Boost Your Child’s Skills Even If They Are Dyslexic
July 30th, 2009How many words did you know when you started school?
Research shows that top-quartile children have a 7,000-word vocabulary, while lowest-quartile students know only 3,000 words. For Title I students, this gap widens as children get older, interfering with comprehension and classroom success.
So, with this in mind, an easy step to boosting your child’s learning skills is to work on increasing their vocabulary and background knowledge. Even if your child has dyslexia, LD, or ADD/ADHD these activities will improve their skills. Some easy activities to do to increase vocabulary are to expose your children to a variety of places, events, the zoo, historical places, local parks, state parks, and national parks.
So, with this in mind, an easy step to boosting your child’s learning skills is to work on increasing their vocabulary and background knowledge. Even if your child has dyslexia, LD, or ADD/ADHD these activities will improve their skills. Some easy activities to do to increase vocabulary are to expose your children to a variety of places, events, the zoo, historical places, local parks, state parks, and national parks.
Additional activities to boost your child’s learning skills include:
1. Talk about current events.
2. Pick a new word a day and see how many ways you can use it.
3. Repeat the new words often and keep track of them over the week.
4. How many ways can you use all of them?
5. Draw pictures of the new word or use imagery to describe them
6. Try using the new words with a variety of its meanings e.g. earth is a planet; earth is the land vs. the sky or sea; earth is the dirt we cover a plant with
7. Play with homonyms (hear, here; sun, son; pail, pale; peak, peek, etc.)
8. Play with words such as games like the Sentence Zone that has both a basic vocabulary and an advanced vocabulary.
Hope this is helpful.
Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET
