What’s a teacher to do???

When students seem “stuck”, making little to no progress ....

AMP IT UP!!

Amplify Intensity of instruction- Through diagnostic assessment and progress monitoring, become very focused on the barrier to the reading.  Mini-lessons and conferences can focus on guiding the student around the barrier.

Amplify Sensory input- Simultaneous multi-sensory review of skills is the only proven method for helping dyslexic students to learn to be automatic enough with sounds and words to overcome their difficulty with reading.  Students should learn written language through visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic channels.  Spaced repetition should be used to help with memory.

Amplify Frequency of practice- Finding snippets of time for the practice of phonics skills, math facts, and sight words will lead to automaticity.  Motivation for practice at home will reap quicker results.

Notes on Dyslexia:

• Recent research indicates that as many as 1 in 5 children have a form of dyslexia.  This means every teacher will probably encounter several students in every class with this persistent barrier to reading success.
• The most successful approach to overcoming dyslexia is systematic phonics instruction paired with meaningful reading experiences.  The phonics instruction should have simultaneous multi-sensory instruction of new skills, such as letter/sound relationships, blending sounds, knowledge of irregular sight words, and syllabication.
• Dyslexics are often mistaken to have lower thinking skills than their reading peers.  Often this is not at all true.  These students are often the best problem solvers, inventors, and creators.  They need the chance to hear text on topics of interest, to read with support,  and to discuss higher levels of text than they can decode on their own.
• Students will not “outgrow” dyslexia.  They can learn strategies that will help them read, but they may never be good spellers, and fluency may remain out of reach.  However, they can learn to understand complex text and succeed in conquering classes even at the college level.  Some doctors are dyslexic, many entertainers and scientists are dyslexic.
• COLLABORATE with your academic coaches and your SPED staff, to include the Speech Pathologist.  They have many resources and strategies to help you with these students.

Source:  Shaywitz, S. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia: A new and complete science-based program for reading problems at any level (1st ed.). New York, NY: A.A. Knopf :.