Do your children, your students, have difficulty differentiating the letters b and d, or the letters p and q?

Be aware that this is very common! It is a problem that thousands of children face every day. It’s nothing very serious, but sometimes it lasts long enough to begin to get in the way of reading and writing. Children between 5 and 7 years of age may experience this period of difficulty, which fortunately does not last, except sometimes in dyslexic children. The problem is that the letters are “mirrored”.

This is good news! There’s an absolutely foolproof trick to never make a mistake again, and I’m revealing it to you today.

Rather than having piles of reference tools written in a notebook that you don’t have on hand, you should use what you always, but absolutely always, have on you: your own hands!

Since a good drawing is better than a long speech, here’s the trick in pictures:

Differentiating b and d

The child places both hands towards him, fists closed and thumbs up. The left hand represents a b and the right hand represents a d.

As it is from left to right like the alphabetical order, no more mistakes are possible!

Differentiating p and q

And it also works for the letters p and q! Just turn your fists over, thumbs down.

Voilà! Nothing could be simpler, could it?

No more confusion!

Obviously at the beginning the child will need some time to think: he will stumble over the letter, consult his hands, determine what the answer is, refocus on the word to read and then finally get it right. All this will take a few seconds at the beginning, it’s inevitable.

But with time, by dint of using this technique systematically, he will soon not need to really look at his hands, because he will be able to visualize them in his head. And then, little by little, he will stop thinking about it and will be able to recognize the letters directly, without thinking about it: he will be able to read them.

Good luck and good reading to the children!

Article written by Ingrid, Coliglote