My 3rd grade son is dyslexic. His reading is doing wonderfully now due to being in special classes. He has a great teacher. His writing can be a little hard to read, although it too has come a long way. In the past couple of months, though he has done 2 papers that were mirror imaged. One was a cartoon with a think box above it and about 2 sentences written in the think box. It was totally mirrored. Yesterday, he wrote down all of his 9’s multipication tables….it too was completely mirrored. From Left to Right, every number backwards.
Like 81=2x9 and 72=3x9 all the answers were right,
except all the numbers were reversed.
I am wondering how common this is exactly. I thought I had read somewhere that all dyslexics don’t do this? Is that true? It just seems to make no difference to him. When I question him, he says “Oh, yea, it IS reversed”, so he is aware. For as scary as it is to see your child hand you a paper like that, it still amazes me too. How the brain can do that.
Re: Mirror Image Writing
My son does this too.However his teacher realizes this and as long as he has the right answer she does not mind .he is classified and has dyslexia.He is very bright but cant get things on paper right.As long as his teachers understand him I will be allright with this.He does get things marked wrong in spelling this year when he does this with letters(in a sp.ed. class for phonics, spelling).Work in reg. class is not marked wrong his teacher asks his real intent.
Re: Mirror Image Writing
I used to write in literal mirror image. Don’t anymore,of course I am a 37 year old mom of two boys. One of my boys writes like I used . He wasn’t as consisten as I was,except with numbers. The neuropsych that evaluated him told me numbers are extremely rare,don’t know if this true,or she never came across one like my kid. Who knows. I can tell you OT did help.
Re: Mirror Image Writing
thats what my son does mumbers a lot and very consistant with them being backwards,
Re: Mirror Image Writing
Just curious: Is he left-handed? The two boys I work with who often write in mirror image are both lefties.
I was talking to a dr. friend about this recently. He’s a man in his 70’s. One of his closest friends is a retired neurosurgeon, also in his 70’s. For his entire life, he often wrote in mirror image. He had been labeled dyslexic and got through medical school using a tape machine. He said that it took lots of concentration for him to not slip into mirror writing. He’s a leftie also.
Re: southpaws
Funny you should bring that up. I am pretty much severely left handed. Our son is right handed. There are certain things that I can only do right handed which kind of confuses things (shoot pool etc..). On the other hand (no pun intended), if, when bowling, I start to do worse with left handed bowling, I simply switch to right handed for a few frames and then it seems to true in my left handed abilities again. Go figure. Was ambidexterous as a small child and was told to pick a side for little league for a mitt. My dad, brother, neighbors were all right handed… I chose “left”. Hmmmm.
Re: Mirror Image Writing
This is funny. I too am left handed. Neither of my boys are. I turn my paper to a severe 90 degrees to the right when writing. It helped me to at least write legibly.
Re: Mirror Image Writing
Did you ask your son about these two papers? Is it possible that they are just something he did out of his own interests? Although I am not dyslexic, as a child there was a period of time in which I was fascinated by mirror images and spent a good deal of time practicing writing in reversed cursive until I could write nearly as well as in expected direction. This was instructional in a visual way and helped me with such things as working with a microscope and trimming the back of my hair using a mirror. Of course you would want to be sure that he recognizes the difference between the expected direction and the mirror image direction.
our son used to do much of this in his younger years (your son’s age, early grades thru 4th-5th grades). He used to have fits when his teacher would mark the math “wrong” when, if you did the math “his way”, he was correct. He would do the problems upside down and backwards sometimes, although his computations were basically correct. This teacher was a real peach (not really) and she never did grasp the problem. Again, the computation would be done from left to right, and from the bottom to the top, but, if you put in the time and figured it out, his computations were correct. Strange, but that was how it went.
He did real well the following year, with an excellent teacher in a different school that understood dyslexics. He used manipulatives and many alternative methods to kind of get things worked out.
He could also read mirror writing as quickly as normal. Reading was never an issue. Handwriting more than made up for the problems though.
Hope this helps.
Andy