Questions: Dyslexia

[asakiyume]

If you have dyslexia, what strategies helped you master writing? Was there anything that helped when you were of school age? If you weren't able to deal with it during school, how have you dealt with it since then?

If you have kids with dyslexia, how have you helped them with the task of writing?

Comments

[cmcmck]

I taught young adults with dyslexia (it's a specialist area in my SEND qualification) but am myself dysnumeric.

[asakiyume]

And what things worked well for you in teaching them?

[cmcmck]

Dyslexia can be a matter of balance so teaching people to centre themselves was sometimes useful

I also found teaching word families could be really useful.

Varying print and colour backgrounds can help too.

[sartorias]

Mine is minor, switching letters and especially numbers. When I was a kid and caught my hand switching letters I sometimes made myself write the word 100 times, furious with myself. It never fixed it. But that was common when I was young. (The student was usually called lazy, not paying attention, or backward.)

My spouse is far more dyslexic Nothing they did back then helped. He finally got the habit of reading in semi darkness because the letters didn't dance on the page so badly. I watched him do this while slowly finishing his dissertation, and it made my eyes ache just to see it. His handwriting is impossible to read unless he makes a great effort, by turning his papersideways and writing upwards, sort of.

When I was a teacher, dyslexia was just beginning to be identified as a near/brain thing, not laziness etc. I read wildly, and tried all kinds of things with my students, shortly discovering that there were different types of dyslexia. For one or two, the different colored glasses helped, but most, no. Nothing really helped, excepy permitting some to print in caps instead of using curvise. For the ones with severe dyslexia, I discovered that testing them out loud made a HUGE difference, though I would warn parents that they would get pushback in public schools. (Which they did. For years.) I had one kid who was super dyslexic, yet very talented at drawing. He wrote beautiful cursive, but he could not read it after writing it, and if he wasn't copying from a workbook, he couldn't spell but the simplest words, and half the time those were reversed. His greatest joy was drawing buildings. He kept saying that he wanted to be an architect, but his dad was determined that he would be a professional baseball player, and all his afterschool and weekend time was spent in baseball clinics. He was slow and dreamy by nature; I often wonder if he eventually won. (Dad, I thought, was also dyslexic, and his idea for getting around that with a good job was the baseball.)

Lots of audial learning helped. Computer typing helped some--this was before computers were a regular thing. I encouraged parents to get their kids typing asap. Dyslexia also often came hand in hand with other issues, such as ADHD, or whatever it's called now. For a couple of kids, a desk with carboard on the sides actually helped with focus, as their eyes were not constantly distracted by the other kids simply working.

[asakiyume]

Thank you for these insights--much appreciated!