I'm not a doctor with any special interest in Dyslexia, or what it is more often diagnosed as today, Specific Reading Disorder. I'm not a specialist. I don't have dyslexia myself. What I do have is a daughter who I love to bits and pieces who is smart, outgoing, vibratious, and happens to have dyslexia.
Or, more accurately, she has literary dyslexia, dyscalcula, and auditory dyslexia.
Now, if you're new to the world of dyslexia there are resources out the wazoo. Some of my favorite as a mother are books like 'When your child has Dyslexia', or 'The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan'. My daughter's favorites are ones like 'Can I Tell You About Dyslexia', and 'I Have Dyslexia' which comes in a male and female version!
We could talk all day on the complex symptoms of all forms of dyslexia and how not all versions manifest in all people, or how the severity of symptoms are a sliding scale. We could talk all day on how one thing that works for a child may not work for another. But today I would like to talk about some of the things which work for my child, in hopes that it may help to encourage another homeschool parent with their dyslexic child.
When I say my daughter is smart, that isn't just Mama pride talking (Although I must admit a smidge of it of course). My eight year old has been so committed to becoming a doctor since she was three (Every Hebrew Mama's dream, am I right?) that she has taken my old medical text books and will try to work out what they say or even just study the illustrations, she'll watch YouTube medical videos for days, always takes a book out of the library that has to do with anatomy, physiology or the sort. She's very dedicated to her studies and is thriving in our homeschool enviroment with being able to continue at her own pace. In science she's almost ready to go into grade 4 already, and we're only two months into grade 3.
Yet in her English she's still at a grade 2 level in her understanding of grammar, and even lower at her reading level. Her comprehension, however, is amazing when she has the time to process what she is listening to. In math she struggles when it isn't read to her, as she can't see the numbers for what they are.
So what are some of the things which help my budding dyslexic doctor?
We have taken to using those colored films. The color isn't the issue for her as she doesn't have Irlsen, but the black edges on them help to keep her letters and numbers straight and keep her from merging them into the next column or the row beneath or above.
I let her draw! Anytime she is listening, processing, absorbing her material I let her draw. Seeing the visual as well as working with her hands helps the connecting pathways in her brain to work around the material and absorb that much better for retention.
We have learned the value in other languages. Not only are other languages largely encouraged on the broad spectrum for people with dyslexia (minus a few like French for it's difficulty in spelling and sounds to letters).
In our case we have been using American Sign Language and Hebrew. With ASL I've found it significantly helps her to be able to visually see and physically do the word or the letter without it being involved on paper. It's helped with her comprehension of new words, helped her learn to spell when she has to spell in sign, and it's all around brought back the fun to her of learning spelling as she isn't struggling with the page and the letters themselves.
But it's the Hebrew that I have seen cause the most actual improvement in her! Since the letters themselves are so different, and the reading is right to left rather than the left to right of English she doesn't feel the same sort of stress in trying to read or write her Hebrew. The language in and of itself is easier in that each letter makes a specific sound, and besides the Aleph there really are not silent letters, nothing overly tricky like we can have in English. The real shocker of using Hebrew however has been sentence structure. Hebrew utilizes a different form than English, almost more similar to French in that is seems 'backwards' in many ways to native English Speakers. At first this can seem counter productive, it did for my daughter right off the bat too, but after a bit it made her make amazing growth in her English use! Because she then has to think more on the Hebrew and the English sentence structure when she is working on DuoLingo. (If you take Hebrew on this you must first know your aleph bet, it assumes you do, you also must download a Hebrew keyboard. Duolingo is excellent for homeschool as you can make a 'classroom' and it gives your children logins without email addresses and sends you weekly reports on their progress) Having to work those extra pathways in her mind has brought her ability to form proper sentences in the English much further than learning English alone has accomplished. It's been a phenomenal growth.
I let her learn, to some extent, at her own pace. If she wants to fly through something, like her science, and is retaining it with a desire to learn more and more I am certainly not going to stop her! If she is struggling in an area the trick is learning with your child when to stop pushing. Encouragement is often needed for my daughter when doing her English or when she has to do Math without any Auditory assistance. But when she hits that wall where her frustration with the task at hand is to much she will only get worse in the way her mind is processing the information, and thus send her into a spiral. As a mom and as her teacher I must then watch my daughter for signs that this is happening and begin to back off or take her to another subject for a bit so that she doesn't sour to the subject and can come back to it with a fresh mind.
Sometimes it's giving her more grace than I'd really like to in that moment. As mothers I am sure many of you can agree that sometimes we simply want to be able to say, or at least feel, things like 'She is 8, she should be able to X,Y,Z'. Now, I don't mean simply doing the tasks an 8 year old can normally do, I mean following the steps. Because of her dyslexia I can tell her things like 'Take off your shoes, put your backpack on the hook and then fill up your water bottle'. Yet when she does things in a different order my mind wants to rebel that she didn't listen, when the truth is she may have very well processed this as 'fill up your water bottle, then take off your shoes and hang your backpack.' Which is why muddy farm footprints are now in my kitchen by the water cooler.
Life with a dyslexic daughter is never boring, but neither is life with my advanced son. Because of their learning differences I also have to cater to that in their homeschool. My son is younger than my daughter, but it isn't something that is apparent. Because of his aptitude he is already at a high grade 3 level, almost at a four in some subjects, and has already exceeded his sister at English... in truth he did so when he was still in Kindergarten. This can cause many self esteem issues in children when those younger then them are excelling beyond their capability and it did for my daughter as well.
This issue presented fixes in a couple of ways for us. First and foremost our children have learned the value in the lesson that everyone has strengths and weaknesses. That one person will be amazing in the arts, like my daughter, while another can excel at writing and math, like my son. The next is that sometimes working together is how to get the job done. While my children are both doing the same grade level currently in Math they are functioning in it at different levels. My son is a hair slower at word problems, while my daughter can't read them so struggles. But if they work on their lessons together they can talk about why one is the right answer and both cater to their individual weaknesses and strengths. And then sometimes it's better to divide and conquer. To combat the competition that happened in English my children are now using two totally separate curricula. My son is using the Lifepacs workbooks which make him practically self sufficient, able to read the instructions and do the work with very little help from me. My darling Daughter is using Learning Language Arts Through Literature, which helps her to read with me and feed her love of books while putting English very much within a context of how we use it in daily life, keeping it practical and applicable to her while staying low stress.
I hope these methods can help you find the key to unlocking your own child's mind when homeschooling! It's work, but it is the most rewarding thing in the world to know that you are discipling your child from the ground up and able to confident that they are learning how to learn from a biblical worldview. May Abba bless you all, and all your children.