17 ACTIVITIES FOR CHILDREN WITH DYSLEXIA - ECONOMÍA - 2024

In this article I will explain 17 activities for children with dyslexia that will help them overcome difficulties and improve performance. Dyslexia is a learning disorder related to literacy. It is within the specific learning difficulties (DEA).

Subjects who present this difficulty show problems when accessing the lexicon and may have problems in phonological, auditory or visual processing.

A person with dyslexia presents / displays a cognitive development within the normality or it can be superior to the average, and in addition they do not suffer from sensory alterations and they have acceded to the reading and writing in a habitual way; however, they present problems of access to the lexicon

17 activities for kids with dyslexia

1. Knowledge of one's own body

Dyslexic children can present psychomotor problems, for example, in the body scheme. Working on the body scheme implies working so that they know their own body and then the other.

Any activity that involves naming your own body can help. It can be done on activities on paper with the silhouette of a boy or girl to name the parts or in a more experiential way from their own body (in a mirror) or that of their partner.

The spatial notions of the own body and of the other are worked on. You can work on the location of body parts and also the location of objects with respect to the body itself.

Another idea to work on the body is to cut out a silhouette so that the child must assemble the puzzle to compose the complete human body.

2. Spatial-temporal orientation activities

Children with dyslexia also present spatial-temporal orientation problems, so they should be taught spatial notions such as up-down, front-back, as well as temporal ones, such as before-after, late-night.

It must be done in graphic association but also in a dynamic way. This makes it difficult for children with dyslexia to locate letters and structure them in space.

For example, to work on spatial orientation you can take different objects and ask the child to put them in front, behind, to the left, to the right. You can work with your own body (put on top of the table, below, to the left).

Spatial notions can also be worked on on paper. An exercise can be to make the image of a child and several dogs, one on each side. The dogs facing each other and the person in the middle. The person can vary in position (he will be facing, back, to one side, to another).

A child is asked to paint the dogs on the child's left blue and those on the child's right green.

To work on temporal orientation, for example, an activity that can be developed are vignettes. Play a messy story and ask the child to order the story through the vignettes.

3. Reading and comprehension of texts and stories

Another thing that can be done is the understanding of stories. From these you can perform many different activities.

While reading a story with the child with dyslexia, you can comment on what is happening, you can also ask him what he thinks will happen next in the story or ask him things that have happened previously in the story.

Also, once you have read it, you can design different activities:

• Get relevant ideas out of the text
• Perform a different ending

You can also establish short stories and ask specific questions (what animal appears in the story, what does the character say to his friend, what color was the house).

Another way to work on understanding, even if it is not based on stories, is to establish images of products, toy packaging, perfume, anything you can think of but that has written material.

Through this, for example with a package of cookies (or its photo), you can ask what ingredients it has, how many grams it has, what brand it belongs to, etc. You can also make different vignettes where one of the boxes contains information that does not match the comic.

You must ask the child what is the wrong vignette in the story because it is meaningless. Thus, you must understand the text to understand it correctly.

4. Crosswords, word searches, board games with letters

To work on phonological awareness, any of these letter games can help us.

We can make crosswords for children, word searches or even play Scrabble-style games to create words, look for them in the text, etc.

5. Lateralization activities

Children with dyslexia also have motor problems and laterality. Work must be done to identify lateral dominance.

Lateral support can also be worked on. For that, you can perform strength exercises (lift a cube with the part of the body you want to strengthen, hold a book, a box.

And also precision activities, such as screwing and unscrewing nuts, a button, laces, for the body areas that must be secured.

You can do activities such as: with your left hand touch your right foot, stand in front of a mirror and divide your body in two with electrical tape, touch with your right hand only the right area of ​​your body (eye, cheek, shoulder).

6. Exercises to spell words

We can work on the spelling of the words. We can say a word and learn to spell it (writing down words on a sheet of paper, picking up a magazine, with street signs, the name of a book).

It is important to work on the sound in addition to the name of the letter.

7. Activities with rhymes and riddles

Rhyming activities are very beneficial for children with autism. For example, they can be encouraged to find two words that rhyme, to make pairings with their name and those of their friends or family.

Or we can also help and encourage them to create simple riddles.

8. Work with phonemes

To work the phonemes you can work different activities. We can work on the segmentation, substitute them, omit them.

For example, activities to work on how to segment phonemes would be asking the child to make all the sounds in a word, for example, table: table. And so with different words. As it makes the sound, we are naming the letter.

Substitution can also work, so we ask you to substitute the s (and we make the ssss sound) with a different sound. For example, instead of string, you can say string.

As for phonemes, we can also ask you to omit it. In this way, if we ask it to do it with the letter S, instead of caStillo, it will say ca-tillo.

To work on phonemes we can also ask you to find the same sound that is found in different words. For example, at home and school or in water and in drinking.

9. Work with syllable segmentation

It is important to work on syllables with children with dyslexia to work on syllabic awareness. Different exercises can be developed for this.

You can work on the segmentation of syllables, where we work with the child to divide them. For example, we ask you not to say how many syllables the word chocolate has: cho-co-la-te.

In addition, we can also work on the substitution of syllables through words, where we ask the child how a certain word would look if we change one of the syllables.

For example, we say, we are going to substitute the first syllable of the word milk. The child will first segment the word le-che and then think about how to replace it, for example te-che.

With syllables you can also work on the omission, for which we will ask you to omit a syllable that we mark. To do this, you will need to do the segmentation first and then skip it.

For example, we tell him to omit the second syllable from the word bottle, and he will have to say bo-X-lla.

We can also do it the other way around, put words where a syllable is missing and it is he who has to complete the word looking for one that he finds that makes sense.

10. Location and identification activities

To work on visual reception, visual decoding, which is the reference to the ability to understand or interpret symbols (an example is written words).

Examples can be made where the child must locate the similarities and differences between two words, for example, finding where the difference is.

Other exercises that can be done to work on visual reception and that are appropriate when the problem is in this area can be identifying objects by associating letter-sound, identifying colors, numbers, geometric shapes.

And these activities can be done both on paper and living them.

11. Meanings and synonyms in reading

You can also work on synonyms from reading. You can establish a text with some underlined words and ask the child what the word means.

This will allow you to deepen your understanding so that you can explain the meaning of the concept in your words and look up synonyms or antonyms to better understand it.

12. Made up words or silly phrases

Another fun activity that can be done with children with dyslexia is make up words.

It is about creating columns of word pairs, for example: house / sasa, lion / teon, snail / snail. And ask the child to choose which of the two words is the invented one.

To work on auditory reception, activities to identify absurd phrases can also be carried out.

13. Play I see I see with words

It's about playing the traditional game of See-See. We can work through the beginning of words a word that begins with A, but also through syllables, such as indicating to the child a word that begins with salt- or a word that begins with mu-.

You can also work with the last syllable, for example, a word that ends in che (car).

You can also work without the I See-I see, so that, even if it is not present around you, you can present different syllables to it and it is the child who invents different words that can begin (or end like this).

For example, we suggest salt- and he can complete it with all the words that come to mind: jump, salmon, jump. Or the other way around, that they end in -te: tomato, chocolate.

14. Order syllables

The exercises for ordering syllables consist of presenting the child with words disordered by syllables: te-to-ma, for example, the child being the one who has to put the correct word next to it.

We can then indicate to create a sentence where the mentioned word is included.

An alternative would be to give him the word with the gap for him to fill in.

15. Work to word strings

Another exercise is the word chain game. To do this, we will start with a word, for example, tomato and the child with dyslexia must say another word that ends with the last syllable, for example telephone, and the next one continues from the telephone with another word, for example: note, check, sausage, shoe.

16. Recognition of correct forms of words

Another activity that can be done, although it also depends on the age of the child, is to recognize the correct way of words and sentences.

This implies knowing how to differentiate the singular from the plural, the tense, the masculine and the feminine, the adjectives, the suffixes.

Activities can be tailored to the child's level. We can establish a list of words so that they tell us if they are feminine or masculine words; we can set the synonyms and tell it to tell us what it would be like in the plural, etc.

17. Work by semantic field

To work on verbal expression, which allows the child to communicate his ideas, we must enhance verbal descriptions, offer visual and verbal suggestions to stimulate him.

For this, in addition to the descriptions that their experience implies, we can help them through the classifications of objects by semantic fields.

Thus, we can create cards by semantic fields: the beach, the school, for example, and add all the words that occur to us from each semantic field.

Later, we can mix them with other cards that do not belong to these semantic fields so that the child can classify them.

References

1. Ministry of Education. Manual of attention to students with specific educational support needs derived from specific learning difficulties: dyslexia.
2. Iglesias, MT Students with dyslexia: strategies for educators.
3. Website of the Dyslexia and Family Association. Retrieved from:
4. Web page of activities to work with Dyslexia PTYAL.
5. Rivas, RM and Fernández, P. (2000). Dyslexia, dysortography and dysgraphia. Pyramid, solar eyes collection.