Strengths

So I am not writing today about Tom Cruise strengths!  I thought we would focus on the strengths of people with dyslexia.  It's that time of year to be cheery and bright.  Many people with dyslexia have so many strengths, in fact, many of them can hide their reading struggles because they are so skilled and smart.  I wanted to include a list of strengths

• artistic skills
• athletic ability
• people skills
• musical ability
• mechanical skills
• 3-D visual-spatial skills
• vivid imagination
• intuition
• creative and curious
• global thinker

Now your job is to get on google or bing or whatever search engine you prefer, and look up famous people with dyslexia.  The lists will blow your mind.  That is where Tom comes in, you see he has dyslexia!
Have a merry holiday season.

Dyslexia....in your family tree?

Here is a staggering fact from the book Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz:

 "Between one-quarter and one-half  of the children born to a dyslexic parents will also be dyslexic."

You could say that dyslexics keep it in the family.
The first place to look when trying to decide if one of your children have dyslexia is your own family tree.  Do you or your spouse struggle with reading?  How about grandparents or siblings?
Dyslexia doesn't go away in adults so the adult in your family will still have dyslexia.  Look for these things to decide if dyslexia runs in your family.   

• Start by asking about the ease with which the adult learned to read.  If the adult has dyslexia, then learning to read would not have been easy.
• Their phonological weakness is still with them, so they will be readers but usually slow and laborious.
• They probably hate to read out loud for others, and find themselves making mistakes when they do read out loud in a group.
• There comprehension of what they read is not effected at all by their slow reading.  Usually comprehension is a strengths.