Brain Exercises for Reducing Effects of Dyslexia

If you have dyslexia, you can reduce its effects through attention and concentration exercises, active working memory exercises, word games and logic and reasoning activities. Other exercises can also help improve verbal fluency and how quickly and accurately your brain processes information.

Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a learning disability that can affect how well you recognize, understand and comprehend the words you read. This neurological disorder can also affect how quickly a child’s vocabulary grows and how the brain processes and interprets information. Nearly 15 percent of Americans suffer from a mild to extreme form of dyslexia, according to the National Institute of Child and Human Development. Incorporating brain exercises into their daily routine can help children and adults with dyslexia reduce its effects on their lives.

Games With Sounds

You can help someone with dyslexia begin to learn how words work and fit together by playing games that incorporate sounds. Games that can help are ones that require you to stretch out the sounds of words when saying them aloud, using word roots to learn about word families, solving riddles and clapping in time with the syllables of a word.

Games With Words

You can help someone with dyslexia learn the meaning of a word by playing games that help attach meaning to the word and improve someone’s understanding of it. You can try playing a variation of the game Pictionary, with each player responsible for drawing a picture that represents a word. Also, using flashcards, write out parts of words -- suffixes, prefixes and roots -- and mix and match the parts as you form new words.

Memory and Concentration

Dyslexia not only affects reading comprehension but also how well someone remembers what she read and can concentrate on reading. Playing memory games, such as the classic Memory game, or asking someone with dyslexia to memorize a list and repeat the items on the list back to you can help strengthen the memory.

Video Games

A 2013 study found that playing action video games can help improve the reading skills of a child who has dyslexia and help improve how well she processes, understands and comprehends information. "Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment," Andrea Facoetti, of the University of Padua and the Scientific Institute Medea of Bosisio Parini in Italy, told ScienceDaily. "Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly." He added that his study should not give someone with dyslexia license to stop other treatment activities and focus solely on playing video games.