Dyslexia Journey’s 5 Favorite Family Activities!

Looking for some fun family activities that will easily include your dyslexic kid? Stick around, because we're going to share our favorites with you.

Hello, we're Nick and Sonja, and this is Dyslexia Journey, where we discuss topics related to supporting the dyslexic child in your life. So, it's almost winter break time here, so that's what's inspiring this particular discussion. We wanted to share with you some of the activities that we've really enjoyed together as a family, and that our dyslexic daughter in particular felt very included by, and that we'll explain a little more as we go for each one, like as to why they particularly were good.

Do you want to start us off with board games? Sure. Okay. Yeah, so we love board games in our family, but unfortunately, a lot of games require, depend on good reading ability, and so aren't always as fun for dyslexic kids. But there are a couple that we really like that are more visually oriented that have been kind of family favorites in our household. So, let me show them here. So, they're both by the same company, they're called Dixit and Mysterium, and these are both based, they're very visual games, based around cards.

The cards are fairly abstract, but they allow for a lot of imagination in the games, and the two games are very different gameplay. Dixit is for younger kids, it says 8+, but you can actually play with quite a bit younger age than that, and Mysterium says 10+, and I think you can probably play with slightly younger kids than that as well. Totally different gameplay. I don't think we can really get into how they work exactly. I'll just say that Dixit is a little bit similar to Apples to Apples if you've played that, but without relying on being able to read anything.

Mysterium's more about the clues, let's say. It's more of a mystery kind of game, so it's more about the clues being from these impressionistic images. But yeah, so we'll let you explore that yourself, we can just link to a board game review site so you can explore those further if you're interested. So our second idea that we really enjoyed over the years is to do charades, and we don't really mean the classic kind of charades. I suppose you could do it, but I think maybe the, you know, how you can really get into syllables and all of that, like that could be a little trickier.

We like to play kind of more looser versions of them. So, Nick, do you want to hold up the example? There's an example of a game you can actually buy, but I'm also going to talk about ways you can just do it. Yeah, so this is one that our family has enjoyed. It's called Acting Out, and there are cards that you draw, and the idea is you have to sound out something from one card while you're acting out something from a different card.

So that's kind of fun and funny and often encourages laughter and so on. It does have sort of the downside that you do have to actually read the cards, and the person acting it out has to read them privately, because if someone helped them, then they would know, and it would sort of take the fun out of it. But you could have teams, either teams or someone who's more of like a helper or judge kind of person, you know, organizer type person who could help with that.

But so we often, though, like to just play sort of our own version of charades. I mean, that can be as simple as, you know, really any topic, and then, you know, not having as many of those rules about syllables and that kind of thing. And we often just trust each other for whatever, you know, we came up with. I mean, someone could write it down, and it doesn't matter if baseball did it right or whatever, if you wanted to do it that way.

And then you'd know later that that's what they had. But one particular version that we've often done, especially as our kids got older, was more based around like either books or TV shows or movies. Like, as those as categories, when it's something that we maybe have seen together as family, we just kind of are more familiar with together. So it could be picking that specific, for example, show, or it could be like TV shows, but we tend to go for the ones that we know that people.

So you might like say it's going to be, you know, acting out without words, that character, trying to guess what the character is, for example. Yeah, and I want to emphasize that this doesn't have to be a competitive game. It's really fun just to take turns acting out characters or whatever theme you choose and trying to guess. And we rarely keep score or have a winner or anything like that. It's just fun to do the experience.

Whatever, yeah. I mean, whatever family dynamic that your family likes, but it's definitely possible to do it very casually. Another activity that we've enjoyed as a family, more when our children were younger. But I think older children can perhaps enjoy as well, especially if you have a mix of older children and younger children in your household, is a scavenger hunt. And the idea is you just come up with a list of items you can find online.

There are plenty of lists, sort of sample scavenger hunts. Or you can come up with your own list of sort of items that might be found in the household or it's winter here right now where we're filming in Colorado. So outdoors is not always feasible, but doing this outdoors in the summer or if you have a nice winter day is also a lot of fun as well. And the idea is you just have these lists of items and everyone gets a copy of the list and you can work in teams or you can work individually to go in and collect all those items.

And you can, again, you can do this competitively against each other or you can do it cooperatively as teams or as just one team for your family. And then for children who struggle with reading or who don't know how to read yet, you can put pictures of the items in the list. That's one option. Or you can go through if they're sort of early readers or struggling with readers. It's often helpful, we've found, in any scenario like this, to read through the entire list with your child together before you get started to make sure that they have heard it verbally and can sort of keep it in their memory.

And then maybe recognize it again when they look back at the list. And, you know, if it is a nice enough day and you're on a hike, this can be a good way to keep especially younger kids going on a hike. So just a little tip there. So our fourth suggestion has to do with music. So some families might like to sing together, but I appreciate music in some other way. You know, it could be singing along to the radio.

It could be, you know, singing songs that just any song you want to. I guess at winter break, sometimes people sing holiday songs together. But we're actually, one of the ways we do it, it's a little different from that, which is more like a name that tune kind of thing. There's plenty of YouTube videos that are set up this way so that you can do like a name that tune. You can either do it for lyrics or just try or there's even ones that you can try to like come up with a song that has a particular word.

But the ones that purely like play some music for you, usually it's to identify the song and singer or to try to finish the lyric. And I find like this can be particularly fun for teenagers because, you know, sometimes they're listening to more music at that point. And then it can be fun sometimes to do like bass dubs over the years. And so it sort of like ends up being kind of like the parents and different generations against each other because usually we're more familiar with some of the past decades tunes.

Yeah, we're definitely better at, let's just say, certain decades than the more recent pop hits. Yeah, especially for knowing them very well, right? Like things might be familiar, but to finish a lyric, for example. Yeah, and that's something that you can do if you just have, if you just want like a five or 10 minute break, you know, after dinner, before starting homework, something like that. It's a really quick kind of thing that you can do all year round.

Or if you want to take more time during winter break or whatever, you can do, name that tune for holiday tunes or something like that. And there's almost infinite options of YouTube videos that you can find. All right, should we do our final one for today? All right. Our final tip or our final favorite family activity that we do together is baking. And so a lot of families, I think, do this around the holiday time of year, baking cookies and so on.

But we want to add sort of a twist to that because traditional cooking and baking can be somewhat challenging and frustrating for dyslexic kids because reading recipes can be a little bit confusing, especially when you're looking at the measurement abbreviations, TSP versus TBSP or teaspoon versus tablespoon if you're in the U.S. using imperial units. And so and that's not to say that that it can't be that it can't be a good way to get children, dyslexic kids to practice reading sort of in a different setting.

But what we actually sometimes like to do as a family is be a little more creative with our baking and do kind of baking inventions or even baking competitions where maybe two people would compete against each other with a third person who's the judge. And the two people have to come up with a creation and then and then the judge gets to try it. And you can, of course, have different best stubs rather than it's just this is the better than that one.

You can have like most most visually appealing, most in the best tasting and you can have different categories there. But, yeah, it's kind of a fun way to it's also a fun way to include people who don't like to bake as much because I'm actually less the baker in the family, but I very much enjoy being the judge and the taster. Right. But it's a good way. Yeah, it's a good way.

Of course, it's possible anyway to bake with your dyslexic kid and, you know, help them out with the recipe. But this sort of it's just an extra fun way to have like sort of a whole challenge and bigger if you like want to have kind of a bigger event as a family. And to add some creativity to it. Yeah, exactly. So we'd love to hear if you have any other suggestions in the comments for fun activities that you've had success with, including everyone in your family.

And we would so appreciate it if you would like and subscribe to our YouTube channel so we can get this content out there. And if you're listening to the podcast, please leave us a rating and a review. And I hope you have a wonderful time having fun with your families. Bye.