Dyslexia at work: Strategies for working from home
Read and Spell Blog
Dyslexia at work: Strategies for working from home

Dyslexia at work: Strategies for working from home

A guest post by journalist David Hayter.

I have dyslexia and have long been aware that the challenges of dyslexia tend to be magnified in the remote workplace. During lockdown, I took the opportunity to change career and study law while.

As such, I was given a bird’s eye view of the profound effects the work-from-home landscape can have on both dyslexic employees and learners. Through this experience I developed a repertoire of remote work strategies that helped me overcome the wide array of challenges I faced.

How to help a child with dyslexia at home
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How to help a child with dyslexia at home

How to help a child with dyslexia at home

Parents want their children to do well at school and have the opportunity to reach their full potential. Learning at home can play an important part in this when a child has dyslexia. Reading together and finding kids’ computer programs and apps that support literacy skills development are a good first step. Some parents may want to work directly with their children on phonics, spelling, and homework. Others may be a bit more reluctant to take on the role of teacher. It does take a special set of skills, and it’s not for everyone. Nevertheless, there is still plenty you can do to support learning at home, even if you don’t directly tutor your child.

This program is working great. We are using it for our 6 year old and he is enjoying it. He wants to "do my typing" each day. Our 4 year old daughter watches with keen interest. The way it is designed really does include reading and spelling and not just typing.

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Irlen Syndrome
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Irlen Syndrome

Irlen Syndrome

When reading the words on a page or a screen is difficult, it may not always be because of a learning difficulty. Some people have light sensitivity and visual processing problems, symptoms that affect their ability to read. Irlen Syndrome, also known as Meares-Irlen Syndrome, Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome, and sometimes referred to simply as visual stress, describes a situation in which the difficulty is not with actually seeing the letters on a page, but interpreting the incoming visual information. Ease of visual processing can be affected by changing the color of the text background to a particular tint that best suits the reader. Irlen Syndrome can affect individuals of any age and can be both frustrating and demotivating, particularly when it interrupts reading comprehension for work or school.

What does dyslexia mean to me
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What does dyslexia mean to me?

What does dyslexia mean to me?

A guest post by journalist David Hayter.

My life and livelihood are entirely dependent on those skills most severely affected by dyslexia. I work as a journalist: reading, writing, editing and organising are my passion, and they are the very things that I was told, as a child, that I would forever struggle with.

Rather than holding me back, receiving a dyslexia diagnosis at a young age not only helped me come to terms with and develop strategies to cope with my dyslexia, but to master the very skills that were the source of so much frustration and anxiety in my school years.

3 Spelling mistakes that are easy to make
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3 Spelling mistakes that are easy to make

3 Spelling mistakes that are easy to make

Not everyone finds spelling easy. Children and adults, native and non-native speakers, and individuals with and without learning difficulties alike can all struggle with the irregularity of spelling in English.

That’s because more than one letter or letter combination can be used to represent a sound. An f is used in fire-truck but ph is used in phone. Similarly, the same letter(s) can represent different sounds. The pronunciation of c in face is soft but the c in car is hard. The initial sound in kick is k, but the same sound is spelled with a ck at the end of the word.

Signs your child is dyslexic
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Signs your child is dyslexic

Signs your child is dyslexic

As a parent of a daughter with dyslexia looking back over six years since her diagnosis, I can remember my daughter’s difficulty with reading words and spelling and how that got in the way of her being able to enjoy learning at school. Let me tell you about the signs that indicated that our child was dyslexic, how I was able to get her through the school system, and how she learned to thrive.

Did you know learning to touch-type can make you a better speller? Be the best you can be with TTRS!

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Visual processing disorder and dyslexia
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Visual processing disorder and dyslexia

Visual processing disorder and dyslexia

Visual processing disorders can interrupt an individual’s ability to understand and navigate written symbols, which may cause problems with math/maths and learning to read at school. They’re not due to vision problems or any issues with the eyes, but rather with how the brain interprets visual information.

On the other hand, dyslexia is a separate condition that often makes it challenging to break spoken language down into its component parts. This, in turn, complicates reading and spelling. While the two conditions can look similar, they have different causes and thus children and adults who have one and not the other will require a different set of strategies and accommodations.

You may also encounter the term visual dyslexia, which can describe individuals who have dyslexia but are prone to reversing or transposing letters, struggle with locating words on the page, and have a tendency to skip over words.

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Touch-typing can support spelling skills and help students build confidence in and outside of the classroom

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Does dyslexia affect speech?
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Does dyslexia affect speech?

Does dyslexia affect speech?

Dyslexia is a language-based specific learning difficulty that can affect reading and spelling skills in children and adults. While the effects of dyslexia are more visible where the processing of written language is concerned, it’s not uncommon for kids with dyslexia to be late-talkers. This is because a child with dyslexia may have poor phonological awareness – or an inability to break words down into their component sounds. If the dyslexia is co-occurring with a motor skills difficulty like dyspraxia, then production of speech sounds may be further delayed.

Individuals with dyslexia can also have trouble with sound sequencing, substitutions, and rhyming. Word recall may be problematic. This ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ phenomenon can lead to misspeaking and halted speech. It can also generally cause embarrassment and anxiety, which disrupts speech fluency and over time, may result in low confidence, and low self-esteem.

What’s important to remember is that speaking difficulties caused by dyslexia are not an indication of low intelligence. There are also plenty of strategies and accommodations children and adults can use to overcome fluency issues at home, at school and in the workplace.

Famous people with dyslexia
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Famous people with dyslexia

Famous people with dyslexia

Salma Hayek, Keira Knightley and Tom Cruise are some of Hollywood’s brightest stars – and they have dyslexia. Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Leonardo da Vinci, and Pablo Picasso possessed some of the greatest minds and talents in history and they were dyslexic.

Successful entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs made use of their dyslexic brains to build billion-dollar companies, and George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and JFK left an indelible mark on history as presidents of the United States of America, regardless of their spelling ability.

No matter where you go in the world, you will find dyslexic individuals who have achieved success, despite experiencing early difficulties with reading and writing.

Best apps for dyslexia
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Best apps for dyslexia

Best apps for dyslexia

Dyslexia is a specific learning difference that can affect spelling and reading skills in children and adults. Students with dyslexia are not less intelligent than their peers, they just process language in a different way. Unfortunately, most school instruction is heavily dependent on reading and writing, thus from an early age, learners with dyslexia are at risk for falling behind or experiencing a mismatch between intellectual potential and performance in the classroom. This is especially true at the end of primary/elementary school when students are graduating from learning to read to reading to learn.

It’s also one reason why dyslexic individuals will typically benefit from having access to strategy training and classroom accommodations that facilitate language use. These accommodations might come in the form of additional time on assessment measures or alternative approaches to assignments.

Quite often they include using a laptop for note-taking, essay-writing, and homework. They may also extend to the use of smartphone and tablet apps that exercise the cognitive abilities which underpin literacy skills success.

But it’s still up to teachers, tutors and parents to select the right programs and apps to ensure a dyslexic learner achieves the maximum benefit from his or her technology use. That’s why we’ve put together this list with information on the skills that learners with dyslexia should be targeting and some of the most popular apps available today.

3 Types of learning difficulties and how to help
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3 Types of learning difficulties

3 Types of learning difficulties

A learning difficulty is a condition that can cause an individual to experience problems in a traditional classroom learning context. There are different types of learning difficulties that may interfere with literacy skills development and math. They can also affect memory, ability to focus and organizational skills. A child or adult with a learning difficulty may require additional time to complete assignments at school and can often benefit from strategy instruction and classroom accommodations, such as material delivered in special fonts or the ability to use a computer to take notes.

No two individuals with a learning difficulty are exactly alike and conditions, such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia, exist on a wide-spectrum. Note, it’s not uncommon for learning difficulties and motor-skills difficulties to co-present. Dyspraxia is a motor-skills difficulty that can affect a learner’s ability to write by hand, and may impact planning skills as well. The same is true when it comes to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).