I remember my nephew had this back in the mid-70s. I was in teacher training at the time and talk of dyslexia was very new. My nephew's idiot teacher was insisting he DID know his letters because he got them right half the time. He would continually switch "b" and "d", "p" and "q" and would get letters out of place SOMETIMES. As I explained to my sister - a kid who gets letters revered ALL the time clearly can distinguish between them, he just gets confused as to which is which. But a kid who gets it right sometimes and wrong sometimes fairly consistently - needs to be investigated for a failure to recognise the difference.
Remember this was back in the 70s, the theory at the time concerning my nephew was that his brain had not determined which half was dominant (his 'handedness" was also uncertain, he would switch from one hand to the other). My sister got him in to a specialist clinic and they suggested ongoing assessments as well as determining which hand he favoured more and really working to help him develop a preference - he may seem ambidextrous, they told us, but his brain simply hasn't settled to make a decision and we have to force it.
A few years later a doctor in Sydney (Paul Hutchins - pediatrician) joined up with an optometrist (I think she was) called Helen Irlen, and found that a lot of people with a diagnosis of dyslexia (especially of the letters seem to swirl on the page) will benefit from wearing glasses with tinted lenses - the colour of the tint will vary from person to person. My sister got coloured glasses for her son - his were dark grey, which was an indication of how bad his problem was. The theory behind the coloured lenses - by screening out some frequencies of light, you are reducing the input to the brain. Monochrome is easier for the brain to process without any added confusing information, these people do find (in a lot of cases) that they can read better.
For my nephew, it didn't fix his dyslexia, it just made it easier for him to manage. And the dark grey - he had to cut down on his visual input A LOT.
I don't know what the current status of the Irlen glasses is, but reports were that a lot of people were helped. And it wasn't a money-making scam, either - people were going to optometrists and simply trying out various coloured lenses to see which ones made reading easier, and then getting the glasses made up. No royalties to anyone, no exorbitant fees. I don't know if this is still considered a viable management option but it would be worth finding out.
I was coaching a couple of kids recently (siblings) and they both seemed to have similar reversal problems which they had been told was dyslexia. I think there are probably a number of different things which are described as dyslexia. But for these kids I developed an exercise to try to deal with one particular issue - eye tracking.
When we read (a person with no problems) our eyes do NOT steadily slide across the page. Instead, the eye is static and looks at a group of words in a line without moving, then quickly skips along to another static position and takes in the next few words. These skips or jumps are called saccades. During the movement of a saccade, our eyes do not register any information - it is as if we are blind for that split second. We do not see the blur of movement, we only see the still page.
But I surmise - a kid who is getting letters in a word jumbled, or words in a line jumbled - that child is not saccading properly, in a series of left to right movements. This can be tested - where I used to work, my professor used to teach the medical students exactly this phenomenon and it was me he wired up to test his equipment, which is why I know about it. It is a simple test, similar equipment to an EEG only it is recording the movement of the little muscles around the eye.
We should saccade in regular intervals from left to right. If our eyes instead skip randomly over the page, what our brains receive in terms of the written word will be a jumble. It should be possible to TRAIN the brain and the eye to track left to right, but to do this we need to give the eye something to work with, that moves left to right.
So I went out and found some eyeballs. These are great little toys - they look like a simple round ball, designed to look like an eyeball. But in reality, they are two balls in one. The outer ball is clear, the inner ball is the eyeball - white, with a pupil and iris painted on the top - and it is weighted, so the 'eye' is always facing upward. The inner ball floats in some sort of clear fluid (probably water) inside the clear outer ball, so as you roll this ball, the outer clear plastic rolls but the weighted inner ball always faces up. it looks like the eyeball is SLIDING from one side to the other. Kids love it because it looks gruesome. I also found one with a globe of the world on the inner ball - less spectacular, but also interesting.
So, here I was with a collection of eyeballs. I gave one to each of my students and told them to roll the eyeball from left to right across the desk. They roll with the left hand and catch the ball with the right. They then pass the ball from right hand to left hand, UNDER the table, then roll the ball again. All this time (apart from under the desk) they are to maintain eye contact with the eyeball.
This would be a way to help retrain the brain to track properly. It's inexpensive - the ball costs about $2 in Aussie money. And the more the exercise is done, the better the result should be. But it should be repeated through the day, say for about five minutes every few hours.
This is an exercise specific to those whose problem is complicated by poor eye tracking or incomplete brain dominance. But be aware - I am rusty on this topic, there may be an exert out there with more up-to-date information. What I suggest is something you can try at home which will certainly do no harm, Get an expert's assessment and see what they say.
But this certainly is not uncommon.
Marg
. He did really well learning to read - he had orange lenses in prescription frames which stopped the words 'moving' on the page, he had access to a computer in class and we used lots of reading techniques with him that really helped! In England there are computer programmes called 'Word Shark' and 'Number Shark' that are really good. His numbers can be in the wrong order too - so it affects his maths too. There's loads of stuff out there, I hope his teachers help you more
