5 Spelling Strategies for Dyslexics

Spelling Strategies

By Read and Spell

https://www.readandspell.com/us/spelling-strategies-for-dyslexia

   A dyslexic student can have a lot of trouble keeping up with their peers in a traditional teaching environment.  Some schools have adopted a “dyslexia friendly teaching” approach.  Everyone can learn from dyslexia friendly approaches to reading and spelling, which include multi-sensory learning delivered at the pace of the learner in small incremental steps, with lots of repetition and positive reinforcement.  A little praise goes a long way.

1. Get early recognition of dyslexia and the appropriate accommodations.  Here are some examples; twice the time to take tests, have a reader and/or a scribe for the test, testing in a quiet environment, have the alphabet written on your desk to help with retrieval of letters, use voice to text software when typing longer essays, use a red painted fingernail on the right hand to remind you of right vs. left during driving test etc.

2. Choose a teaching strategy based on evidence based, proven interventions.  At this time, Orton Gillingham is the gold standard for phonics, but fluency is also a huge piece of the reading puzzle.  Be sure to add timed reading and timed writing portions like Fluency Builder.

3. Learn to type.  Students with dyslexia need to overlearn to get spelling from their short term into their long term memory.  It also needs to move from their frontal lobe on the right side of the brain, which is slow and not automatic, to the left side of the brain over the ear at the occipital and temporal lobes.  Here the knowledge is fast and often automatic.

4. Don’t focus too much on spelling rules, but instead get a large wealth of words in front of your eyes so that you develop a memory for what a word looks like and how it is pronounced.  This can be done with Hoopla, from the library and download read along books for the student to hear the book read to them and see the words light up as it is read.  Read 2 Go and Dolphin Easy Reader are more options.

5. Use mnemonic devices and memory tools or learning tricks to help you to memorize difficult words.  Like because: big elephants cannot always use small exits. Letter reversals like b and d can be improved by showing that a capital B can have a lowercase b inside of it.  Or when writing b, use a bat, the long stroke and a ball the circle stroke.