Your child’s letter reversal habit should not immediately be a cause for concern – it is not necessarily a sign of your child having dyslexia, as it is commonly assumed. Many practical initiatives can be used to curb your child’s habit.
Letter reversal is the inability to remember the correct direction in which letters, such as ‘d’ and ‘b’ or ‘n’ and ‘u’ should be written. It is most common amongst children below the age of 7. However, it can become a habit for older kids, too.
Read on to find out about some practical solutions to help prevent letter reversals.
Teaching Your Child Cursive
Although it may seem like a huge step forward, teaching your child how to write in cursive and teaching them what letters connect and how may help imprint in their mind the direction each letter is supposed to go. Read more about how to teach your child cursive here.
Multisensory Tactics
Sometimes, visual learning is not enough for writing, and the prevention of letter reversals and multisensory tactics need to be employed. This could be any number of things, including air writing, which helps the child feel the letters forming in the air by moving their body and big hand motions.
Sand writing allows the child to see the letters physically forming and feel the motion of their formation. Other methods include letter magnets and sandpaper letters. Find out more about multisensory tactics here.
Visual Activities
One of the easiest ways to prevent letter reversals is by introducing lots of visual activities, such as connect-the-dots, wooden block games, and matching games. This can help children strengthen their memory through repetition, while connect-the-dots activities could help improve finger memory and the child’s visual perceptual skills.
Group Letters Together
Finally, another way to help stop letter reversal habits is by teaching letters in groups and making sure that letters that are commonly reversed, such as ‘d’ and ‘b,’ are in different groups. That way, the child will recognize the difference between the similar letters and, hopefully, not get confused.
It could also be a good idea to give each of these groups a different color so that the child will associate a specific color with a particular letter direction. You could even go a step further by coloring every line involved in a letter a different color.
Concluding Thoughts
Hopefully, the suggestions above help prevent your child from dealing with letter reversals in the future. The strategies may take some time and may even require a combination of a few of them to produce notable results.
