A great question. Many people associate having a learning disability with writing letters backward, upside down, or in reverse order. These behaviors are indeed seen in some young children who have LD or who are at risk for LD. There are lots of reasons why this is so. If a child doesnlt "get" how letters work and has trouble differentiating the sounds that they make, it could be that they are just not paying close enough attention to the differences between letter. (try this... show a child a printed lower case "d" and "b" and ask them if they are the same. If they say no, it's clear that they perceive them as different. If they say yes, asked them to explain and promt them to look at every feature of these letters... the top, the bottom, the sides.... and see whether they still say that they are the same!). As children get older, as they become more skilled at reading, writing, and copying, writing letters in reverse tends not to be as much a problem as reading (or mis-reading) letters that have similar shapes.

Some wonderful books about LD and these types of difficulties have been written by prominent researchers including Louisa Moats, Steve Graham, Karen Harris and others. Look online for article that they have written, and ask the educators in your child's school who work with students who have LD for guidance about what you can do.