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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
Before agreeing that a child needs phonics, find out which piece is missing. Ask them to say the sounds in cat, then to join up sounds you give them, then whether cat and hat finish the same way. A child who can blend but cannot pull a word apart needs different practice from one who cannot hear the difference between the sounds at all. Phonics given undifferentiated to the whole group can miss both of them.
Among the things named as God's teaching is that He taught him to communicate (Quran 55:4). Expression is a taught skill in that telling, so a gap in it is a gap in what has been taught so far.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The multiple deficit account, set out in a theoretical review, holds that dyslexia comes from several interacting risk factors rather than one, which is exactly why children with the same diagnosis present so differently. It is a model rather than a trial result. As a practical matter it argues for finding out what is weak in this particular child instead of running one standard programme past all of them.
van Bergen E, van der Leij A, de Jong PF. (2014). The intergenerational multiple deficit model and the case of dyslexia.. Frontiers in human neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Different parts of the sound system fail in different children, and practice only helps if it lands on the part that is missing.
In most children attention and memory sit at roughly the same level. When memory is far ahead of everything around it, ask what it has been quietly making up for.
Plenty of children read the equals sign as put the answer here. Write it the other way round sometimes, eight equals three plus five, so they meet the idea that both sides are simply the same amount.
When the sound scores and the movement scores are both near the floor, you are looking at more than a reading problem. That pattern needs specialist teaching rather than a general classroom programme with a bit more of it.