Creating a Dyslexia Friendly Learning Environment at Home

The learning environment can have a big impact on how successful the learner is.

Today I’d like to share with you 3 top tips to help you create a dyslexia friendly home learning environment for your child.

Resources
Make sure you have all your resources ready before you & your child start work.

Have you ever gone to quickly staple a document and file it, reached across your desk for your stapler and realised that someone has borrowed your stapler and not returned it? How distracting is it when you have to go and hunt the stapler?

Children with dyslexia can be very easily distracted and if a piece of kit is missing, they may forget the flow of what they were doing and go off to hunt for the required item.

Having a box (could be an old shoe box, biscuit tin or a plastic box) which contains a basic set of resources can help avoid distractions. Possible contents could include pencils, pens, ruler, scissors, glue, sticky notes, paper, highlighters and reading glasses or coloured overlays (if your child requires them).

A mini whiteboard and pens can be really useful too.

Show & tell

When explaining a concept or task to your child you may need to repeat it a few times to help them process the new information. Or you may need to show or explain it in different ways (and possibly not the way that you like to hear/process information).

To check their understanding ask them to explain the concept or task back to you using their OWN words, not repeating yours. This will give you a good indication as to whether they actually understand the task, rather than just parroting back your instructions.

Fun

When learning is fun, children are more likely to recall the content later.

I’m not suggesting for a minute that you should ensure that all activities are hysterically funny, but if you have the resources/opportunity then approach tasks in a new way.

Why not allow your child to chalk their spellings or sums on the patio and take a photo as evidence to send to their teacher?

How about making biscuits - in the shapes of letters of the alphabet - (if you can buy any flour) and then spell words using the biscuit letters. Or make round biscuits together and they can use icing pens to write their ‘spelling words’ on the biscuits. They can then eat their creations.

It’s more fun for the children and may increase their chances of recalling the content. 

If you’d like to learn more about how to create a Dyslexia friendly learning environment for your child, please message me and we can arrange a Decoding Dyslexia call.

If you know anyone who may benefit from these tips or who might like to join the course please pass the details on.