Q: My 15 year old daughter was recently found to be severely dyslexic. Her public high school has set her to enroll her in an online high school because her local school can't meet her needs. We've been told that her vocabulary is weak. What program would you...
Teaching Common Core Academic Vocabulary to Students with Dyslexia [Premium]
Academic Vocabulary are words that usually appear in higher educational settings or advanced texts rather than everyday conversational speech. Before the Common Core, most language arts programs had little emphasis on explicit teaching of academic words, but direct instruction is often very important for students with dyslexia because it contributes significantly to test performance and reading comprehension of complex texts. In addition, lack of mastery of complex vocabulary can hold students back from pursuing advanced degrees and success in academic vocabulary text-heavy STEM careers like science and engineering. Why Academic Vocabulary May Be Hard for Dyslexic Students to Learn There are several reasons why dyslexic students may have greater difficulty with academic vocabulary: – many academic words are long and hard to read – many academic words […]
Helping Severe Dyslexia – Part 2 Word Learning and Vocabulary [Premium]
In our previous post on Severe Dyslexia, we talked about 6 steps required to read: 1. Seeing 2. Visual Recognition of Words 3. Matching Letters and Words to Sounds – Phonemic Awareness 4. Matching Words to Word Meaning 5. Saying Words 6. Comprehending Text In that post, we talked about how different readers may have difficulty with the visual aspects of reading, whereas others have trouble with sound. Other areas where children or adults can have trouble are in the areas of learning and remembering word meaning, speech output, and finally reading comprehension in text form. It’s important to be able to target these areas because it helps prioritize needs and also could explain while more progress isn’t being made. One student may need intensive remediation in […]
Top Dyslexia App: Grammarly
Congratulations to Grammarly, a free-premium software that adds directly onto the Safari, Chrome, and the Firefox browser and can be downloaded HERE. I've been using it on my Mac and it's already caught a number of errors. If you use Microsoft Word or Outlook on...
How to Read to Kids with Dyslexia – Reading As a Conversation [Premium]
There are many good ways to read to children with dyslexia. In this post, we wanted to talk share an approach that some have called “dialogic” or like a dialogue. A dialogue is a back and forth conversation, and that is exactly how this style of reading goes. Rather than having a parent or teacher read aloud with a child listening, in dialogic reading, the adult helps the child tell the story. The acronym for this method is PEER: 1. Prompt a child to say something about the book. 2. Evaluate her response. 3. Expand the response by rephrasing and adding more detail, and 4. Repeat the prompt to make sure the child learned. Except for the first reading of the book, PEER sequences should […]
Choosing the Right Reading Level Books for Students with Dyslexia [Premium]
It’s often told to parents that a “Five Finger Rule” can help you choose whether a book is at the right reading level for a student. The rule states that if a student misses five or more words, it may be too hard, no words and it might be too easy, and three words and it’s ‘just right’. The problem for dyslexic students is that the “Five Finger Rule” may prevent them accessing print information at their intellectual level and if reading aloud is the guide for the rule, then it’s possible they may never be granted access to higher level books even if they are university professors! In fact, pioneering work by Rosalie Fink (see research paper below for Premium members), showed that accomplished […]
Dyslexia in the General Classroom – YOU DECIDE : 2nd Grader and Reading [Premium]
YOU are a 2nd-grade teacher in a busy public school classroom. You just learned that Teddy, a student in your class has been tested and found to be dyslexic. Teddy already gets pull-out instruction with multisensory learning to help him read. What can you do to help Teddy make more progress in reading? ************ 1. Alliteration, Rhyming, and Singing – All students can benefit by alliteration and rhyming. New readers will find the books easier to read and reinforcing in terms of the patterns of sounds and printed word families, but good readers can also use alliteration and rhyming as a prompt for poetry and humorous writing. Here is a nice graphic organizer for alliteration: (click here for more). This teacher created alliteration spinners to […]