The Gift of Dyslexia
Dyslexia - A description
People sometimes believe dyslexia is a visual issue. They think of it as kids reversing letters or writing backwards. But dyslexia is not a problem with vision or with seeing letters in the wrong direction. Because people with dyslexia tend to see words as a whole and not in the individual pieces of letters (holistic inspection), they often have difficulty breaking them into the individual phonemes or "chunks of sound".
A key sign of dyslexia in kids is trouble decoding words. This is the ability to match letters to sounds and then use that skill to read words accurately and fluently. One reason kids have difficulty decoding is that they often struggle with a more basic language skill called phonemic awareness. This is the ability to recognize individual sounds in words. Trouble with this skill can show up as early as preschool.
Common Characteristics of Dyslexia
- Has trouble recognizing whether two words rhyme
- Struggles with taking away the beginning sound from a word
- Struggles with learning new words
- Has trouble recognizing letters and matching them to sounds
- Has trouble taking away the middle sound from a word or blending several sounds to make a word
- Often can't recognize common sight words
- Quickly forgets how to spell many of the words she studies
- Gets tripped up by word problems in math
- Makes many spelling errors
- Frequently has to re-read sentences and paragraphs
- Reads at a lower academic level than how she speaks
Dyslexia and the Brain
Experience it yourself
Strategies for the classroom
- Explicitly teach phonemic awareness, letter-sound relationships, spelling patterns, syllabification rules, and decoding strategies
- Use a multi-sensory approach to teaching and practicing spelling, word patterns, and sight words
- Allow for alternate mediums for consuming and producing information - podcasts, vlogs, etc
- Allow students to use technology to help accommodate for their difficulties - grammarly, text to speech and speech to text software
- Take a Universal Design Approach to instruction. What is good teaching for students with dyslexia is good teaching for a wide range of students. See lists of common accommodations here, here, and here.