The labelling of a child as Dyslexic can to some parents be a blessing. If you have been aware of the struggles your child has faced in the classroom then you hope that the new label will help ease the situation.
For most schools to pick up on literacy difficulties there must be a clear lack of progress in literacy development for quite sometime. This has often led to the child feeling daily failure in the literacy hour or writing / reading sessions. Amazingly and as proof to those who still consider the dyslexic to be just plain stupid, many of these children have developed excellent coping skills and have managed to avoid the teacher’s eye for a while. Girls in particular generally take longer to be spotted because they are happier to share answers and work with each other, unlike competitive boys.
As a parent job number one is to ensure that a child’s self-confidence is still intact and find an area that the child succeeds at. Then carefully encourage learning, often of course kinaesthetic is proposed to be the best but anything that is repetitive and allows encouragement is a great start. In fact encouragement has been proven to be as effective with developing children’s literacy skills as specialist tuition. (The encouragement and self-esteem development was carried out by a specialist psychologist and would be considerably more expensive than hiring a teacher).
There are many products on the market claiming to be the ‘fix for dyslexia’ but very few professionals would select any as the solution. Many of course have good and unique ideas all of which could be useful to the teacher. So don’t rule any ideas out, just don’t buy in completely to one idea. The best dyslexia resources will cover all aspects of literacy, phonics, blending, chunking, comprehension, writing and spelling to name a few. Yet this itself is a huge amount of work.
At Dyslexia-Consultants we are proud to sell a range of products to support dyslexia.
Spelling programs like Nessy games, Literacy teaching programs like Nessy Deluxe, board games, fun worksheets, dry wipe board (especially good as the evidence can be got rid off) , spelling cards, spelling books like Stareway to Spelling, books to teach phonics, decoding and chunking like Toe by Toe and of course the tried and trusted Stride Ahead for comprehension skills in those dyslexics who can read but have no spare brain power to comprehend the text as they are trying so hard to decode our bizarre and irregular language.
All of the resources sold at Dyslexia-Consultants have been tried and tested over years of specialist teaching with children from 8 to 15. We can offer advice on the suitability of the product choices in relation to advice given by schools, psychological reports or general areas of weakness.
Of course it is always advised by schools to have your child’s eye sight checked – just to be sure- and ask the school if they have a set or buy for £12.25 a set of coloured reading rulers or overlays to check for visual stress. You can of course get the optician to do this for you but it will be a lot more expensive than £12.25 and knowing those with visual stress – the visual stress and colour choice will change depending on room lighting etc.
Good luck but remain positive- what’s the worst that can happen –David.S.Cooper Dyslexia-consultants.co.uk
