Page 141 - Reading Nest - The Supportive Literacy Environment Handbook

Features related to movement and play

• difficulty/clumsiness in self-care – most obvious when visual control is poor or absent-
combing hair at the back of the head, putting on a scarf, doing buttons up under the chin,
activities in front of the mirror are also complicated;

• clumsiness in manual activity (painting, cutting with scissors, tearing paper, making a
whole shape out of details, handling tools). Making mosaics and patterns informs of
skills needed to sequence parts of a whole (correctness) and hand and eye coordination

and fine motor skills (precision);
• clumsiness in complicated/complex movements and learning them (cycling, pumping
legs on a swing to build up momentum, throwing a ball while running);

• particularities in realising temporal and spatial relationships in free and motion games
(e.g. how to throw and catch a ball, making balls of snow and then a snowman, moving

large objects and sequencing them). Placing shapes and, in particular, letters and writing
letters is a challenge due to deficient spatial perception.

Markers of reading and writing difficulties at school age

Oral speech

• continued difficulties in uttering long complicated words (spaghetti-sgabhetti);
• distinguishing sounds (ornament-ornanent);
• confusing words (cabbage-baggage, boiler-broiler);

• using simple sentences;
• learning letters is slow and difficult.

Reading

• the reading skill emerges and evolves in a slow and cumbersome way;
• reading is slow, with errors and has no expression;

• reading by guessing (longer words);
• losing track when reading, may use their finger to keep track for a long time or use a
bookmark for this purpose;

• difficulties in understanding written instructions;
• understanding the text read aloud by somebody else is better than understanding the

text they read out themselves;
• avoiding reading aloud;
• remarkable difference between oral speech and reading.