Ideas for Tutoring Children with Dyslexia

Tutoring Your Child with Dyslexia

Helping your child with dyslexia at home can be difficult at times. Before getting started, it's usually best to consult with your child's teachers and other reading professionals working with him or her. They can probably give you a good idea of the severity of your child's issues and what you can expect to accomplish with home tutoring sessions. Also, the U.S. Department of Education's website has a section created to help you as parent identify specific learning disabilities.

The Internet can be a useful resource for helping your child. There are various games and activities available at no cost aimed at kids who struggle to read. You can get up-to-date tutoring ideas and news from websites such as the 'Dyslexia Tutor News' blog, which has frequent posts about issues and achievements in dyslexia education. There are also various educational and medical information sites aimed at both parents and teachers.

When tutoring your child, you can engage him or her in discussions and provide hands-on activities. The following are a few examples of activities and lessons you can use when tutoring your child.

Phonics

Some dyslexic kids struggle to connect phonetic sounds to letters and letter combinations. Create phonics flashcards and go over them with your child each and every day without exception. Concentrate on sounds that your child especially has trouble with, such as the 'long a' sound and the 'short a' sound. Even if improvement isn't immediately noticeable, keep going. Constant repetition can be helpful for yielding tangible results.

Visual Closure Activities

Visual exercises can be useful for training your child's brain to process letters, words, sentences and passages. Many of these activities don't use words or letters and help with math as well as reading. The goal is to train your child's brain to function in a certain way that improves visual closure. Visual closure is the skill that enables a person to recognize what a shape or symbol is without seeing it in its entirety.

One such activity your child can practice at home is letter completion. Go over the letters of the alphabet over and over each day. Draw parts of certain letters on a sheet of paper and ask your child to fill in the blanks. At first, you can add dotted lines to guide your child.

Visual Memory Activities

Visual memory, at its most basic, is precisely what it sounds like: a person's ability to remember what something looks like. Show your child a series of shapes, starting simply with two or three. Cover the shapes and ask your child what they were. As your child improves, increase the number of shapes. Next, switch to letter sequences that spell simple words.