Dyslexia … Help!

You might find this article helpful:

Hearing, Learning and Listening: The role of auditory function in academics and everyday life.

I found it just yesterday while trying to understand why my youngest, who is 8, cannot remember the phonics sounds.  We’ve been trying to teach her to read with phonics for 2 years and she is just not getting it.  But yesterday she picked up Dr. Suess’s The Foot Book and read several words from it on her own.  I thought, well, I know Mary Hood (who wrote The Relaxed Homeschool) had a daughter who couldn’t do phonics and they had to switch to sight reading, so I googled about it and found this site.  Here is a quote:

Mixed dominance is also the specific cause of reversals known as dyxlexia. The information goes in one hemisphere and to output the information, it must come from the other hemisphere, resulting in reversals. I have seen children, especially boys, with very bad reversal problems. One very bright young man I tested couldn’t do a visual digit span test well because he couldn’t read off a sequence of numbers the same way each time without switching the numbers around. The good news is that once we establish eye and ear dominance on the right side, the reversals disappear.

So, achieving cortical dominance improves long-term memory, emotional control and reversal problems. It also helps the individual be more organized and is often manifested in external as well as internal organization.

Then I found this site about brain hemispheric dominance: Brain Hemisphere Utilisation

Then I read an article that says that Hand-Clapping Songs Improve Motor and Cognitive Skills, Research Reveals and that:

“children who don’t participate in such games may be more at risk for developmental learning problems like dyslexia and dyscalculia. There’s no doubt such activities train the brain and influence development in other areas. The children’s teachers also believe that social integration is better for these children than those who don’t take part in these songs.”

Also interesting:

Sulkin also found that hand-clapping song activity has a positive effect on adults: University students who filled out her questionnaires reported that after taking up such games, they became more focused and less tense. “These techniques are associated with childhood, and many adults treat them as a joke,” she said. “But once they start clapping, they report feeling more alert and in a better mood.”

I’d never thought about this, but how many homeschooled children participate in this kind of activity? I started teaching hand clapping games to my own girls and they are having a blast with it!  If you search for them on youtube you can watch little girls hand clapping, and here is a webiste with the chants and directions: Funclapping.com

I really like Karen Tankersley’s Threads of Reading books for good ideas to use in all 5 areas of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. Her books are filled with practical ideas and she has good info on dyslexic readers and how to help them. She also has some good ideas on her Threads of Reading website with several free games that you can download for struggling readers both primary and older. I just got her new book on Coaching the Threads of Reading and it is quite helpful if you are a reading coach in your building.  You can find all her stuff on her website or at Amazon or whereever else you normally order books.

My DS11 has severe dyslexia and using Dancing Bears has really helped improve his reading.  His spelling has improved thanks to Apples & Pears spelling.