Your kid looks at the word frame and says fame. It’s a word with similar letters but it changes the meaning. Are you exhausted by the guessing game? This post shares 5 keys on how to teach a dyslexic child to read.
Ever wonder why your dyslexic child looks at the word “Persia” and guesses “person.” As an Orton Gillingham Tutor let me share why this is happening. In a typical reader’s brain, the left hemisphere is the part responsible for language. It’s like a high-speed fiber-optic network. When they see a word, the signal zips from the visual processing center to the area that connects sounds to letters, and then straight to the “word form” area where meaning is stored. It’s like a triangle of information zipping around.
In the brain of a dyslexic child, that fiber-optic cable has a few snags. Instead of using the efficient pathways on the left, the brain tries to compensate by using the right hemisphere. Now, the right hemisphere is wonderful. It’s where your child’s creativity and big picture thinking is located. But it is NOT built for the fast-paced, granular work of decoding phonemes. The process takes longer, mistakes are made, and automaticity requires more practice.
You’ve probably heard the term OG. It doesn’t mean Original GOAT (greatest of all time). While l like the comparison, it stands for Orton Gillingham which is a methodology of teaching dyslexic children how to read. It sounds very formal, but Orton-Gillingham is just a philosophy or way of teaching that is based on how the brain actually learns.
Back in the 1920s, a pioneering neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Orton, began studying children who were bright but couldn’t master reading. He was one of the first to realize that dyslexia wasn’t a vision problem, rather a difference in how the brain processes language. His work involved understanding neural connections and the role they play in building memory. He had the “why,” it was occurring, but needed the “how” to fix it, which is where Anna Gillingham came in. She was an exceptional educator who took Dr. Orton’s clinical research and distilled it into a structured, step-by-step teaching system. The system was designed to go from the simple to the complex; from sounds, to syllables, to words, to sentences, to paragraphs. Together, Dr. Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham created a multisensory approach that combined sight, sound, and touch to forge new neural pathways.
It was a revolutionary approach created by a doctor and a teacher, and it remains the gold standard because it respects exactly how a dyslexic brain is wired to learn.
When you think about how to teach a dyslexic child to read, you want to look for several specific elements in a program. If your child’s program doesn’t have these elements, it’s like trying to bake a cake without an oven. So let’s get down to specifics and talk about how to teach a dyslexic child to read and understand why Orton Gillingham is recommended.
There are five keys that are needed when discussing how to teach a dyslexic child to read. I’m not referring to a specific curriculum, rather to key elements that need to be included in any program that is used. In the next post I’ll share the names of specific reading programs that parents of dyslexic kids can purchase. Think of this post as a two-part series: 1) the 5 key elements and 2) reading programs that incorporate these elements.
We don’t leave anything to chance. We don’t “hope” the child notices that C says /s/ when followed by E, I, or Y. We tell them. We show them. We practice until it’s automatic. For a dyslexic child, just reading books isn’t enough to pick up on patterns. They need the code of the English language presented on a silver platter. Believe it or not, English is much more logical than most people think. There are rules that can be taught. So you want to ask for the scope and sequence of the program in question.
Good programs don’t follow the alphabet. Instead, they start with the most common sounds in the English language and gradually expand to the least common sounds. But there is a second point that is really important. We don’t move on until concepts are mastered. Think of it this way…If a solid foundation hasn’t been achieved, then do not pass GO and collect $200. (Sorry, I played Monopoly too often as a child.) All kidding aside, it’s not about getting through the curriculum in a specific number of weeks. It’s about spending the time on a concept until it’s mastered. This is important because once mastered, it moves to long term memory which frees up the brain for other things.
VAKT stands for Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, and Tactile. Honestly, this is the secret sauce in how to teach a dyslexic child to read. What does each term mean?
When I’m teaching the idiom: feeling blue, I will have a picture of a blue child looking sad, I will say the idiom and (depending upon the age) I will have the child use their finger to trace an imaginary frown on their own mouth.
By using different pathways at once, you force different parts of the brain to talk to each other. You are building that bridge across the lake. But this takes time. By now, you know that I love analogies so perhaps the best analogy that I can make is if the front door to the house is locked, walk around and open the back door. The objective is to get into the house. Efficient readers use the front door, while dyslexic readers walk to the back door and some even have to climb through the window.
Every lesson I give is based on what the child did previously. If they are struggling with the vowel-consonant-e pattern, then they need a lot more practice before we can move on. This is a really important element when sharing how to teach a dyslexic child to read. Too often teachers need to keep the class moving. They can’t wait for everyone to catch up. But if the child hasn’t mastered the concept they won’t retrieve it quickly; they will use too much brain power trying to figure it out. So, we teach, reteach, and practice until it’s mastered.
This point relates to how often your child is taught with the program. Ideally, it’s every day for about an hour. For learning to happen, we need constant exposure, over time, until it moves into long term memory. The more continuous the exposure the faster that will happen and the more information that can be learned. Let’s say there are 100 concepts that your child needs to learn. If they learn 1 concept a day it will take 100 sessions to get through everything. If your child has 5 sessions a week then it will take 20 weeks. Now if your child only has 1 session a week, it will take 100 sessions. This assumes they master everything they are taught immediately (which isn’t realistic but I’m just explaining why continuous exposure is important).
Now let me put these key elements together and wrap it up nicely with a virtual bow. I am going to start by asking you a question.
What color is a polar bear?
If you’re in a place where you can answer, say it out loud. White. Correct! I expect most of you replied within 3 seconds. You didn’t think long and hard. You simply knew. Now let’s talk about what happened in your brain. Since you were not thinking about the color of a polar bear before I asked, that means the information was not in short term memory. Your brain had to retrieve it from long term memory. So it did and you knew the answer.
We want the same thing to occur when your child reads. That only happens when automaticity is achieved. Automaticity is when you can read a word within 3 seconds or faster. The brain processes the information quickly and automatically. It takes time and continuous exposure for that to happen. Information builds upon previous information until it comes together. So when you want to know how to teach a dyslexic child to read, you want to ensure that you are incorporating all five pillars.
Now, let’s discuss some Dos and Don’ts to be aware of as you discover how to teach a dyslexic child to read. Let’s start with the Dos.
Spelling helps reading so it’s important to teach alongside reading. When spelling, forget about writing the word ten times. Instead use Elkonin boxes. Each box represents a sound (not a letter). This can be a game-changer for those digraphs, trigraphs, diphthongs. A digraph is one sound made by 2 letters; a trigraph is one sound made by three letters; a diphthong are two adjacent vowels that make a blended sound. So many things that have to be explicitly taught!
When your child is reading with you at home, and they come to a word they don’t know, you want to help them sound it out. Never ask them to look at the picture or guess a word that might make sense. That actually encourages using the wrong brain pathways. So when they come to an unfamiliar word, tap out each sound. Use your fingers to represent each sound. This takes getting used to and forces the brain to do the hard work of decoding rather than the lazy work of guessing.
Right now, it might feel like you’re in the thick of a battle. You have that nagging worry about your child’s future. But every time your child picks up a book (even though it’s hard) they are showing more courage than most adults do in a week.
By seeking out information on how to teach a dyslexic child to read, you are already providing the most important thing your child needs – a path forward. Remember, it’s one step at a time. One sound at a time.
Does this feel overwhelming? You can also contact us about 1 to 1 Orton Gillingham tutoring for your child.
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