Every family that deals with dyslexia has its own story. I want to share with you today how our family has dealt with my son’s dyslexia diagnosis and some of how it has affected our lives and schooling.

Pre-diagnosis

Like most homeschooling parents, we didn’t know much about how to teach our kids to read. We figured we’d just kind of “wing it”, and we did just fine with our daughter. I still believe that most kids just need being read to, lots of love, and some guidance to learn to read. Things were quite different with my son, though.

He went to three-year old preschool and had a blast. We put him in four-year old preschool (for lots of reasons, none of them academic) and started to see some issues. This preschool was more academic and our very bright little boy wasn’t able to keep up. He was quite social, but couldn’t do the “academic” things that this school thought a four year old boy should have been able to do.

At age five, my son started his “real” homeschooling at home with my husband, the homeschooling parent. My daughter, three years older, was already being homeschooled. My husband started out using Hooked on Phonics with my son. After about a month or so, it would be clear that my son was not quite understanding putting sounds to letters, so they would take a break for a few months until he was more ready. This went on for about three years. It never quite seemed that he was “ready” to learn to read. He could learn to recognize letters, but he had trouble writing them down. His math skills were good, although he reversed and missed numbers regularly. He had poor short-term retention of facts, but good conceptual understanding.

At the end of his third grade year, we talked to my husband’s sister, a teacher with some extra training in dyslexia. She agreed that it was time to get him tested for learning problems, particularly dyslexia. We really trusted her opinion because she seemed comfortable with letting kids develop at their own rate. By this time, though, we were all concerned that we were missing something with teaching our son. And, our son was getting frustrated. All his friends at church and in AWANA could read, but he couldn’t.

Diagnosis

Getting diagnosed was not as simple as just going to a doctor. In our state, the school districts are required to do testing, but don’t have to provide services to children not enrolled in the public schools. In addition, we were in the process of moving; the school district we were leaving had a reputation for not being helpful to homeschoolers as far as special education was concerned, and I knew nothing about the new school district.

So, I went a completely different route. Our health system’s behavioral health section has an educational psychologist who does educational testing. That ended up being just the right thing for us. She interviewed me and my husband and our son one day and then did the testing a few days later. Our son was, indeed, diagnosed with dyslexia. Not only did this doctor do the testing, but she was also helpful in directing us to resources in the area start getting help.

Getting Help

Right about the time we got my son tested for dyslexia was also the time I quit work because of illness, we moved to a different house, and my husband started back to school in hopes of starting a new career. So, my son was now being taught at home by me instead of his dad. Talk about stressful! The changes, though, ended up all being good changes.

The first change that we made was to get a new reading curriculum. The best of the Orton-Gillingham programs (intense phonics programs recommended for dyslexics) are quite expensive, so I chose Sensational Strategies for Teaching Beginning Readers which is a great curriculum to get started, but only has resources up through consonant teams (I believe). I also got Recipe for Reading to help me understand how the curriculum worked. This alone was a big help. My son needed the structure and multi-sensory nature of an Orton-Gillingham program.

I also read just about everything I could get my hands on about dyslexia. I read books for parents of dyslexics and bought my son a book about a boy with dyslexia (The Alphabet War). My favorite was Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz. It’s not really directed at homeschoolers, but it gives lots of good information about how the brains of dyslexics work based on current research.

The best thing we did, though, for our son was to start private tutoring. We worked with a tutoring group whose teachers were all comfortable with special education and dyslexia. They used the SRA program, which is a direct instruction reading and phonics program. The tutor said that their students generally came twice a week, but we were only able to go once a week because of the distance and my illness. Despite that, my son made excellent progress and the tutor was quite happy. I used our curriculum at home as well as reviewing what he had learned with his tutor. We continued the tutoring for almost two years.

Progress So Far

Every day I marvel at my son’s progress. Three years ago, he could not reliably put letter names and sounds together. Today, he can read third grade chapter books, only missing one or two words per page. He’s much happier because he can read the words on his video games as well as websites and other fun things! Specifically, I have seen huge changes in the following:

1. Phonemic awareness – when we started, he had trouble even distinguishing the different sounds of words. Today he can read 85-90% of the words on the page.

2. Sequencing – Although he still gets tripped up at times, he does a much better job in putting sounds in order.

3. Improved short term memory – It’s still not great, but he can now keep three or four things in his brain at once, which is important in reading and spelling.

4. Fewer flipped letters – When he writes, he doesn’t flip his letters and numbers as often. It still happens, but it is less frequent, and he’s more likely these days to catch his mistakes.

photo courtesy Heidi

What We’re Doing Now

One of the things that has served my son quite well is that we do lots of reading aloud in our home. We read subjects such as history and science, but we also really enjoy reading fiction together. My husband reads our Sonlight read-alouds at night, and when we get ahead on our read-alouds, we find other fiction to read. While this may not help him specifically with decoding, it certainly has kept his comprehension and other skills in good shape.

For working on decoding, my son does the Explode the Code workbooks. He also reads to me or my husband every day. I had him start with All About Spelling last year which has also helped his reading. All About Spelling is a multi-sensory spelling program that reinforces everything that my son has been learning in reading. A year ago, my son could barely write a legible sentence; now, he can write many decent sentences and many more that, while there are misspellings, are still understandable.

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed in the last year is that my son’s confidence in literacy activities is much improved. He will now check books out from the library and actually read them. He goes to websites and reads what he finds. He rarely asks us to read an entire page to him, but asks us to read a particular word to him. It’s been amazing!

The Future

In the short term, our future holds lots of work, especially for my son. I don’t know what curriculum we’ll be using in the next few years since I change based on what seems to be working for him. I do know that he’s almost surely going to be homeschooled. Here at home, I can give him the one on one attention that he needs to succeed. I can also allow him to work at his own level in different subjects which is hard to do in a classroom setting.

I would be surprised if my son chose to become an English major in college, but I would not be shocked for him to go to college. My goal is to help him learn to communicate through the written word well enough that college is an option for him – and that’s a very reasonable expectation for him.

The most important thing for you to understand about our dyslexia journey, though, is that, as hard as some days have been, we have made it through by the grace of God. My husband and I have prayed diligently about how to help our son and God has been good in providing that direction. We have never been left high and dry without comfort in these last few years.

It’s also important that you know that dyslexia is just a tiny part of who my son is and our dyslexia journey is just a tiny part of our family’s life. Some days, it feels like we spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with dyslexia, but it is really just a tiny part of my son. He is a wild and crazy 10 year old boy. He loves baseball and catapults and video games. Mostly, he’s a precious gift from God, dyslexia and all.

Catherine is a homeschooling mom of a 13 year old daughter and a 10 year old son. Her children were homeschooled by their father while Catherine worked as a Family Physician until three years ago. Since that time, Catherine has been the homeschooling parent since she is no longer able to work due to illness while her husband is developing a business doing math tutoring. Her hobbies include blogging, reading, knitting, and trying to stay (somewhat) sane. Please visit her blog at Domestic Adventure.