Students with dyslexia typically struggle with decoding words, reading fluently, and recognizing sight words. These skills become increasingly important as students progress through school and can affect essentially every subject. Help your child with dyslexia develop stronger reading skills with the ideas detailed below.
Multisensory tools
Students with dyslexia tend to respond well to a multisensory approach to teaching, which integrates the visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic modalities. For young students, for example, when teaching them the name of each letter and how to write it, you can fill a cookie tray with salt or colored sand and have them trace each letter while saying its formation out loud. For example, when writing the lower case letter f, they can trace it in the sand while saying aloud, “around, down, and across.” For t, they would say “down and across” as they write it. You can also have them blend sounds together using magnetic tiles or use whiteboards to have them read or spell basic words. The more multisensory tools you can integrate, the better!
Daily reading
It is important that your child with dyslexia reads every day, ideally during a designated reading time. This might be right after school or before dinner - whatever time works for them is fine as long as they stay consistent. While decodable books containing sound patterns they have already learned are ideal, other books are fine too. Try to find books at their level on topics they’re interested in; if they like dinosaurs or rainbows, try to find books on those topics to help engage them. The more interested they are in the topic, the more likely they will enjoy reading. If reading a whole book themselves is too challenging, you can also try alternating reading where you read a page and then they read one until they are ready to read the complete book on their own.
Make reading fun!
While reading may be challenging for your child with dyslexia, the more enjoyable you can make the experience, the better. Try setting up a reading nook in your child’s room with a comfortable couch and some pillows that is dedicated just to reading. You can also set up a family reading hour (once per week, every other day, or every day - whatever works for your family) where every family member selects a book to read and you all sit together reading these books. Model for your child that reading is an enjoyable experience and a great way to relax and unwind.
Orton Gillingham tutoring
If your child with dyslexia continues to struggle with their reading, you may want to consider Orton Gillingham tutoring. The Orton Gillingham method is a structured, research-based, multisensory method that helps students develop stronger reading and spelling skills. With this method, students learn individual letters and their corresponding sounds using a multisensory approach and are then taught how to blend those sounds together to form words. Once they have grasped reading words with CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) patterns, they can move on to reading words with blends, consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs, silent e patterns, r-controlled patterns, and multi-syllabic words - all using a systematic, multisensory approach. This type of dyslexia tutoring using the Orton Gillingham method can help your child develop much stronger reading skills.
As students move through school, the reading demands increase rapidly. Help your child with dyslexia build stronger reading skills with these ideas and they will likely become more confident and successful in school.
