How to Teach a Child With Dyslexia to Read: 8 Helpful Strategies

Teaching a child with dyslexia to read requires explicit, systematic instruction and plenty of opportunities for meaningful practice and reinforcement.

Students with dyslexia may need more instruction, repetition, and practice to develop accurate and automatic reading skills. Multisensory activities can provide additional reinforcement by engaging visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile elements as students practice what has been explicitly taught.

The goal isn't to replace phonics or decoding with pictures, movement, or memorization. Instead, these supports can be used alongside structured literacy instruction to help students retain, retrieve, and apply what they're learning.

Here are eight practical ways parents and teachers can support children with dyslexia.

1. Use Visuals to Reinforce What Has Been Explicitly Taught

Visual supports can provide an additional memory connection for students who have difficulty retaining new information.

For example, when teaching letter-sound correspondences, a visual can reinforce the relationship between the grapheme and its sound. Child1st's Alphabet resources use images that incorporate the shape of the letter itself, creating an additional visual connection to the grapheme being learned.

The visual should support the instructional target rather than replace it.

Students still need explicit instruction and practice with the letter, sound, word, or spelling pattern. The visual provides another way to reinforce and retrieve that information.

Explore the Child1st Alphabet Collection →

2. Incorporate Movement and Hands-On Practice

Movement can provide another way for students to practice and reinforce new learning.

A student might use a body motion while practicing a phoneme-grapheme correspondence, physically manipulate letters while spelling a word, or use manipulatives while developing a mathematical concept.

The important point is that movement is connected directly to the skill being taught.

Rather than asking a student simply to memorize information through repetition, give them opportunities to see it, say it, hear it, and interact with it while practicing. 

3. Teach Reading Explicitly and Systematically

Children with dyslexia benefit from reading instruction that is direct, explicit, systematic, and cumulative.

Rather than expecting students to discover how written language works on their own, explicitly teach skills such as:

• Phonemic awareness
• Phoneme-grapheme correspondences
• Blending and segmenting
• Decoding
• Encoding and spelling
• Common spelling patterns
• High-frequency and irregular words
• Fluency

Introduce skills in a logical sequence, provide guided practice, review previously taught material, and give students many opportunities to apply their learning in reading and spelling.

Some learners also benefit from seeing how the pieces fit into a meaningful whole. Explicitly teaching sounds and spelling patterns remains essential, but showing children how those patterns function within real words can give the smaller parts meaning and context. For a child who naturally looks for the big picture, understanding where the pieces are going can make the individual pieces easier to learn and apply.

For students who understand a skill during instruction but have difficulty retaining it, multisensory reinforcement can provide additional practice.

4. Let Students Hear, Say, Read, and Spell

Auditory practice is an important part of literacy instruction.

Give students opportunities to hear sounds, pronounce them, blend them into words, segment words into individual phonemes, and connect those sounds with their written representations.

Reading aloud can also provide useful fluency practice when the text is appropriate for the student's current skills.

Rather than relying on one form of practice, combine hearing, speaking, seeing, reading, and writing so students have repeated opportunities to work with the same literacy concepts.

5. Teach Visualization for Comprehension

Learning to read involves more than recognizing the words on the page. Students also need to understand and remember what they read.

For a struggling reader, so much mental effort can be devoted to word recognition that comprehension becomes difficult.

After reading a sentence or short passage, pause and ask questions such as:

What happened?

What are you picturing?

Who or what is this passage about?

What happened first, next, and last?

Creating a mental representation of the meaning of a passage can help students remain actively engaged with what they're reading.

This is different from using a picture to guess an unfamiliar word. Decoding identifies the words; comprehension strategies help the reader construct meaning from them.

6. Make Patterns Explicit

English spelling contains many recurring patterns.

Instead of presenting every word as an unrelated item to memorize, help students notice and practice the patterns that connect words.

For example, once a spelling pattern has been explicitly taught, students can read and spell multiple words containing that pattern. Comparing related words gives students repeated opportunities to apply the same knowledge.

The same principle can be useful in mathematics, where students can explore relationships among number combinations rather than memorizing isolated facts.

Child1st resources use patterns, visuals, movement, and hands-on practice to provide additional reinforcement of explicitly taught concepts.

7. Give Extra Support for High-Frequency and Irregular Words

Some students with dyslexia continue to hesitate over high-frequency or irregular words even after those words have been explicitly introduced.

This is where additional multisensory reinforcement may be useful.

With SnapWords®, students first attend to the printed word, its pronunciation, spelling, and its regular or irregular features. The visual, motion, and verbal connections then provide temporary memory anchors while students practice retrieving the word.

As recognition becomes automatic, the student moves beyond the visual support and recognizes the printed word independently.

The goal is not:

See a picture → guess the word.

The goal is:

Teach explicitly → reinforce multisensorily → practice retrieval → recognize automatically → apply in reading.

Explore SnapWords® Sight Word Cards →

You can also learn how SnapWords fit with structured literacy and the Science of Reading →.

8. Provide Plenty of Multisensory Practice and Review

Children with dyslexia often need more practice and review before newly learned information becomes automatic.

Multisensory practice can make that repetition more meaningful and engaging.

Depending on the skill, students might:

• Say a sound while writing its grapheme
• Manipulate letters to build and spell words
• Use movement connected to a sound or spelling pattern
• Practice retrieving a high-frequency word
• Read controlled text containing previously taught patterns
• Use hands-on materials to explore a mathematical concept

The purpose of multisensory instruction isn't to replace explicit teaching.

It provides additional ways to practice and reinforce what has been taught so students can retain it, retrieve it, and apply it more independently.

Helping a Child With Dyslexia Become a More Confident Reader

Children with dyslexia can make meaningful progress when instruction is explicit, systematic, cumulative, and supported with sufficient practice.

Some students need more reinforcement than others before sounds, spelling patterns, and words become automatic. That's where Child1st resources can help.

Our multisensory materials are designed to provide visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and hands-on reinforcement alongside explicit instruction, helping students practice skills they are learning in reading, spelling, and math.

Easy-for-Me™ Reading combines explicit instruction in phonics and word construction with meaningful visual and multisensory supports. Children practice hearing sounds, seeing spelling patterns, building and reading words, and applying what they learn in connected reading. Easy-for-Me™ Children's Readers provide additional opportunities to practice developing reading skills in connected text.

Looking for the right place to begin?

For Parents:
Download the Free Parent's Guide to Supporting a Child With Dyslexia

For Teachers & Interventionists:
See How Child1st Supports Automaticity for Students With Dyslexia

Ready to explore resources?
Explore SnapWords®

See How Child1st Resources Fit Into Your Existing Curriculum
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