Don’t Wait to Help Your Struggling Student

The four-year-old who is having a hard time learning letters becomes the kindergartner who is having a difficult time associating sounds with letters. And that child easily becomes the student who is falling behind. Children who don’t read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school.

However, with early intervention, this does not have to be the case. Diagnosing and treating dyslexia early in a student’s life is not only essential, but it is increasingly accessible.

Today, it is possible to reliably identify children at high risk for dyslexia before they fall behind.  Below is the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity’s advice about the most scientifically sound and sensible approach to identifying young at-risk children before they experience reading failure:

1. Observe your child’s language development.  Be on the alert for problems in rhyming, pronunciation, and word finding.
2. Observe your child’s ability to connect print to language. Notice if he is beginning to name individual letters.
3. Know your family history. Be alert to problems speaking reading, writing, spelling, or learning a foreign language.
4. If there are clues to problems with spoken language, learning letter names, and especially if there is a family history, have your child tested. Here is a link to Lexercise’s free online tests.
5. Focus on strengths as well as weaknesses. The goal is to make sure that the strengths and not the weaknesses define the child’s life.

If you have noticed any of these identification signs, but are still unsure if your child may be at risk for dyslexia, a good place to start is by administering Lexercise’s Free Dyslexia Screener. Our screener can help raise red flags which may indicate that your child is at risk for dyslexia. The dyslexia test takes only 5-10 minutes and provides you with results immediately upon completion.

Whatever you choose to do, please take action now. Waiting another year will only hurt your child.

If you are concerned about your child’s reading, spelling, or writing the most important first step is a professional evaluation. No matter where you live, your child can be tested and treated individually, face-to-face, online, by the clinical educators at Lexercise. Learn more here, or contact us at Info@Lexercise.com or 1-919-747-4557.