Art Activities for Dyslexia

Between 15 and 20 percent of the population has learning difficulties, and of those, 70 to 80 percent struggle with reading, according to The International Dyslexia Association. But, dyslexia is not just about reading words. People with dyslexia have difficulty interpreting the phonological components of language. Phonology describes the sounds made as we verbally connect words together. Art and creativity have roles to play in dyslexia management.

Life Drawing

• The enjoyable and rewarding art activity of life drawing can challenge a dyslexic person and improve his ability to copy what he sees. Copying words from a whiteboard, for example, can be difficult for someone with the condition. He finds the process of "tracking" a challenge, which means they struggle to read along through the letters without losing their place. By copying objects instead of words, he teaches his brain to accept what he sees and to reproduce it. Art is subjective and based on interpretation, so there is less pressure on the dyslexic person to achieve exact correlations between the life objects and the drawing, and this improves confidence.

Visual Puzzles

• By pushing the boundaries of dyslexia, the sufferer can begin to understand her condition more. Increased awareness means a better chance of overcoming the problem. Visual puzzles such as jigsaws, anagrams and crosswords can increase a dyslexic person's understanding of how letters and words fit together to create meaningful expressions. Visual puzzles are designed to explore cognitive processing. A crossword, for example, can illustrate the linkage between words and their component letters. New puzzles can be designed to create associations and to push limits, such as the "mirror rotation" test. Different words are presented to the dyslexic person using a mirror, and she has to work out what each word is.

Imaginative Art

• Creating sculpture, painting from the imagination and even dancing all have a role to play in the creative side of dyslexia. A person who can coordinate movement, sounds and perhaps the words of a play or musical is functioning well, cognitively speaking. Repeating sounds, breaking sentences and words down, then rebuilding them, and exploring the meaning of syllables in speech, song and imaginative art such as graphic design, is a mechanism used by specialist teachers with children as young as three and four, according to The Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. Adults can combine their art with the structure of sentences, the definitions of complex words and the use of prefixes, suffixes and roots if they wish to gain a deeper knowledge of language. Graphic novels and cartoons are another vibrant, exciting form of art that combines short, well-constructed sentences with accurate drawing, imaginative writing and the more developed skill of putting words together to create a meaningful story.

Language Art

• As Larwal Wornek explains in a 2008 article in "Serendip," many people with dyslexia are more creative and artistic. They use their dyslexia as a basis for writing poetry and short stories, the "language arts." Without their condition, some say they might not have been creative and that art is a pastime rather than purely a treatment. Small-scale hand-eye coordination tasks, such as writing short lines of poetry or making small sculptures, has been shown to improve the reading ability of dyslexic children, as described by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Rhyme and song are also language arts that people with dyslexia can use to improve their word and sound associations.