Dyslexia Resources
A brief rundown of resources we've found useful as we've navigated dyslexia.
I offer this list with some trepidation. My experience with dyslexia is limited to working with my son and listening to other people’s personal experiences, so I’m no expert. However, all the resources listed below have been critical for unlocking some piece of the reading puzzle. It’s hard to say how any one of these resources would have worked alone. To those of you who are struggling along the dyslexia reading journey, my very earnest wishes that something on this list can be useful to you!
The Gift of Dyslexia
Reading The Gift of Dyslexia by Ronald Davis really changed my perspective on dyslexia, in a good way. I cried while reading the author’s personal experiences in grade school. It’s hard to fathom what some kids endure because of things beyond their control. The book is a good peek into how people take in and process the world around them very differently than I do and how that can be a real talent. We did the activities in the book for younger children. We made all the letters of the alphabet in clay, which really did stop the letters from flipping around. That was a huge step forward in our reading progress. I can’t speak to the exercises for older children because we didn’t do them.
Dyslexia Is My Superpower
I actually hated the premise of Dyslexia is My Superpower, the goal of which seems to teach kids to accept dyslexia as a disability and then be proud of it, which seems like a really great way to permanently stunt kids’ potential. However, I really appreciated all the firsthand accounts of what it’s like to live with dyslexia—I didn’t know that it can be hard to remember the sequence of the months of the year or the days of the week or to remember people’s names. And I really liked all the art from the kids—a great perspective on how dyslexia is perceived. This was definitely a helpful book.
Spell to Write and Read
A friend gave me this set of materials. Thank you, friend! This was another huge step forward for us. While the suggestions in The Gift of Dyslexia of making the letters and hard-to-visualize words in clay were very helpful, I felt unsure where to go after that. You still have to teach a kid to read, and Spell to Write and Read was a perfect starting point for us. The program is very thorough and very effective in learning how to read and write English, starting by learning the phonograms of English—meaning, you learn the sounds of the language, all the ways they can be represented by letter combinations, and how the sounds fit together. I will say that there was a bit of a learning curve to understanding how all the parts of the program fit together, but once we got it down, it was very effective. The repetitive nature of the program helped us let go of past unhelpful reading habits and replace them with effective ones. I eventually felt exhausted by the drill-like nature of the program, but I think it was exactly what we needed for a year or so to get into really good habits. That said, I went looking for another option because I felt like there were a few holes in the explanations of phonograms, plus I felt like we needed a bit more variety.
Cursive First
Along with Spell to Write and Read, we switched over to cursive handwriting, using Cursive First. The metaphors—clocks, floors in a house—that this program uses to help kids think about what sorts of shapes they’re supposed to be making are very easy to visualize and remember. It was so helpful for my son to learn cursive because the letters look distinct and they’re connected to each other. When you write in cursive, you can’t make this kind of a mistake:
Plus, cursive is actually way less taxing to write. Most of us never got past second-grade cursive, so we never learn the technique of good handwriting, but (and this is a bit off topic) if you actually do want to learn how to write effortlessly, efficiently, and beautifully, I recommend American Cursive Handwriting by Michael Sull.
McGuffy Readers
These are the readers that Laura Ingalls Wilder used growing up. Tried and true, simple and effective, my son was way more successful with these little stories than with a lot of other early readers we tried. The approach is phonics-based and dovetails fairly well with Spell to Write and Read. Not surprisingly, since we live on a farm, my son liked the old-timey, farm aspect of the stories. It felt real to him, as opposed to the placeless, meaningless stories written for beginning readers nowadays. I also think it was easier for him to stay motivated to read the whole story because it was all on the same page. He could see the end and knew how close he was to being done. That’s important when you have to work as hard as he does to read. The only problem with the readers is that there’s no instruction manual for the teacher, so you have to do some detective work to figure out some of the methodology. I’m sure there are places on the internet that help you out, but I found that looking at the second year’s book had some helpful clues. I also appreciated McGuffy’s emphasis on elocution, which is something nobody seems to care about anymore, but which makes reading out loud so much more enjoyable for both reader and listener.
The Logic of English
When I went looking to fill in the holes of Spell to Write and Read, I found The Logic of English curriculum instead, and this is what we are currently using. I’ve started my younger child on this program, and I can’t count the number of times I have thought to myself, “If only my first child could have started with this.” I wonder how much grief we could have saved if we had started this way. You get a solid understanding of how the sounds of English fit together before you even try to do any reading. So instead of English being this mystifying list of exceptions and memorization, it fits together. There’s real logic to it! The upper-level series has been great for my older son. It’s a good mix of activities – reading, spelling, grammar, handwriting. It’s very thorough and fills in most of the holes I felt in Spell to Write and Read. The Logic of English is more expensive (although they have a scratch-and-dent sale twice a year), so if your budget is tight, Spell to Write and Read will do the job just fine. In fact, I would say there are things from Spell to Write and Read that I’ve continued to use. I deeply appreciate both sets of materials. They have been life savers for us!
GAPS
As we’re finding more and more, the health of the gut influences the whole body, the brain included. Since we did some serious gut healing with the Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) diet a few years before we started school, it’s hard to say how it did or did not help our son with dyslexia. However, it did make a huge difference with other kinds of neurological challenges, and I have often wondered if the reading challenges we faced would have been more acute had we not already focused on gut health and food. We’ll never know. What should be obvious is that it’s hard to concentrate and do well on anything when you’re feeling icky, and cleaning up your diet makes you feel better, hence, it’s easier to be in control of your behavior. Scary, but true.
Upper Cervical Chiropractic Care
This is a chiropractic approach that focuses on the bones that connect the skull to the spine. It is very gentle, and very effective. There is truth to the old idea that you need to have your head screwed on straight. By the time we learned about upper cervical chiropractic care, we had been in the reading trenches for a couple years and already made some significant progress, so again, I can’t pinpoint the effect of it. But making sure your brain stem isn’t experiencing pressure from misaligned bones in your neck is critically important for all kinds of physiological processes. The upper cervical chiropractic approach is different than regular chiropractic care, and it is very effective when done well.
Myofunctional Therapy
To belabor the point, good breathing is important. Myofunctional therapy etc. helps train the muscles of the mouth and throat so that you’re getting enough oxygen. Among other things, that means you sleep better at night, which means you can cope with the challenges of daily life—like learning to read—much better. James Nestor’s book Breath is a great read, and the myobrace has been very effective.
Visual Therapy
While dyslexia and vision issues are two separate matters, visual processing issues can also make it hard to read. It’s possible to have both challenges. Visual processing challenges include struggling to smoothly connect one line of text to another. Many people with these kinds of visual challenges seem to have good overall eyesight; it’s keeping track of the details that is challenging. Therapy can train the eyes to work together. The Power Behind Your Eyes by Robert-Michael Kaplan gives a quick overview.
This post is the accompaniment to the essay, Reading is an Anti-Social Act.