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Hi Parents and Teachers,
Let’s get your Therapy Thursday off to a great start with our 5 top tips for this Therapy Thursday of ways to support your child/student with dyslexia!
Most of the Dyslexia-Academy specialist teacher team are home learning with their own children at the minute during this tough time and wanted to share with you some of their top tips, if anything, to brighten up your Therapy Thursday and help support you and your child/students in these times. Whilst working with our own own children who are getting some online support from school we noticed some of the following issues
*Different/ mixed fonts
*No repitition of verbal information
*Difficulty with seeing the slides/information
Some of these difficulties led us to think about how we can support our children with online learning, when accessing their usual school based online learning lessons. So far, some of the ways we have discovered included:
1*Requesting the powerpoint/slides/visual information before hand- sometimes we have then used a reading/scanning pen for our children to read through the information before the lesson. We have found that Scanning Pens are offering a free two week trial of their reading pens. https://www.scanningpens.co.uk/ReaderPenUK/Request-Parent-Trial-Reader-Pen-UK.html#
2* Ask for permission to record information where possible. The school may be able to record the lessons so that your child can rewatch the lessons where possible to support working memory.
3. We have been using the ‘Quick Access Toolba’r in Microsoft Word. This is a handy place that stores all the frequent tools that you find the most useful. The Quick Access Toolbar can sit above or below the main ribbon of commands. To access this, just right click on the command bar to access the option ‘Customise Quick Access Toolbar’. See below image. Some of the useful commands include
*Font and page colour
*Text Highlight Colour
*Translate
*Speak Selected Text
4*We have been trialing some text to speech readers which can turn web pages, pdf’s into audio. Immersive Reader is a reading enhancement tool that is available in Office 365 and it works with word, outlook and onenote. So far we have found that it allows you to view the texts in a variety of fonts/colours/sizes and will speak the text in a choice of voices too to support auditory reinforcement. To access this in word or onenote you need to head to the view menu. To access Immersive reader in Outlook, you can head to the ‘More Actions’ menu.
5*We are using Windows magnifier. You can find it by clicking start-control panel-Ease of Access-Optomise Visual Display. You then need to navigate to the heading ‘Make things on the screen larger’ and here you will find the option to turn on the magnifier!
Oh and we have some really exciting news as well that we hope that you may want to be apart of. The Dyslexia-Acadeny will soon have a fabulously engaging, multi-sensory, structured learning game that will be available to help support your young individual. This will be aimed for ages 6-12 years and students will help Dyslexia-Academy’s Amazing Adam and Inspirational Isla on their incredible learning journey, developing touch typing skills, alongside phonological awareness . Once this is ready, we want to offer it for FREE to trial to students. You can find out more about how you can be apart of this below.
At the Dyslexia-Academy, we are passionate about supporting you every step of the way, whether you are a parent/teacher/pupil. We believe that until you spread your wings, you just won’t know how far you can fly and we are here to help you fly and demonstrate your true potential.
Bye for now and do get in touch with us if you need any help/support!
Katie Nelson
Parent of a fabulously amazing, talented neurodiverse child, Specialist Teacher and Assessor, Founder of Dyslexia-Academy, Dyslexia Centre North West and ESENDI SEND Services for Schools