Tracey Wood

If you think your child may have dyslexia, look for the warning signs so you can have a physician make a proper diagnosis. You can minimize the effects of dyslexia by using a variety of teaching techniques that involve memorization, rhyming, phonics, and multisensory training to help your child learn to read and write.

A dyslexic person, although bright in many areas, struggles long-term with written (and sometimes spoken) words. A psychologist can identify that your child is dyslexic by a variety symptoms but you should lookout for warning signs that include the following: Lack of interest in letters and words at a young age.

Phonics is not only the backbone of learning to read (and the thing that identifies dyslexics the most) it’s a key teaching method in dyslexia programs. Phonics shows children that letters and groups of letters represent speech sounds. A dyslexic child needs to firmly grasp phonics to discover order in words that otherwise seem like jumbled letters.

Dyslexics respond well to multisensory methods of learning which use a hands-on approach engaging a few senses together at the same time. Help your child combat dyslexia with multisensory learning at home by playing a lot of hands-on and physical games, fit drawing and model-making into homework, and saying out loud the words she reads and writes.

Because dyslexia makes it hard to remember how words are put together, rhyming and visualization strategies — like turning letters into lively, more concrete characters — are great tools for jogging the memory and helping dyslexics remember word formation. To help your child master many words and fix them better in the mind, try these strategies: Help your child with short-vowel sounds by having him draw images into the vowels while saying their short sounds.