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Dawnie
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| Posted: May 16 2006 at 4:40pm | IP Logged
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My almost 7yod is still reversing her letters and numbers at times. She frequently writes her b's, d's, p's, and q's backwards. She also writes other letters backwards, though not as frequently. I've noticed that it happens more often when she is writing something from memory, rather than copying it. Should I be concerned about this? Does she just need more time/practice writing letters and numbers? Any suggestions for resources that would help me to deal with this? Thanks so much for your input!
Dawn
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Sarah
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| Posted: May 16 2006 at 5:55pm | IP Logged
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No suggestions other than patience. My ds7 can't tell the difference between "b" or "d." He doesn't appear to have learning issues, however.
I'm eager to hear from others.
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Six boys ages 16, 14, 11, 7, 5, 2 and one girl age 9
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kristina
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| Posted: May 16 2006 at 9:35pm | IP Logged
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Dawn,
Ironic that you would post this today. I was just reflecting upon this because I just realized that our first son seems to have finally "outgrown" reversing his numbers. When he would do it, I would give him a really clever practice sheet that I found in our first grade right start math program. It gave a nice progression of how to form numbers which begins with a dot to dot style tracing of the entire number, progressing so by the time they would get to the end of the line of copying numbers, they will have written the number by themself. It was did not take him long to do this little drill, but it must have helped.
Now our second son, has just begun to write his threes, fours and sevens backwards. I find it strange that he is doing this since he learned to write numbers correctly and continued to until recently. I can only wonder if this is age or math level related. Our son is working on multiple digit addition, perhaps with all of the adding, and carrying, he is forgetting which direction the number goes??
I echo Sarah's suggestion for patience. I can only say that since it was a tiny little issue that was outgrown, I am not too concerned about it with our second child. Our poor firstborns are often the "guinea pigs" on our hs journeys.. or as I prefer to say, the Trailblazers!
Sarah, we would have the trouble with the b's and d's on occasion, too. Our pediatrician showed the boys a little trick to remember. Make two fists opposing each other with both thumbs up. Look at them, and think of the word, "BED". The left fist is the b and the right is the d. Our guys would use that to remember which direction the lowercase b's and d's went.
Blessings!
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marihalojen
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| Posted: May 17 2006 at 6:51am | IP Logged
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Kristina,
The 'bed' trick is great, the variation I taught was with the okay sign as it is a bit harder to turn your wrists about and your thumb and forefinger make a circle so it looks like a b and d. Also, kids frequently reverse letters before 3rd grade, if they haven't grown out of it by the beginning of 4th grade it might, perhaps, maybe, be a sign of something but otherwise it is perfectly normal.
If you think about it, in schools the alphabet is always posted above the chalkboard even up into the high school classes, and in elementary schools the desks have mini alphabets taped down right onto the kids' desks. I guess my point is that the school kids don't have to rely on memory, they can self-check the letters immediately. Jan Brett's Classroom Help-a-Longs has various alphabets and number lines available for printing to post or practice with.
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Willa
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| Posted: May 17 2006 at 8:11am | IP Logged
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What helped with my son was the self-talk "down, around," with "b" and "around, up, down" with "d". Helped him become aware that the process of forming these letters is different though they "look" the same. I would not be concerned about it, almost my boys did this at age 7 and it has not affected their reading or future competence in writing.
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1st grade mom
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| Posted: May 17 2006 at 11:09am | IP Logged
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My nearly 7 yr. old dd reverses numbers and letters too. One thing that helps with letters is that I still allow her to write in all caps. She sometimes will copy a lowercase letter when copying text. She loves to write notes and label things, so I didn't want to stop the enthusiasm by forcing proper handwriting, but I would like her to start using lowercase also.
The thing that helped with number reversal was that she once left a notebook in church. Luckily, the next week it was still there, but she was concerned it might get lost in the future, so she decided to put her phone number in it. I told her that no one could read the phone number if the numbers were not written properly (they were reversed). Since then she has made an effort to write all her numbers correctly :) . She will ask for help if she doesn't remember which way they go. If I don't have paper handy, I draw them in the air.
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ALmom
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| Posted: May 17 2006 at 8:14pm | IP Logged
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We have had number reversals that were related to vision problems. However, in this case the child does not generally improve with practice and reverses more than the usual p, b, and q. Our children were reversing just about everything at times including writing 12 as 21. Our therapist gave the same general advice as above in determining whether or not it is vision related or not. Generally it is outgrown by 3rd grade or so if not. It is very, very normal when dc are first learning to write in 1st and even some in second especially if they haven't done much writing. If there are other indications of vision difficulty - ie struggling with reading, various body postures, eye rubbing, tired eyes, closing an eye or jerky eye movements, then you may want to worry about the reversals more and a bit sooner, but more importantly get a good assessment when you get an eye exam. I say this not because your situation sounds like this - your dd is only 7 and reversing the very commonly reversed letters. This is very, very normal. If it doesn't improve with practice over time, then I'd be concerned.
That being said, as eyes were corrected, we did do some things to encourage quick recognition of the reversals. These may be helpful to you.
To help our children with some of the common letters we used the ditty in Sing, Spell, Read and write. For b, we said, "first comes the bat, then comes the ball." Funny thing about this is that our first dc with vision problems never reversed b and d - just everything else. For d, we said, "first little c, then little d." Both these went with the way we taught the dc to write the letters. Another thing that helped, was really supervising their first writing experiences and not letting them start from all different places. If they are consistently moving left to right in letter formation, they get the directionality kinesthetically a little easier. Some people have stronger directionality than others and this would relate to letter formation. Also, we traced in the air first, or over something textured to really feel it.
Janet
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4Real Forums : Language Arts Come Alive
Topic: Reversing letters and numbers
