Dyslexia in Canberra is treated like Cancer… and it shouldn’t be!

Lately a lot of Canberra people are telling me that their child suffers from dyslexia.  I ask them, “What type of dyslexia?”.  They usually don’t know.  They say “The school told me they did a test and she has dyslexia.”  It’s almost as though everyone then suddenly changes their expectations of the child.  They start to believe that the only thing the child can do is ‘just pass’ English for the rest of their life… never achieving their potential.  It doesn’t have to be that way.

Dyslexia just means that the words on the page are doing unusual things in the child’s mind.  There are so many things you can do to prevent this from hurting your child’s learning.

The first thing you do is print out some text on dark blue paper, light blue paper and purple paper.  For more than half of children who are diagnosed ‘dyslexic’, one of these colours will completely stop the words from moving.  How easy is that?

The second thing to do is to make sure that everything your child does on the computer is double-spaced and bold.  If the words are “moving” but you are double-spaced, then the words will not run into each other.  It makes reading easier.  Also if the words are bold they are less likely to fade away and disappear (which is another issue sometimes with dyslexia).

Dyslexia is not Cancer.  Somehow in recent times in Canberra people have got the idea that it is an excuse for not achieving a child’s potential.  Please spread the word that dyslexia is not a dead end… And there are some fairly simple things you can do about it.

Also, if you know someone who is hitting brick walls, get them to phone us at Big Improvements Tutoring and I will gladly have a chat with them about what they can do.