Early intervention helps against dyslexia

Ever had an encounter with a child or a person who had difficulties with learning including reading, writing or spelling?

The child may have a condition called dyslexia.

Dyslexia is a learning difficulty, which does not affect the person’s intelligence but comes with difficulties with being able to read and write.Often this condition runs within a family. More often than not,a child is noted to be dyslexic once they start school and now start practicing reading in the break through stages.

Estimates world-wide note that 1 in 10 people maybe dyslexic and often in our country students are under diagnosed because of lack of awareness or scarcity of trained personnel in this area.

often students may be confused by symbols such as + and x signs, have problems of telling time and time keeping skills; they may have difficulty in remembering anything that’s a sequence like learning the alphabet order, months and days of the week. They may have difficulty with knowing the difference between yesterday, today, tomorrow.

Students may have difficulty with motor skills such us controlling pencil and pen use, they may exhibit no specific hand preference as well as have problems of knowing the difference between up and down. Performance may be erratic from day to day. Memory may also be an issue, this may include problems with route learning, following a routine and confused by the difference between left and right, up and down, east and west. Often the students may seem to be easily distracted or absent minded, in a dreamy world and when asked to do work may avoid it by doing other tasks like spending time looking for books.

Symptoms of dyslexia in older children and adults may include disorganized work that often has good content but is not well expressed. This can be seen when writing compositions or essays, letters and reports in school work for instance in the languages. often there would be lack of proper brainstorming and planning for these and multiple spelling errors. Teens and older adults may often hold back from reading and writing and may also have difficulty taking down notes.

They man often fail to meet deadlines, including homework and assigned work for the older adults. Adults may have problems with remembering cell phone numbers and pins for instance.

when parents note this symptoms it’s important to engage the teachers to check of they may also have similar concerns and to engage a doctor to make a medical assessment of any co existing health problems that may be affecting the child such as eye issues and hearing. People with dyslexia may also have other problems affecting them such as

dyscalculia like the name implies, to do with calculations and numbers. They may have a poor attention span and problems concentrating eg adhd and other physical problems.

With the right support, dyslexia can be managed and with the right coping strategies a child can be assisted to cope with reading difficulties and even later on in life be integrated into the working class.

What’s important is to identify the signs early on and get a child assisted through the special need program. Often parents are reluctant to get children referred to special needs but if you look at it, when a child has a broken leg we assist them by taking them to a doctor promptly to also ease their pair and help them function quickly and we should do the same with dyslexia as it can impair a child’s progress academically and other wise.

Dr Wada Goitsemang is a Family Medicine Specialist and CEO of Dr Wada’s Tutorials

Contact at :74 55 38 90