Like it or not, when Fall rolls around, many of us may need to school from home whether it's our first choice or not. What if your student is dyslexic? Can it possibly work? There are a lot of people who can't see schooling from home working for their student, but...
READING FLUENCY: Phrase Craze
Once students have made significant progress with single word decoding, reading fluency practice can be rolled into reading practice with phrase cueing. HERE is a nice review of reading fluency approaches that includes a discussion of phrased reading. Phrase scooping...
The Remediated Student – WHAT TO EXPECT [PREMIUM]
For the overwhelming majority of dyslexics, early intervention helps with the decoding step of reading. Usually 2-3 months of intervention is enough to see a measurable difference, and at least in our experience, 1-3 years to bring most children from failing their grade to being able to keep up in diverse subjects at grade-level with appropriate […]
[PREMIUM] TEST-TAKING: DYSLEXIA and MULTIPLE CHOICE
At the secondary and university level, many students with dyslexia may prefer short answer questions to multiple choice. There are many reasons why the multiple choice question format may not be a good estimator of a student’s knowledge. It is very common for the questions and choice answers to be ambiguous. From Biochemical Education: “Writing […]
[PREMIUM] Reading and Spelling: When Sights and Sounds Don’t Match
TRICKY WORDS:WHEN SIGHTS AND SOUNDS DON’T MATCHSpotlight: Inflectional Suffixes Because many dyslexic students don’t have a visual imprint of words, there are common spelling or pronunciation errors that occur when word endings seem to vary. In most cases, being explicitly taught the different patterns can reduce a great deal of distress later. The technical term […]
This Secondary School Developed a Comprehensive Plan to Help All DYSLEXIC Students
Here's one remarkable school decided to go 'all in' to help a dyslexic high school student who seemed to be slipping away. Matthew was a rising 10th grader at a non-selective high school. The majority of students at the school were described as being of low...
Dyslexic Master Montessori Teacher ALISON AWES [Premium]
I recently had a chance to talk with Master Montessori Teacher Alison Awes who is based at the Montessori Training Center of Minnesota. Alison is dyslexic herself and she has written about how Montessori instruction can support dyslexic students. Alison is also trained in Orton-Gillingham Level1. Like the Orton-Gillingham method, the Montessori approach was created […]
STRATEGIES FOR THE MOST COMMON SPELLING MISTAKES: THE SCHWA [Premium]
Once you learn how to recognize the ‘schwa’, you’ll start recognizing them everywhere! In linguistics, the schwa sound is represented by an upside-down ‘e’ and the mouth position is a lot like the ‘uh’ sound in ‘butter’. It contributes to lots of misspellings in dyslexic students (and actually non-dyslexic students too) so recognizing the patterns […]
[Premium] What to Do If a Reading Curriculum Doesn’t Work
It happens to everybody. You research a curriculum thoroughly or it gets through several levels of a review and then you put it into action and… it just doesn’t connect. What do you do? There are several common reasons why a curriculum doesn’t connect with a particular student – and so some trial and error and […]