Where possible also change the colour background on computers and interactive white boards. Therefore it’s always best to provide coloured paper pads to write on too. It’s likely that the student may have visual stress when writing and this may be displayed by letter reversals, transposed letters and poor handwriting. If you’ve identified a particular colour is more suitable for a student remember this only supports reading. They won’t be a magic cure for every child but it’s worth taking 10-15 minutes to check all the colours, as blue is not the answer for every child. Sometimes you will begin to see the ‘maybe’ pile is all from the same colour, i.e. On other occasions I go through the colours making a pile of ‘maybe’ and ‘no’, then go back through the ‘maybe’ pile to compare colours. I also tend to look for facial expressions, as at times you can see that ‘light bulb’ moment. However overlaying it on some text and asking then to try to read can often see immediate benefits. Sometimes it can be hard to know which colour is best, as sometimes a student may say a particular colour is best because it’s their favourite colour. #BLUE OVERLAY TRIAL#As soon as I identify a student is struggling I trial the various coloured overlays to identify which colour helps to relive some visual stress. The reading rulers are a wonderful classroom and home resource. The shapes in this test are mirrored and often students will label the shapes incorrectly or need to spend some time focusing on the shapes and the time to complete the test is then very slow.Ĭrossbow Education have also developed a visual stress test and are the the developers of the coloured reading ruler. This is an excellent test to identify visual processing speed, when not linked to letters and reading and also very quickly identifies if students are struggling to focus on shapes. #BLUE OVERLAY FULL#However I would always strongly recommend a full diagnostic dyslexia test and certainly a visit to a behavioural optometrist.Īnother test which assessors can use is SDMT (Symbol Digit Modalities). As a stand alone difficulty we would not say this is dyslexia, yes it can be a characteristic of that, along with other clusters of difficulties. I’ll often get asked if these letters being transposed and reversed diagnoses dyslexia. In other words, break the word down, labeling letters and giving them a sound. Therefore if we present students with non-words or nonsense words they then have to use decoding skills. Therefore they don’t have to truly decode the word. The same happens with reading, sometimes a student will learn the word through whole word recognition and being told what the word says. Think of a child who is a pre reader, they can’t read the word ‘McDonalds’ but when they see the sign they know what it says, as they’ve probably got a semantic link to that word and heard a few times when pointing to the sign. Many students learn to read by whole word recognition and know ‘what the word looks like’. Also non-word reading tests can also provide some valuable information. In a timed reading test we look to see the student’s automated response. Timed tests can also produce a different response to untimed reading tests. As a dyslexia assessor I will often not only conduct tests and use the standardised scores but also observe the types of errors a student makes whilst reading.
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