Is the good day, bad day really a thing?

I've had the most fabulous week. I've been working with a 13 year old, and honestly, what a star she has turned out to be. She has absorbed everything like a sponge.

Watching a learner change that much in a few short days is the part of this work that never gets old, no matter how many times I see it.

And it leads rather nicely into what I want to talk about today.

There's a question I get asked more than almost any other when a parent first sits down with me, and it usually comes out sounding like an apology.

"He can read the word one day and then he can't the next. Am I imagining that?"

No. You're not imagining it, and it isn't a memory problem either.

A picture thinker's brain files words by attaching them to something it can actually see. Dog has a dog behind it. Table has a table. Running has a picture of someone running. Those words go in easily and they stay there.

But a good half of the words on any page have nothing behind them at all. The. Of. Was. Were. If. There's no image for "of." Nothing to picture for "were." So there's nothing for the brain to file and nothing to recall, and the word comes back a bit differently every single time.

Then there's the layer that catches most parents out, and it's what I've written about this week.

Change. Consequence. Before. After. Instead. Unless. Although. Because.

Eight words with no picture behind any of them, because they aren't things at all. They're the relationships between things, the order events happened in, the reason one thing led to another. And they're usually the words carrying the meaning of the entire sentence.

Which is exactly how a child can read a page perfectly, word for word, and still have no idea what happened in it.

If you've been told your child has a comprehension problem, it's worth asking whether that's actually what it is, or whether it's a blank word problem wearing a comprehension label. Those two things need very different answers, and only one of them responds to more comprehension work.

The tricky part is working out which one you're looking at.

That's why I put together Five Signs Your Child Might Be a Visual Thinker. Five things I see over and over in the families I work with, with a score you give your child for each one, so by the end you have something clearer than a hunch about how their mind is actually working.

It takes about five minutes.

👉 Download the five signs here: https://www.dyslexiaunpuzzled.co.nz/five-signs