Revision tips for dyslexic DS

[Iamaworrywart]

My son has Y7 exams coming up in a couple of weeks and I would appreciate some revision tips, now that there are so many subjects to revis for at the same time.

Thanks

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Help him to have make written timetable for each day/evening clearly stating what he needs to revise and for how long. Break subjects up and get him to identify what he struggles with most. Focus on these trouble spots daily and brainstorm some strategies for overcoming them.

Will he have a scribe, if yes then it would pay to try to meet the scribe and do some practice runs otherwise you may need to scribe for him to help him organise and communicate his ideas.

What areas are of most concern for him?

Be creative - you need to make sure the info gets into his brain using a different pathway to its usual visual route.

Familiarise yourself with the revision topics and talk to him about them every day

If you remember your French speak to him entirely in french for a day. He won't understand everything but it will reinforce set phrases and expressions.Tape some vocab leaving a gap on the tape for him to give a translation before giving him the answer eg Demain - pause - Tomorrow or read some geography case studies into a tape and play these on the stereo. Look at his syllabus and see if you can go out on a sort of field trip locally to look at river bank erosion etc. If there is a stream nearby where you can play/paddle see if you can create your own ox bow lake.

Post it notes which are different colours dotted all over the house are useful. Eg Science terminology. When ds1 has his first science paper the whole family knew about calcium carbonate and limewater experiments because it had been stuck next to the loo roll for a month beforehand

Use music too - Number bonds are easy to sing along to but you can use it for other subjects too. Use well known tunes such as nursery rhymes or favourite pop songs.

I don't know severe your son's dyslexia is but I would suggest the following ideas:

Lots of large sheets of paper and fat coloured pens to write/draw on it with.
Post-it notes on walls, particularly with vocab - mismatch them for him so he can match them back up.
Outline countries/historytimelines/body shape on the doors and get him to label them with read-written post-its. Colour code topics so particular colours are associated with particular things.
Agee with pp get him to record his notes then read it internally at the same time as listening.
Mind-mapping - get the Mind Maps for Kids book by Tony Buzan and get him to start practising now so he's really good at them by Y11.
If he learns kinaesthetically get him to associate a sequence of movements with a sequence of information. Also do card sorting and swapping activities with him.
Sounds crazy but for recall use scent. Different subject, different smell as revising, send him in with a tissue with it on.
Um... If I think of anything else I'll come back :-)

If he has long passages of text to learn from, get him to doodle an image that represents each paragraph next to it, then extract these images and write them in segments of a circle and learn that. Also works for things like the MR GREEN signs of life in Biology.

If he is clever wordwise he could write poems, or raps, to remember facts.

In general the key rule is to involve as many parts of the brain as possible and as many senses too. And the more fun, the better. You can also try putting him in different places for each subject (a science corner, history table etc) as this also helps with recall.

Thanks everyone for your tips, I'll be trying them all out. Fingers crossed.