Activities For Children With Dyslexia

We propose 6 activities for children with dyslexia to work on literacy, memory, motor skills, etc. And you know what’s best? They are going to have fun!

Dyslexia is a mild learning impairment related to literacy. However, dyslexia can also generate other types of difficulties in motor skills or in visual and auditory perception.  In this sense, another of the points that can be affected is short-term memory, organizational capacity or even speech. Activities for children with dyslexia are of great importance to their treatment.

Although it is true that dyslexia is a lifelong condition, interventions and an appropriate teaching method go a long way.

What is dyslexia?

According to the International Dyslexia Association ,

Some signs of dyslexia

If you think that your child may have dyslexia but you are not entirely sure, here are some signs that they may manifest, such as:

• Change the order or reverse numbers and letters.
• Problems understanding mathematics.
• Difficulty maintaining attention.
• Laterality problems.
• Follow and learn routines; it usually causes them an inconvenience.
• Reading and writing are slow and laborious.
  
• They can confuse the meaning of words that are pronounced similarly.
• Altered spatial and temporal notions.
• Lack of balance
• Your short-term memory suffers.

• Difficulty organizing your thoughts.
• In some cases there may be difficulty in speech.

How to treat dyslexia?

At the first suspicions that a child may have dyslexia, the most important thing is to go to a specialist in order to carry out the necessary tests for diagnosis. In this sense, all the areas that are involved in the development of literacy are usually evaluated: visual, auditory, laterality, psychomotor skills, memory, etc.

On the other hand, those factors that merely intervene in reading are also taken into account, both semantic and phonological. Thus, once the results of the tests are obtained, activities are designed to focus on the areas in which intervention is needed.

Some activities for children with dyslexia

1. Knowing your own body

Psychomotricity is one of the areas that are usually affected.  Certainly, knowing and working on your own body scheme is something fundamental, especially with the little ones. Depending on the age, we can design activities that invite them to name the parts of the body, to locate them and to point to them. In this sense, an activity for children with dyslexia that is super interesting is to make a puzzle with their silhouette and make up the entire human body, for example.

1. Space-time activities

Children with dyslexia have trouble identifying up and down, left and right, before and after… so developing techniques in this regard is very necessary. For example, invite them to stand to the right and left as the music changes, or to draw all the flowers on a leaf in blue. Also, have them order a graphic story chronologically, or stand in front of or behind their classmates.

1. Form words

As we have said, literacy is the key to the problem, so that is where there is more work to be done. The classic game of forming words from a series of jumbled letters  can be a difficult challenge to overcome, but very productive.

1. Look for the letter …

To work on selective attention, you can use exercises in which they have to identify words that have x letters, or that begin or end with another. In this way they learn to discriminate letters.

1. Read tales

From reading stories you can get a lot of activities for children with dyslexia: from reading itself to working on their comprehension and memory. You can also ask him what he is understanding of the story, suggest that he narrate an alternate ending, or check if his attention is full with questions about what he thinks will happen next.

However, do not focus only on reading stories, since they can read anything always with the premise of making it fun for them.  Cookie ingredients, car license plates, street signs, for example, are a good alternative.

1. Do you remember the Twister ?

The mythical play of the carpet with colored circles is perfect for working on laterality.  “Right hand in green and left foot in blue . ” A challenge full of fun!

In conclusion, we can say that there are many activities to work with children with dyslexia and from very different approaches. Ultimately, the most important thing to remember is that, although it is a disorder that does not go away, its evolution can be very good as long as it is properly diagnosed and worked with professionals.