8 Secrets for Teaching Children With Dyslexia

Experts agree that the best practice for teaching children with dyslexia is to teach them by engaging all their senses (multisensory teaching). This means using visuals, motion, body movement, hands-on, and auditory elements in their learning. Studies have shown that children with dyslexia draw from various regions in their brains while engaging in reading, so it stands to reason that using teaching approaches that stimulate various regions in the brain would ensure success for these learners.

“Children with dyslexia have a difficult time learning to read and write in a typical classroom setting. Most teachers often gear their lessons to students with auditory learning styles. The teacher relies mostly on talking to teach. Teachers lecture, explain and answer questions orally. The dyslexic learner cannot process this information using only his auditory modality. For this reason, dyslexic learners need to learn using an approach that simultaneously combines auditory, visual, and tactile learning strategies to teach skills and concepts."

~ Karina Richmond, MA
Pride Learning Center

8 Ways to Help a Child with Dyslexia

Child 1st resources are designed to engage multiple pathways to the brain, so you can be confident that no matter which product you select to use with your child, it has been created to do the work of teaching for you. Since the lessons in each resource explain exactly what you need to do, you don’t need any training to use the products effectively.

Here are 8 helpful ways Child 1st resources help you teach in a multisensory way that works wonders for children with dyslexia. 

1. Incorporate visual elements in learning

Embedding new material into images can supercharge young students’ abilities to understand and recall that new content. They can store the images associated with the new material into their visual memories as quickly as you can snap a picture with a camera. A recent study showed using a picture-embedded method for teaching developing readers’ sight words produced stronger performances than text-only methods. According to the study, picture-embedded methods are effective for both typically developing readers and those with more diverse needs. Children with dyslexia love visual aids, so the embedded picture provides a win-win situation. Learning and recall get a boost, and the kids enjoy the process, associating learning to read with a positive experience. 

2. Involve body movement in learning

Children with dyslexia learn more easily through hands-on activities. To work through math problems successfully, they often depend on manipulatives–objects they can move–rather than just pencil and paper. When dyslexic learners can experience a concept or word physically, they can better understand that concept. Simply giving them facts or rules to memorize will likely leave them more frustrated than educated. The same principle applies to learning words. Lean into your developing readers’ natural learning style. Lead them toward more successful, confidence-building learning by giving them the opportunity to “act out” a word or “move as the word moves.”   

3. Use an explicit, systematic approach to teaching reading 

Learners can ultimately make connections for themselves, but developing readers and math students need direct instruction showing them how to make those connections. For example, emerging readers need to be shown how the word “apple” connects to an actual fruit or to connect the short “a” sound to other important words (and what those words represent) in their world–like “daddy” or “ask” or their pet named “Happy.”  

4. Read out loud in order to utilize the auditory pathway to the brain

Children with special needs such as autism, auditory processing disorder (APD), stuttering, and dyslexia can see remarkable benefits from listening to themselves read aloud. Some children on the autism spectrum respond well to auditory input and enjoy hearing themselves speak. Children with APD often struggle to differentiate sounds, have diminished hearing, or miss letter and word sounds due to other environmental noise. Using an auditory amplification device, such as the Toobaloo®, enhances learners’ ability to hear themselves and create and simultaneously listen to letter and word sounds. For children with dyslexia, this multisensory approach and auditory emphasis allows the opportunity to pair visual signals with their corresponding sounds and gives children who stutter a low-risk chance to practice speaking and pronunciation. 

5. Teach children the art of visualizing as they read

If a child struggles with reading, chances are their entire focus is on trying to decode or “sound out” words. When decoding becomes a child's focus, the idea that words carry meaning tends to escape them. They assume "reading" just means calling out words. In 1997, literacy researchers and experts Keene and Zimmerman concluded, “Proficient readers spontaneously and purposely create mental images while and after they read.” Their conclusion continues to inform reading instruction. It is so important to teach children to stop every few lines to visualize a mental picture of what the words on the page actually mean. Learning to visualize might be slow-going at first, but as you continue to take your child through this practice, visualization will become an automatic process, and our reading materials will help make that happen. 

6. Summarize and give the big picture first, then teach the details

Children who have dyslexia (and many other learners, too) need to see the whole picture before they can understand how the parts of that global whole work. Think of your approach to assembling a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. You might need to see the completed picture on the box cover before you start sorting pieces and putting them together. For a developing reader, showing them the different ways you can spell the “Long A” sound can provide a global frame of reference that will help them better understand the many individual words that include that sound. In math, showing the children a global view of the combination of numbers that add up to 10 will make it much easier for them to learn the individual combinations. See the global map of the number combinations to 10 in the illustration below. 

7. Teach from whole to part

First, introduce basic sounds (One easy way to do this is through well-known nursery rhymes). Learners hear and see the sounds repeated. Then move to teaching whole words (using SnapWords®). After children can recognize whole words, it is easier for them to recognize the sounds within them and break those words apart into their phonemes (sounds). Through this process, children will develop “detection skills” and recognize words related by sound spelling. 

8. Use a multi-sensory teaching approach

Reading and math instruction has largely moved away from “skill and drill” type activities. However, even as new methodologies make their way to the classroom, they are often implemented with a one-size-fits-all approach or focus on a learning style or technique that may work well for “most” students but does not serve the needs of students with dyslexia. The result: frustrated students who think they just cannot learn. However, dyslexic students can successfully learn reading and math if exposed to multi-sensory instruction.

A multi-sensory approach helps them “snap” mental pictures of content embedded in images or other visuals–such as charts, graphs, or organizers. It lets them “grab on” to concepts presented through hands-on activities, and when they hear themselves speaking or reading aloud, they open up another pathway to the brain, absorbing content as they listen. 

Since its inception in 2006, Child1st has emerged as the leader in providing resources that parents and teachers alike can pick up and use. By their very design, Child1st resources meet the needs of children without the teacher-adult having to receive special training.  We exist so that every child has the opportunity to learn in their own learning language.