When should you be alarmed?

Everyday I meet several parents with concerns about the difficulties their children face at school. Some of these children are as little as 4 or 5. They always wonder whether the difficulties the child is facing will pass away as the child grows older? Or are they actually the symptoms of any kind of a learning Difficulty? I have tried to outline a few signs that we should look out for and document. If your child scores an yes on more than 50% of this list then you should get a psychologial and an educational assessment done.

Reading
 Slow and hesitant reading. Tires easily with reading or complains of sore eyes
 Sounding out when reading
 Failure to recognize familiar irregular words, e.g. “whose”, “right”, “hour”
 Reading words as anagrams, e.g. “was” as “saw”, “on” as “no”
 Confusion between “b” and “d” and sometimes” “p”
 Repeatedly getting stuck on the same words throughout a passage
 Difficulty understanding overall content
 Dislikes reading
 Omission or addition of words or lines
 Poor standard of reading in comparison with oral ability

Writing
Slow at learning to spell
 Letters and numbers often reversed
Spelling tends to be bizarre
Incorrectly formed or written letters
Failure to write “p” and “g” or “q” sitting down on line
 Confusion between “b” and “d” and sometimes” “p”
Difficulty in keeping writing on lines of page
Confusion between “b” and “d” or always writing them as capitals
Order of letters within a word frequently incorrect
 Great difficulty in spelling common words.
 Words spelt in different ways in same piece of writing
 Difficulty in reading back what he/she has written
 A dislike or avoidance of writing
 Difficulty in copying from book or blackboard
 Poor standard of written work in comparison with oral ability or drawing

Other
 Confusion between right and left
Difficulty tying shoelaces or remembering which foot to put each shoe on
Difficulty doing up buttons into correct buttonholes
Difficulty in carrying out more than one instruction at a time
 Difficulty in remembering what day/month it is
Difficulty in remembering anything in sequential order, e.g. stories, songs, rhymes, months of
year etc.
Difficulty in learning to tell the time, learning times tables or number sequences
Easily distracted, Poor concentration on reading or writing tasks
 Generally lacking in confidence
A bright child who wants to learn and understand how things work