If detected at an early age, there are many ways to help teach a dyslexic child develop coping skills and learning tools that can aid them throughout their school career. These can involve getting your child a specific tutor or buying special software.
At home, there are a number of play activities that can also teach your child to associate learning to overcome dyslexia while having fun. Here are some options to try.
Use Clay
Dyslexic children are often highly visual or kinesthetic learners. One great way to learn the proper order or letters in a word, or even the correct shape and reversal of individual letters is to physically make them out of clay.
Use Legos
Write letters on individual Legos and encourage the child to 'build' words, or even build sentences. This reinforces language in the visual-spatial areas of their brain.
Use Shaving Cream
Lather up one of the walls of their bathtub with shaving cream and encourage your child to draw words and letters in the foam. This is another visual-spatial learning trick. It reinforces it in a different way by allowing the child to see the space between the letters even more clearly.
Take a Silly Break
Any child can get frustrated and fidgety when asked to sit and focus for too long. Allow them to take a short break every so often in which they can get all their stress out in a positive way. Shift gears enough so they can think about something completely different.
Be the Letter
One of the positives of dyslexia is that it often comes with lots of creativity. A unique way to help your child recognize and focus on letters and numbers is to allow them to 'get to know them'.
Have your child assign a personality and a story to a set of numbers, and have them act out a skit in which the numbers interact. This can be especially helpful in math, where the child can use these characters as mnemonic devices to memorize multiplication tables.
Describe the Story
Read a passage out loud to your child. Ask the child how they have visualized an aspect of the story: what do you think the character looks like? Have the child read the next passage, and then ask them to visualize another aspect: what does the character's house look like?
This technique helps the child continue to use their greatest strength while reading- their ability to think in pictures. Allowing a child to realize that they can still use their visual brain while reading can help take a lot of the stress out of reading.
In working with any learning disability, identifying the child's strengths and focusing on those is extremely important. To learn more about your child's individual strengths and how to help them with their areas of improvement, having an official cognitive assessment can be a vital tool.
To learn more about cognitive assessments and the benefits of psychological services, Edmonton families are encouraged to visit our services page.
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