There is a certain modest pleasure in being able to create exactly the items your students need. I love a good Teacher Pay Teacher download as much as the next person, but let’s face it, you have to put a whole lot of printing and prepping into those items too! I want to share with you some of the simple but super effective materials for helping individuals with dyslexia. You probably already have 95% of the materials, and if you have 5 minutes and a sharpie pen, you can make these items.

Vocabulary Flap Cards are so awesome, because they address a fundamental but over looked deficit among older dyslexic learners. The students are not reading the hard words. They just aren’t. You as the teacher need to help bridge that gap, and vocabulary flap cards will do just that.

The ideal users of vocabulary flap cards are students advanced enough to have multisyllabic words as part of their texts or assessments. Probably grades 4 and up are the target audience for this method.

Here are the step-by-step directions with pictures! It will take you longer to read the directions than to make one, I promise you.

Start with a 3×5 card, and fold it lengthwise with the lines inside.

Write vocabulary word large inside the card, slightly separating the syllables. 

Cut through the top layer, creating syllable flaps student can raise to read the word by syllables.

On the front top, write the verbatim definition you will use on the test. 

The student reads the long, difficult word by syllable, with assistance at first, and has the definition on the front pointed out to him or her so that extra layer of learning is understood. The student can then practice reading the difficult words and linking them with the definition. It is very helpful to your dyslexic student if you use the verbatim definition as it will appear on the test, since students with dyslexia are not very good at rephrasing under pressure.

Let me know if you use this method, and if it works for your students! The beauty of it is not needing to make a card for every single word in the chapter, just the ones that are difficult for that particular student!