I first asked, could this be a sign of dyslexia? when my son, Harry, was five years old.

Harry couldn’t spot his name on the coat pegs at school, but because he was so young, I didn’t worry about it being a sign of dyslexia. When he got to seven and still struggled to read, he had him assessed.

Maybe you’ve noticed your child is taking longer than their sibling to learn to swim, gets lost easily, or says pasghetti instead of spaghetti.

Dyslexia affects more than literacy

When I was at school, I got by thanks to a mixture of hard work and being friends with the smartest girl in the year. Although I never had a problem reading, my spelling was… well, let’s say, creative.

When Harry was diagnosed with dyslexia, I started reading around the topic. Finally, I could put a name to the challenges I have faced all my life.

Dyslexia affects every aspect of life

I discovered dyslexia came with eight areas of challenge. Being a picture thinker, I imagined these as the arms of an octopus and drew a mind map in the shape of this creature. I added the dyslexia challenges to its arms and wrote a book about it called Dyslexia. Wrestling with an Octopus. 10 Tips to Help your Child. In my book, I discussed these challenges at length. What follows is a brief overview.

A person may not struggle with every arm of the dyslexia octopus. Harry and I don’t, but between us, they have all tripped us up at one time or another.

8 signs of Dyslexia

1. Spatial and temporal difficulties

• Knowing left from right — how did I ever pass my driving test? I was almost 40 years old when a child showed me that by holding up my left hand, palm downwards, with my thumb sticking out, it made the letter L. That is such a helpful tip.
• Difficulty reading maps — don’t follow me, I’m lost too!
• Have trouble telling the time — timetables are my worst nightmare, and yes, I’m always late.

2. Motor control problems

• Difficulty copying from the blackboard — all that looking up and down! How can anyone keep their place?
• Letter reversals — thank goodness my son’s name is short. However, in primary school, he regularly reversed the letters.
• Loses place when reading — there are many reasons for this, but having a squint when a baby can cause the eyes to fight each other. Harry suffered from a squint.
• Coordination problems — learning to swim and ride a bike may take a dyslexic child much longer. Harry’s swimming lessons cost me a fortune.

3. Signs of dyslexia with reading

• Slow phonological processing — this has nothing to do with intelligence. A person with dyslexia may require longer to take in and use information.
• Phonological problems — Harry couldn’t link the sounds he heard to letters and required therapy to train his ear to hear vowel sounds.
• Print dances or blurs — researchers suggest between 10 and 15% of children have visual difficulties that impact their learning. A visit to a behavioural optometrist may be necessary. Harry has a SchoolVision Here is an archived weblink for SchoolVision 
• Needs to re-read many times — Harry often feels frustrated when he reaches the end of a page and has absolutely no idea what he has just read.

4. Listening difficulties

• Can’t listen and take notes — asking teachers to supply handouts is one way Harry overcomes this.
• Pronunciation difficulties — numerous words can trip up a dyslexic person. Saying pasghetti instead of spaghetti and pacific instead of specific are common in our family.
• Struggles with background noise — air conditioning units, ticking clocks, traffic and children talking, make it difficult for Harry to follow what the teacher is saying.

5. Signs of dyslexia with spelling

• Difficulties with remembering words — spelling words slip out of Harry’s mind like fried eggs off Teflon. It takes a non-dyslexic child around thirty-five sightings of a word to remember it. However, a dyslexic child needs over a thousand sightings to commit a word to long-term memory.
• Difficulty spelling words — because so many words have no picture attached to them, common words such as it, or, and but can prove especially difficult to master. Harry learned these by making them out of clay.

6. Writing difficulties

• Difficulty holding sounds — Harry’s phonological problems were a significant barrier to his writing.
• Can’t find the correct words — Harry’s poor reading limits his vocabulary. Sometimes he knows the right word but picks an easier one because he knows how to spell that word.

7. Signs of dyslexia with memory

• Poor working memory — working memory allows a child to hold information in their head while doing something with it. A school child needs a strong working memory. We strengthened Harry’s by playing memory games with him.
• Difficulty with telephone numbers and times tables — the dreaded multiplication tables! Harry learnt his by using pictures and stories. A helpful resource is multiplication.com
• Struggles to remember the sequence of the seasons, alphabet etc. — when he was small, Harry would wake up in the morning and ask, ‘What’s for dinner?’ We used an online dyslexia programme called the ‘Learning Staircase’ to help him with sequencing.

8. Social and health signs of dyslexia

• Glue ear — as a baby, Harry had multiple ear infections. There is a connection between glue ear and dyslexia. Check out Dr. Lindsay Peer’s research.
• Naïve — children with dyslexia may be emotionally several years behind their peers. Navigating the social aspects of school is as challenging for Harry as his literacy issues.
• Skin conditions — a known gene for dyslexia is found on chromosome 6. This chromosome is also responsible for immunity. Skin rashes, eczema, and dermatitis are common for dyslexics.
• Digestive problems — the gut is the second brain. Just as a person with dyslexia has a different brain structure, I suspect their gut is also different. Coeliac disease and gluten intolerance are more common in people with dyslexia. For more about the effects of gluten, read this post. For some research, see https://doi.org/10.1016/0028-3932(90)90122-5

Is the octopus helpful in explaining these 8 signs of dyslexia?

I recently received an email from a Welsh dyslexia assessor who wanted to know where I bought my toy octopus.

“I want one. When I explain the challenges dyslexic people face using the arms of an octopus, the kids I assess can understand them.”

I hope you also found my octopus illustration helpful.

Thanks to  https://www.lexxic.com/dyslexia for sponsoring this post.

Sorry, I must dash because I’m making pasghetti for dinner.

To read how to teach spelling and reading in 30 minutes a day, click here.

Speechify is an app that can help dyslexic children as it reads online text. Here is my affiliate link.

Which of the 8 arms do you or your child struggle with the most?