As a dyslexic pupil and student Primary Teacher I feel passionate that the classroom should be a welcoming place for each individual, irrespective of how you learn.  My top 10 tips for an inclusive classroom are: Allow children thinking time when asking them a question. Use a voluntary approach to reading out loud in class as reading aloud can cause stress to dyslexic learners. Use of technology such as an iPad, Read, Write Gold and a calculator for maths are very helpful. Keeping resources in the same place as this frees up space in the working memory.  Giving children time ..read more

by a dyslexic student At school I didn’t think I was different to anyone else. I was not a low achiever but found exams stressful. I hated being asked to read aloud in class. I was a slow, not very fluent reader. I wasn’t very good at spelling and was rubbish at languages. I’m not artistic but am OK at maths and sports. Looking back, I used coping strategies such as watching YouTube videos rather than reading lots of text. Doesn’t everyone in my generation? A college friend had dyslexia. It wasn’t discussed much. She was regarded as non-academic and used a reader and scribe to get through exam ..read more

Hello, my name is Monty. I have known I was dyslexic since I was 10 years old in the summer of 2018, a few weeks before I turned 11. Before I found out about having dyslexia, I always thought I was not intelligent and found school very difficult from primary 1-6. When I found out about having dyslexia, everything started to make sense to me, it wasn’t that I didn’t have the intelligence, it was that I didn’t have the right resources in place to help me learn and understand things the way I do now. Certain things in earlier years at school were certainly difficult, such as Big writing, which wa ..read more

It is with a mixture of sadness and excitement that we let you know that our blog is moving. Our fantastic community-made content is now set to become part of Dyslexia Scotland’s website. The transfer of this blog will happen during summer when we launch our new, up to date website, which brings together all of the content we’ve had across different platforms, to the same space. The move helps us to amplify the dyslexic community’s voice by giving your content space on our main platform. For visitors to our site, this helps join up the support that a dyslexic person may need throughout their w ..read more

Leading on from my Part 1 blog, here is a list of my top 5 tips, that I want to share, in the hope that it might help other people. My Top 5 Tips Technology – I love Grammarly. My work pays for me to have the premium edition, which is great, but even the free version I think is excellent as it works across so many different platforms. Plus, I know there are other similar pieces of software out there, so use the one that you like the best. I also use voice notes and audio readers. Like everything it is trial and error to find the software that you like the best. The only piece of advice I woul ..read more

When you read a blog, you want to come away more knowledgeable about a topic, gain a new perspective or at the very least laugh out loud. Let’s hope this blog about my journey with dyslexia delivers all three! Key Fact About Dyslexia It is estimated that 1 in 10 people have dyslexia. Please take a few seconds and let that statistic sink in. My Early Journey with Dyslexia As I write this blog, I am a 41-year-old dyslexic woman who has worked in marketing for 15 plus years and has had a bumpy journey embracing her dyslexic self. I was ‘officially’ identified when I was 16, and the catalyst for m ..read more

While many celebrities speak openly about their experiences of dyslexia, I have never been so moved as I was by the recent BBC documentary Jay Blades: Learning to Read at 51. Anyone who has seen The Repair Shop knows that Jay is an articulate and talented man, who highlights that dyslexia can affect anyone and is no barrier with regards to the possession of immense determination and talent. That said, dyslexia can still be hard to live with. Thanks to Jay, hopefully many more people now know just how hard. Dyslexia is more than just a reading problem – Jay correctly states that the learning d ..read more

One of the things that I recall when I discovered in my sixties that I was dyslexic, was the news that I was now classified as a disabled person. The Equality Act of 2010 says so. The first outcome was that I felt closer to my disabled students: I was disabled too – one of them. I was disabled. It wasn’t something that I was going to recover from. So, of course, I became more interested in disability as such – and avidly read any news reports about disability. Now, I always look for what the Scottish journalist Melanie Reid has to say. She became disabled as an adult, when she was injured in a ..read more

In my last job, I was lucky enough to experience a dyslexic friendly workplace. It allowed me to see first-hand that an inclusive workplace is real possibility in 2022, especially as hybrid working becomes the new normal and digital assistance is now a realistic addition to our everyday work environments. It’s the small changes that make a big difference to us, allowing for dyslexics to reach our full potential and focus on work. With this in mind, let’s take a look at our top 10 tips for an inclusive workplace in 2022. Awareness of dyslexia amongst colleagues This tip is probably the most i ..read more

If you know about dyslexia, you will probably have heard about dyscalculia too – a difficulty in understanding number and number processes. Sometimes they can co-occur. For young people in Scotland who have dyscalculia, it can be hard to engage with maths and numbers at all, leaving them feeling excluded from some learning. Since Scotland’s curriculum is designed to be inclusive, it’s really important that teachers can understand, recognise and support dyscalculia. On Monday 25 April 2022, Education Scotland published the Scottish Working Definition of Dyscalculia. View the definition of dysca ..read more