3rd grader with occasional letter reversal

[Ausmumof3]

I'm still getting the occasional number or letter reversal from my 3rd grader. It only happens when he is doing something that's quite challenging for him. I think his brain is too busy focussing on the challenging part and not on the writing. I've suspected dyslexia all along, but he is reading really well and fluently now. Is there anything I should be doing to help with the reversals? Should I have him do some more basic type handwriting sheets? I mean we've been doing them since he was 4 - 4 years. Is more of the same really going to help?

[AdventuresinHomeschooling]

My son occasionally mixes up b and d and writes circles clockwise. Cursive writing helps a lot with this.

[Holly]

My kids gradually reverse letters less and less as they get older.  I'm pretty sure both of my older ones still had an occasionally reversal in 3rd grade.  I never did anything to fix it since it didn't happen very often.  

[bgtw]

Is it just certain letters or number?  My daughter (just finished second) was still switching b and d fairly often (p and q less often) and I put a picture of a bed on our wall with "bed" above it in big letters.  She stopped reversing those soon after.  I recently put up a picture of a cat saying, "meow" for my son as he often switches "m" and "w" (he just finished TK and uses mostly capital letters still).  Maybe you could do something similar with the particular ones he reverses often?

[Tsuga]

I still type entire words backwards and write words out of order at times. I am not dyslexic and am a fluent reader and was an early reader. Apparently my mind doesn't devote that much energy to output when I'm thinking hard. Provided it is gradually decreasing and there's no accompanying issues with reading, and particularly if the child is not an older third grader (i.e. did not turn 9 until December) I wouldn't worry.

 

He might be able to write backwards. Some of us can do that, and read backwards, too. This runs in my family. We are not dyslexic--or anyway, we all read really well. We all score really amazingly at turning objects around--I scored in the top 1% for men, and I'm a woman.

 

I have no idea what talent this is, but my cousin (a woman) also does it. And she also reverses letters and can write backwards and with both hands.

 

Unfortunately this is not a very marketable talent since computers do that rotation for everyone nowadays and art is mass produced. :( But my thought is that maybe he's just not that spatially oriented and to him, the letters look equally good either way because his brain rotates them for him, and if he's not looking at them in relation to one another because he's going too fast (or slow), then he gets into trouble. I think that's my problem.

 

Anyway, I'd be more concerned about his writing in general. If he forms whole words fine and can read and understand, that's more important. And yes, cursive helps.

[Ausmumof3]

Thanks for all the reassurance... It's helpful to know its common enough. His only friend his exact age is quite gifted so I don't have many opportunities for comparison. I know I wasn't at that age, but hey I was a girl who loved writing not a boy who hated it.

[TheAttachedMama]

You might try teaching your child cursive and switching to that.   It helped a lot in our situation.  :)

[km123175]

A trick that helped my now 10 year old was teaching her what I learned in AAS....b is a Bat and a ball (draw the straight line down first then the ball bounces out). The d is a doorknob and a door. I sometimes still hear her saying that to herself when writing. :)

 

She was 8 when she learned that trick.

[boscopup]

My oldest still reversed letters at that age and occasionally does it now, though it's a LOT better. For him, his brain and hand just hadn't really merged. He had to think very hard to remember which way things go. I saw it get a bit worse in 2nd-3rd grade due to handwriting itself starting to get physically easier. Then this past year in 5th, he started to get better about not reversing all the time. He's not dyslexic or anything like that. He actually found reading to be very easy. Writing was slower for him, but not to the point of being dysgraphia or anything like that.

 

Interestingly, my struggling reader who mixed up letters in reading didn't reverse letters in writing nearly as much. Go figure.

[MerryAtHope]

Here are 3 main strategies that can help as you work to solve letter reversals.

[fdrinca]

So I taught my oldest son the "lowercase b hiding in the uppercase B " trick.

 

The result? He started reversing his uppercase Bs.  :crying:

[Clear Creek]

I kept reminding my daughter of the correct way of writing letters. Every time she mixed them up I would let her know that to me it sounded like she had written <word as pronounced with the actual letters she had written>. For example, "I see you were 'glab' you got to visit the zoo last week? Was that what you were trying to communicate to me?"

 

I began teaching her cursive in 2nd grade, and she quickly mastered the fine art of reversing cursive letters. I gave her all sorts of tips (use your hands to make a "b" and a "d" and think of the word "bed," ball/bat and doorknob, etc.) and none of them helped. She eventually outgrew most of her reversals, and by 5th grade the only letters she ever reversed were "b" and "d." She solved it by always writing an uppercase "B" when printing (and when beginning a word with cursive), and I don't fight her about it. At this point the goals are effective communication, correct spelling, and cohesive paragraphs, and if she breaks a tiny convention by always using the uppercase form of a letter so as to focus on the three goals, so be it.