Dyslexia

Thinking about Dyslexia and learning

The difference a tutor can make to your child or young adult with Dyslexia

You may have already tried various ideas to help your child with their spelling, phonics, reading and writing challenges – but hit hurdles along the way which you have found difficult to overcome. When parents come to us, they often mention that, though they wish to provide the best support they can, they acknowledge lacking the in-depth knowledge and skills a specialist tutor can provide.

How do I help my child with dyslexia at home?

“As a parent, it is important to reinforce your child’s learning of phonics using activities that are consistent with those used by the specialist tutor. Trying something different might be confusing and counter-productive” explains Linda. Here are some ideas for activities for parents to make reading and spelling enjoyable, meaningful and successful for children with dyslexia.

For all children struggling with literacy:

• Beneficial multisensory methodsIncludes writing with fingers in sand, or using condensation on windows or mirrors. You can also make huge letter shapes in the air, trace letters on the back of a friend or sibling, all the while repeating the letter sounds while making their shapes.
• Read stories and books togetherAs opposed to focusing on individual words or contrived sentences. Even if you, the parent, are doing most of the reading and your child is just contributing by reading the occasional word, they are enjoying the experience of reading, and getting meaning from written words.
• When your child is reading to you, try not to correct their mistakesIf what they have read does not make sense, give gentle feedback that encourages your child to monitor themselves and self-correct without feeling bad – for example, quietly asking: “Do you think that’s right?” or “Does that make sense?”
• Encourage your child to ask you if they don’t know a wordAllow your child time to work out a word, and again don’t be too quick to prompt.
• Try writing simple instructions for your child to followAs part of a Treasure Hunt, or a guide on how to make something. This encourages children to judge for themselves whether they have read the instructions correctly. You could also try asking them to write instructions for you to follow.

For children at the very early stages of literacy:

When reading a story, have your child try to find all the examples of a target letter in a page, or paragraph.

To help them do this, you can have them colour/highlight that letter. Then read through the whole page, stopping at each identified word, and emphasising the target letter sound as you read it.

Play multisensory games to practice recognising letters and their sounds, or simple high-frequency words. Games that involve jumping around are often the most effective, as well as the most fun (see blog for specific ideas).

For older children with some literacy skills:

Don’t be too concerned about reading accuracy when mistakes don’t change the meaning of the sentence. This is because pointing out minor errors can undermine a child’s confidence, and may often then lead to more errors being made.

When your child comes across an unfamiliar word, it is not always necessary to sound out every letter. If they use context cues, they can often work out what even a multisyllabic word says from the first three or four letters, by thinking what would make sense in that sentence e.g. “Mum was ill so she went to the hosp…“ Reverse roles. So you read to your child, but deliberately make some mistakes for them to correct you. Be sure to make deliberate mistakes fairly obvious, though!

With written work, where there are spelling mistakes, give credit for the parts of the word that are spelled correctly, even if it’s just the initial letter. It may be just a little part of the word is misspelled

We all know how central reading and writing skills are to the school curriculum and life in general. But they should also be shared as a source of great pleasure – the more enjoyment children get from reading and writing tasks, the better their progress is likely to be.