There is no one characteristic set that is common to all dyslexics.

Some report that the letters move as they look at the words and others say that the lines of words wriggle up and down when they look at them. Some don’t experience any of this, but report that they could be reading in another language because they simply don’t understand what the text means.

A high proportion of dyslexics think primarily in pictures rather than words, so the programme works largely in pictures too. We create the pictures first in the person’s mind, then in modelling clay. This is particularly effective when the learner has been taught to read by using the phonics method. They don’t relate strongly to the component sounds of words, preferring to see whole words as a picture.

Due to dyslexics thinking in pictures and being relatively less competent with using words, expressing their thoughts presents difficulties, thus they can find it confusing and a challenge to commit their ideas to paper. This characteristic means they are often very good at drawing, painting, creating images of new buildings or machines; or other creative pursuits. We often consider this to be talent.

Writing ideas down is also much slower and found to be laborious by picture thinking dyslexics. We think words at roughly 500 per minute. Pictures can be as fast as 32 per second. Most of us at some time or another have had a thought that came and went more quickly than we could capture and express it. This is common place for many dyslexics and means that they do not know where to start in writing what they need to express.