How can we make life easier for a child with dyslexia?

How can parents and teachers best help a child with dyslexia?

I had a casual conversation with the mother of a child with dyslexia a few days ago. She brought up all of the following common concerns that I hear regularly expressed by parents of these children. I hope the ideas that follow are helpful.

1. The children are expected to just remember common “sight words”. The more of them they have to remember the harder it is.
2. The reading books in the easier levels of the school’s reading collection for the children to work through largely contain repetition of common sight words.
3. Phonically regular words are only increasingly included in the higher levels of the reading books.
4. Spelling lists sent home for children to learn each week contain a mixture of spelling patterns.

These features make it very difficult for a child with dyslexia to learn to read and spell successfully. Without intervention, the earlier the better, this can lead to discouragement, underachievement and low self-esteem. The more severe the dyslexia, the harder it is for these children and their parents, particularly if they are very bright.

Having a set of graded reading books is really important, but what makes a book “easier”? Certainly starting with large clear print with only a few words to a page, print that is not on top of pictures and something interesting to read is important. Most easy reading books nowadays satisfy those criteria.

But what would help the children with dyslexia, and probably many other children in the class as well? Here are a few suggestions to try.

1. Teach letter-sound correspondences first and how to blend these to make words. Start with the most common sound for each letter, then progress to ai, ay, ee, sh, etc.
2. Make sure that the graded reading books are decodable and follow the teaching sequence. Don’t expect a child to know something that has not been taught, and never encourage them to guess from the pictures or the first and last letters of a word.
3. Teach an absolute minimum of “sight words”. Always teach them with as much logic and structure as you can, then, “Which bit is still tricky?” Don’t try to teach more than one of these words at any one time. Many/most of these words are actually regular when children have learned more than just rudimentary phonic rules. E.g., “you” is regular and uses the second sound of “ou” as in soup.
4. Make weekly spelling lists follow spelling patterns, perhaps “ay” words this week, with two or three “ai” words to revise from previous week’s list. Start the list with an easy word that all the children know. Include some extension words at the end so that no child is bored, but the words still contain the same pattern. E.g. say, day, play … stay, stray, spray … relay, today, yesterday, Sunday. All children can achieve and all can progress.
5. Use a multi-sensory approach. Make the letter or letters with your body, draw them large in the air or sand, spell a word by stepping on letters on the floor, have a memory aid for each letter combination, plus games that match these with the letters … or anything else you can dream up.

Teachers may be able to implement some or all of these ideas, but what about parents?

1. Do as much as you can to support your child at home using some of the ideas above.
2. Talk to the teacher. Make sure they know how much time and effort your child has expended in trying to learn and remember the spelling words and the type of difficulties that they are having. Share any strategies and resources that you have found helpful.
3. You may need to find a skilled and experienced tutor to help.
4. Don’t give up.

The key to success for all, particularly a child with dyslexia, is a program that is logical, structured and sequential. They primarily need to learn predictable and regular reading-spelling patterns, then have enough time and practice to become secure in remembering and using them. This may be at school, home or a combination. Of course, it always best if school and home support each other.

You’ll find some more ideas at How to teach phonics.