Dyslexia never goes away. The key to dealing with it is for each person to identify and practice using personal tools or workarounds to overcome each aspect of dyslexia.
Finding the Right Dyslexia Workarounds
The process for finding dyslexia workarounds needs to be a team effort with parents, teachers, other school professionals, and the child all involved to:
- Identify the dyslexia effect (such as scrambling steps in written instructions or trouble with multiplying numbers).
- Review various methods for overcoming that effect.
- Test each approach to find the one that works the best for your child.
- Practice that best method repeatedly until it becomes an almost reflex for the child with dyslexia.
- Feel free to combine approaches if the combination works best.
- Help the child create their own way of dealing with that particular part of dyslexia If all known methods and combinations don’t work.
- Make finding a solution a game when discovery of a workaround seems impossible.
Definition of Success
You know you have the best workaround when the personal tool not only overcomes the condition, like reading comprehension, or spelling, or understanding directions, but it is also used without unusual effort. If a dyslexic child can remember how to use the workaround, each time they need it, that is a big win. And this workaround tool can serve them for a lifetime.
Dan is author of Loving Your Dyslexic: A Heart-to-Heart Discussion of How to Help Children and Adults with Dyslexia
