonological awareness.
- He/she shows low performance in writing compared to speaking.
- Difficulty in spatio-temporal orientation.
- Poor memory.
- Deficient attention and/or hyperactivity.
- Low self-esteem - increased symptoms of school anxiety.
- It is not necessary for a child to show all of the above symptoms to be diagnosed with Dyslexia. On the other hand, the presence of some of the above symptoms does not necessarily imply the existence of learning difficulties.
There is no single profile of a student with dyslexia, so diagnosis cannot be done by parents at home.
At this point, we emphasize the importance of early diagnosis and intervention in order for the child to be able to cope successfully with everyday school life and to minimize the chances that may affect his/her self-confidence.
