How To Help Children With Dyslexia?

The first step in helping children with dyslexia is to be clear that dyslexia is simply a learning disability and should not be viewed as a cognitive deficit. This is not an intellectual problem at all. And it is usually detected around 6 years of age, when children begin to learn to read.

Does this mean that it involves difficulties? Yes, but they are all bearable. We should not worry, if our son has been diagnosed with dyslexia, according to psychiatrists, this does not affect his intellectual potential; only that you will need some help in certain aspects.

Children with dyslexia have difficulty reading clearly, which in many cases leads to difficulty in reading comprehension, and therefore, in learning to write (especially in the field of spelling). It is also sometimes difficult to understand mathematical operations, but all of this can be overcome with patience and effort.

How can I tell if my child has dyslexia?

In the first place, neither parents nor teachers are trained to confirm this situation. If we suspect that our child may suffer from childhood dyslexia, the best we can do is go to a professional who is qualified in this regard, such as a speech therapist or an educator. 

Dyslexia has a cure?

Dyslexia has no cure as such, but the difficulties it entails can be reduced thanks to constant and adequate support, depending on the instructions provided by the specialist.

There are various support programs, and each one has been designed depending on the needs of each individual. For this reason, it is not possible to explain for sure which one will be the one for your child. It will depend on your abilities and what the specialist analyzes.

What we can assure you is that at school, once you meet with the teaching and psychological care team, they will provide personalized help to your child, and they can also guide you when it comes to finding extra-school support groups, directed tasks, or simply, complementary activities that can help the little one.

How to help children with dyslexia?

First of all, what you should do is if you suspect that our child suffers from dyslexia of any kind, you should contact a professional immediately. The simple fact of confirming this problem at an early age further guarantees its treatment. Being aware, informed and willing to get ahead is the best way to help our children.

There are many activities that we can do at home with our son that will help him improve. Here we offer you some tools that may be of help to you:

Mobile phone

Today everyone has a mobile phone. Well, there are a huge number of applications for these phones that provide us with very useful tools and strategies. In fact, we can download different games that combine reading with other useful aspects to entertain and help our children at the same time.

In the applications available on our smartphones we can find endless proposals that can be very useful. Everything is a matter of seeking to take advantage of them to obtain the benefits we want. Especially those semi-educational apps are recommended, the most popular in this regard are:

• Lollipops.
• Alphabetics.

Also recommended for children with dyslexia are all those apps that consist of solving word searches, building sentences, ordering the sentence, and the like. On the other hand,  we can use sound repetition programs to help children find it more difficult to speak correctly.

A recommendation that we would like to make is that you check well if the app is available in your language (and that of the child) so that the help is really effective.

Table games

This activity will turn treatment and study into games. It is proven that children learn more by playing than doing other activities, so this will be great for them. We can recreate or invent a multitude of multisensory games, we give you some ideas:

1. Hangman.

It consists of guessing a word. The cartoonist will point out the syllables it contains and the other person will say letter by letter of the ones they think it contains. If the word does not contain one of the letters that the player says, the artist will paint a member of a doll hanging himself.

The player wins if he can figure out the whole word without the artist having been able to draw the whole doll and have “hanged himself”. This game helps the child to match the letters with their sounds.

1. Point to the made-up word.

We will make a list of similar words and one of it will not exist. The child has to say which of all is the invented one. To make it more fun we can make the child invent a meaning.

1. Alphabet soup

In a grid we will place letters in such a way that some form words and others are randomly. The child will have to find the word that we say to him among all the “soup”. This game can be difficult for him so it is convenient to help him as if the two were a team.

1. I see I see what do you see?

One player tells the other the first letter of an object they are currently looking at. The other player will have to guess what it is about.

1. Word string

It consists of saying one word after another with the sole condition that the first syllable of the word has to be the same as the last word that was said.

1. Follow the story …

This game is a lot of fun and children will laugh a lot. We must go telling a story but word for word. That is, each person will say a word and whoever is sitting next to them will follow the story with another word and so on.

1. Right – left games

Some children with dyslexia find it difficult to orient left and right. We can encourage your learning with games that cover both sides.

The most common is the popular  Twister that, based on a roulette wheel, we will have to put a part of our body in a color. This game, in addition to using parts of the body, plays with colors and shapes, therefore it is great in this case.

Another option is to invent a dance and say the movements we do out loud. For example: Right foot forward and left hand on the head.

Dyslexia is a specific difficulty, persistent but does not intervene in normal cognitive development. It is frequently associated with difficulty in developing correct writing (dysorthography).

It does not have to be traumatic in our lives (or that of children with dyslexia) if we decide to be proactive and maintain a good attitude towards the challenges that come our way. Let us remember that in addition to helping them with the activities, we must also be their support. We are here to give you affection, inspire strength and courage.