Phonics and Beyond for Dyslexia

What is Phonics?

Phonics is linking speech sounds (phonemes) to letters and groups of letters, providing a way to decode written text.

More than Phonics May be Needed

Education wars erupt between those who favor phonics and those who favor whole language approaches. For the sake of students with dyslexia, it’s essential to use both! Limiting teaching techniques to one method ensures that some students will not learn to read well. It’s not teaching if the student isn’t learning.

When to Go Beyond Phonics

First grade was a total wash-out for Alta. Her teacher pronounced her “uneducable.” So we tried homeschooling. First order of business was reading. I ordered a highly recommended phonics program. Alta worked as hard as she could. She memorized the 200+ rules for all the letters and letter combinations and understood that letters blend to form words. But she couldn’t make it work on actual words. So, I ordered a different curriculum. Same excruciating process; same result. Curriculum number three arrived. It was multi-sensory and touted as the best way to teach dyslexics. With frustration building, we plowed through it. Same result. Math was no better. Those pesky numbers behaved worse than the letters. Wisely, my husband recommended taking a break and letting Alta focus on music, cooking, and gardening, all of which came easily. In tears, I feared Alta would never read or balance a check book. And yet, I knew she was bright — delightfully so. She was curious and she was a hard worker. I realized we had to go beyond phonics.

How to teach phonics to any child

Go to the library. Check out a book on teaching your child to read. It will be a phonics curriculum, hopefully with multi-sensory aspects (seeing, hearing, moving, singing, color, etc) Give it a try and see if your child responds by learning to read and happily discovering the joy of decoding the text all by himself. If that happens, give him a library card and get out of his way. But, if it doesn’t, and if frustration or simple lack of progress occurs, stop the phonics. If the child has mastered the sounds of the alphabet, you can now use other tools to make headway EVEN if the child doesn’t ever sound out words. Really!

How to avoid spending lots of money and frustrating your dyslexic student

Many excellent curriculums for teaching phonics have been developed since Orton and Gillingham first realized that some intelligent children have “word blindness.” In fact, if your child gets a diagnosis of dyslexia, you are almost certain to be advised to seek out an Orton-Gillingham-based program and tutor. This will cost a lot. It will consist of intensive multi-sensory phonics. This means that multiple senses will be part of the experience, such as using hand signals, music, color, body motions, and pictures to help imprint the phonics material. This is good teaching. All teaching should be multi-sensory. Some children respond well to Orton-Gillingham-based programs. Some don’t. So, if you observe anxiety, avoidance, or anger in the student, please don’t blame the student. That’s your cue to try something else before you spend any more money and make the child hate reading. Generally, when children are learning they are happy. They resist when they are stuck.

Programs that teach phonics and beyond

Some understanding of phonics is extremely valuable, even if the student doesn’t ever use it to orally sound out words. We’ve found three superb books that approach phonics in different dyslexia-friendly ways. We’ve used all three approaches successfully. As with any teaching tool, we recommend trying an approach but dropping it if you don’t see happy progress in 2-3 weeks of daily work. You can buy all three of these books for less than most initial consultations with a reading tutor like me.

Why Tyrannosaurus but not if?

Richard Whitehead (2017) wrote Why ‘Tyrannosaurus’ But Not ‘If’?: The Dyslexic Blueprint for the Future of Education. The book outlines how to create a dyslexia-friendly classroom so all the children learn to read without stress. It has great ideas for home schools as well as classrooms. He even explains why dyslexic students tend to remember long hard words such as dinosaur, and miss little words like if. His classroom model draws heavily from the work of Ron Davis.

The Gift of Dyslexia

Ron Davis (2010) wrote The Gift of Dyslexia: Why Some of the Smartest People Can’t Read…and How They Can Learn, Revised and Expanded Edition. First published 1994, it’s been updated and expanded to make it easy for anyone to use. Although severely dyslexic, Davis taught himself to read as an adult and developed a tactile approach to phonics using clay and stories which is highly effective for many dyslexic children.

The Reading Remedy

Marion Blank developed the Phonics Plus Five Reading System, and also wrote a terrific book, The Reading Remedy: Six essential skills that will turn your child into a reader. Her work is the foundation of the excellent online program Reading Kingdom. Because she realized that phonics instruction was important but was not the only way to learn to read, she recommended approaching reading in six different ways to be sure all students have a chance to learn in a way that suits their brains.

Tools Beyond Phonics

We used ideas from these three authors and more to craft the tools in Dyslexia Tool Kit Expanded Edition: What to do when phonics isn’t enough. If you realize that phonics hasn’t given your child wings to soar in reading, consider moving on to other tools. You and your child will be glad you did!

by Yvonna Graham, M.Ed.
www.dyslexiakit.net

@GrahamYvonna

One great tool for improving reading vocabulary: use audiobooks and paper books together for tracking! You can get free classic audiobooks at Librivox. Or you can get newer titles professionally read for $15/mo at Audible. Best choice? Probably your public library!