How to Help Your Dyslexic Child With Reading and Writing
Dyslexic children tend to have many academic difficulties, but this has nothing to do with their intelligence or the effort that they put into their studies. Dyslexia in children only affects the ability to recognize and understand written words, but luckily now there are numerous resources available to parents to help your child. Here we’ll give you a few tips on how to help your dyslexic child with reading and writing. The important thing is that you work with him and don’t get discouraged. These are some keys to getting there. You can do it!
Tips to Help Your Dyslexic Child with Reading and Writing
-If the child makes a mistake while speaking, don’t make them write the word down multiple times, which is what usually happens at school. Try to work through each word independently and stimulate different abilities at a time. For example, you can write the word, using a different color to point out the letter that they misspelled, write the letter in the air with your eyes closed, make the word with play-doh, etc. It’s important to be creative and use various techniques that will help the child remember sounds through other feelings, not just letters.
-Go to a specialty store and pick up a set of letters, they will help the child process information using other channels, which we already talked about. You can ask your child to make words, sentences, or syllables so that they get more comfortable with them.
-Creating a good base for reading and writing is a big help. If your child is starting to read, make sure that they understand how to write and read the phonemes that we see in our language. If he or she has problems with any of these phonemes, practice them until the child has memorized and understood it. For example, if you are learning the phoneme C, do exercises with the letter blocks with this phoneme, rhyming games, dictations…
-You should advance through games progressively. After working the phonemes and seeing that the child has completed them, start to work on syllables: start with direct syllables and continue with inverse and mixed syllables. Make sure that they are able to differentiate between the types of syllables and read and write them.
-Try to personalize the activities for your child’s likes, if they like doing puzzles, look for activities for dyslexic children that are related to puzzles. For example, there are letter games that can be put together like puzzles.
-Even though your child progresses slowly, it’s important to recognize when he advances and don’t put too much importance on mistakes. Children with dyslexia are motivated to learn.
Try to do reading and writing exercises that will complement their homework. Review the reading that they are doing and class. If they are studying a specific phoneme in class, try to do reading and writing exercises at home that reinforce the same phoneme.
-If he doesn’t understand some things from class, repeat the directions using graphics, drawings, colored letters, and any visual tools available.
-Learn about appropriate study techniques for dyslexic children. Guide them at first while they are learning these techniques, and then let your child apply them so they can learn how to work independently.
In summary, the key to helping your dyslexic child with reading and writing is based on two things: The first is that you work progressively from easiest to hardest to create a good reading and writing base. The second thing is to use as many visual aids as possible so that the child can create different mental images for the word. These are two simple tools to help your child with reading and writing exercises.
