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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
Naming things quickly, repeating made up words, working out an unfamiliar word: all at the bottom. Then coordination and handwriting down in the same region. The two together point to a reading difficulty sitting alongside a coordination difficulty, and each needs its own kind of help. Getting both named matters, because a child given reading support alone will keep struggling with written work and be thought careless about it.
Moses prayed, and give me a helper from my family (Quran 20:29). Asking for the right help with a hard task, instead of trying to become someone who needs none, is a prophetic request.
طه
وَٱجۡعَل لِّي وَزِيرࣰ ا مِّنۡ أَهۡلِي
and give me a helper from my family
Qur’an 20:29read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review of developmental coordination disorder found the motor difficulties rest on identifiable differences in how movement is planned and predicted rather than on lack of practice or effort. Alongside it, the multiple deficit account of dyslexia holds that several risk factors interact rather than one causing everything, which is part of why these difficulties so often arrive in pairs. Both are reviews rather than trials, so they tell you what to expect rather than what to prescribe.
Wilson PH, Smits-Engelsman B, Caeyenberghs K, Steenbergen B, Sugden D, Clark J, Mumford N, Blank R. (2017). Cognitive and neuroimaging findings in developmental coordination disorder: new insights from a systematic review of recent research.. Developmental medicine and child neurology doi
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.
Two separate difficulties do not resolve because one of them is being treated well.
A profile like this needs formal assessment by someone qualified, so what you notice in a session is a reason to refer rather than a diagnosis.
Some people get all the way to university before anything is named, then meet eighty pages of reading a night and cannot do it. Nothing broke that night. The volume simply outgrew a way of coping that had held for years.
When the usual route into reading or arithmetic does not form, children build another one, and it nearly always runs through memory. It works for years, and it costs far more effort than anyone watching realises.
Before adding more content, look at what the child has to receive it with: attention, memory for what was just said, language. Two children given the same lesson do not take away the same amount, and that difference is usually where the real gap sits.