Special thanks to Oriental Trading for providing products for this post. All opinions are my own.
As I mentioned before, in my How to Help a Struggling Reader post, reading is a real struggle for my 7yo. We believe she had dyslexia in addition to a visual tracking impairment. She started testing today with an evaluator from Special School District to confirm the diagnosis. We’re doing everything we can to ease the struggle for her. We switched curriculum, hired a private tutor, and are taking her vision therapy. In addition to all of that, I’ve added reading manipulatives from Oriental Trading to our language arts toolbox. Here’s a look at the one’s we’re using to help her.
First up are the Sight Word Dominoes. Sight words are really tough for her. By playing sight word dominoes as a family, we’re giving her a fun opportunity to practice. Our rule is that to add a domino, you have to say the sight word that you’re adding. She needs help on some of them, but that’s okay. There are six sets of Sight Word Dominoes with 150 dominoes per game. The pieces are made of foam and are 1″ x 2″. You can save by purchasing all six sets together. 
We are also using Word Family Dice. Her tutor introduces different welded blends, and then we work on them with air writing, a see-spell-write sheet, and the Word Family Dice. I try to keep it fun by seeing how many words she can make in a set amount of time. The Word Family Dice includes all forms of word families, with each side featuring a different word family and/or different letter to add to the word family. They are made of foam, have 17 pieces in the set, and are 1 1/2″ cubes.
She also uses Highlight Reading Strips. Since she has the visual tracking impairment, without the highlight strip she has a tendency to grab words from above or below the line that she is working on, which makes it more confusing. The highlight strip helps her to focus on a single line of text at a time.
We haven’t used them yet, but, I also added some dry erase sleeves to our toolbox. I’m looking forward to using them to using them to save paper when she needs to repeatedly do certain pages of her work.
Tell me on Facebook what your favorite reading manipulatives are!
***Product provided for review***
