WHAT DYSLEXIA LOOKS LIKE BY GRADE LEVEL

AN EXCERPT FROM THE FLUENCY BUILDERS TEACHER TOOLKIT

BY GEORGIE NORMAND, M.A.

PRE-K

LETTER NAMES AND SOUNDS

The at-risk child will have difficulty with learning and remembering the names of the letters and have even more trouble associating the sounds with their corresponding letters.

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS/PHONEMIC AWARENESS

Phonological awareness (PA) is a broad term which refers to a child's understanding that sentences are made up of words, and words are made up of individual sounds and sometimes syllables. PA is acquired through listening, and children who can clap out words in sentences or syllables in a word have PA. These children can also tell if two words rhyme. About two-thirds of dyslexic children have a deficit in phonological awareness (Ring & Black, 2018).

Phonemic awareness is a subskill of PA which involves awareness of individual sounds (phonemes). Children with poor phonemic awareness may not be able to segment sounds in a word or blend sounds together. If your classroom uses phonemic awareness activities, this child will be puzzled by these activities. For example, identifying initial sounds, final sounds, and medial sounds will be difficult for this child even after the teacher models this task. These children may find blending and segmenting sounds in short CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words - cat, dog, bat, tip - very difficult.

Other phonemic awareness activities – especially phoneme manipulation - will be challenging for them. Phoneme manipula

tion involves adding, deleting or substituting phonemes: In the following deletion example, the teacher says, "My word is bat. Say bat. Now say bat without the /b/ (The teacher makes the sound of the letter b.) The // symbol represents the sound of b rather than the letter name. The child should be able to respond with at. Or in the case of a substitution activity, the teacher says, "My word is bat. Say bat. Now change the /b/ to /c/. The response should be cat.

SIGHT WORDS

They will find sight words more difficult to learn than most children. They may not recognize them when they encounter them in text – even if they have memorized them.

EARLY LANGUAGE HISTORY & SKILLS

Some children at risk for dyslexia may have a history of early language delay. This is a strong predictor of dyslexia (Raschle, Becker, Smith, Fehlbaum, Wang, & Gaab, 2015). Some children might also show signs of specific language impairment (SLI), but it is a distinct disorder not always associated with dyslexia. Usually parents will report an early language delay if the child has SLI. The child might already be receiving speech and language therapy. Children with dyslexia and children with SLI represent 2 separate subgroups of reading disability. Behaviorally, their reading problem appears similar, but with different underlying causes (Lauterbach, Park, & Lombardino, 2018).