Irlen Syndrome - how colour helped

When my daughter was four and three-quarters she began Prep. After six weeks the teacher contacted me, concerned that she was not keeping up with the class in the early literacy activities. I was taken aback as I had already taught her many of her letters, she could blend sounds and read simple words. I went into school, and mentioned this to the teacher. She was doing none of this at school. So I wrote ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ on a whiteboard, and showed these to my daughter who sounded them out and read them for me. The teacher was so surprised. I could not work out why she was not using the skills she had at school.

At the same time, I noticed that my daughter was frequently reversing letters and numbers. She had enormous difficulties in recalling which way round they should be. The teacher accepted this as normal development and could not possibly correct my daughter every time she wrote her letters and numbers backwards. Worried about her developing bad habits I decided to home school her.

I used a handwriting program, Casey Caterpillar, to help my daughter overcome her problems with letter and number reversals over the next few months, while we mastered the remaining letters of the alphabet. At this point, my daughter was becoming quite anxious about formal learning, and we decided to take a break - just read to her, bake with her, play with her, and have her read occasional words in shared stories but with no pressure to do any formal learning. We would ‘do Prep’ again the next year, as she was young in her grade.

The next year, we continued home schooling and I made a big effort to begin to teach my child to read and spell with more formal lessons. I would write words with a particular phonics pattern (eg. ar) in marker pen, and spread these out widely on the page. We would also write on whiteboards with markers, and on our pavers or trampoline with chalk. She began to make progress. However, one day I wrote the words smaller, with a regular pen, instead of large with marker pen. She refused to try, saying she couldn’t read it. I rewrote it in larger letters with marker pen and she was fine. I was confused because she had no other signs of having trouble with her vision - she could see small objects and distant objects with no difficulty.

Soon after this I wrote some individual words across the page for her to decode. Two of the words in a horizontal line were ‘fat’ and ‘go’. She said ‘fog’. I questioned her and she said, ‘This word moved into that one’. Alarm bells begain to ring - I had heard of Irlen Syndrome and knew it was a visual type of dyslexia which caused words to be distorted and could cause them to ‘move around’.

I booked her in for both a visual assessment and an Irlen Syndrome Screening. On the visual assessment by a behavioural optometrist, it was discovered that although she could read numbers accurately in columns, she had trouble keeping her place when reading numbers going across the page - accidentally reading numbers from the lines above or below. She had good vision apart from this, but was prescribed ‘anti fatigue’ glasses to help reduce the pressure on her eyes when reading. We then proceeded on to the Irlen Screener, Dianne Bevan (Ipswich Dyslexia Clinic).

Dianne noted that my daughter was shading the page with her body (leaning over the page) and squinting at it. She had particular problems with quick recognition of letters and patterned backgrounds on white paper - this improved when blue paper was used. Looking at a page in the screening manual of a penguin constructed from crosses she was instructed to tell us how it looked with different coloured overlays (coloured plastic transparencies). When the aqua overlay was placed over, my daughter exclaimed: ‘It’s bigger!’ (it was not a magnifying page - that was just her visual perception) and she found the turquoise overlay ‘comfortable’. Afterwards, I had her read a simple LEM Phonics Single Phonogram reader (black text on white paper) with an aqua overlay on it, and she read more words than previously (usually she would object to reading more than one or two words at a time), and she recognised the word ‘can’ when it was repeated, so she didn’t need to sound it out again. Up to this point, she not developed the ability to do orthographic mapping (recognise a word automatically) and needed to sound every word every time she wanted to read it. The word images had been too unstable for her to recognise them when she saw them again. Now they had stopped moving, with the overlay. Colour makes a difference.

See More of Our Journey in the Next Blog Post - Irlen Syndrome - Finding a Filter