Homeschooling A Child With Dyslexia

Part 1-Our Story

You can homeschool a child with dyslexia. In fact, in my opinion, homeschooling might be the best option for a child with this type of learning challenge. You can take just about any curricula and modify it to meet your child’s needs. Here are some ideas and tips to homeschool your child with dyslexia.

Discovering Dyslexia

If you have listened to the What About Homeschooling podcast (available here or wherever you listen to podcasts) you already know that my oldest daughter has what I consider to be a moderate case of dyslexia. She didn’t even start reading until she was about 10 or 11 years-old. When she couldn’t repeat letter sounds back to me in kindergarten, I knew something was wrong.

At first, I thought maybe it was a discipline problem, but that wasn’t the personality of my daughter. She had a very good disposition and was usually a very good child. When I realized that wasn’t the case, I started researching what could be the cause of her not being able to do the things her older brother could do at the same age. I looked at different homeschool curricula, I read several books on how to teach a child to read, and on different methods of teaching. As I was doing all this research and reading, I had to keep schooling my daughter. She was eventually able to read numbers and learn math, but memorizing math facts was not so easy.

There are signs of dyslexia that I never knew about, but when I think back, I can clearly see them. My daughter was super clumsy when she was younger. She was always falling off something. She hated to have tags on her shirts touching her neck and she always wore her hair up in a ponytail, so it wouldn’t be on her neck as well. She also needed things very quiet when she was doing her schoolwork. I remember one day, she chased her brother around the house for clicking a pen in the next room. She had asked him to stop, which he did, but then, not fully aware of what he was doing, started clicking again. I didn’t even realize he was clicking the pen, but she was very sensitive to the sound.

Now all these things alone are not going to prove that a child has dyslexia, but put together with reading problems and writing letters backwards etc. they can be part of the bigger picture.

After all the research and talking to some other parents, I realized we were dealing with dyslexia. Now that I knew the problem, I had to do more research to learn how to teach her, so she could read and spell.

Trying All the Homeschool Curriculum

So, early on in my research I read the book Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch. The author gives information on how to teach reading and shows why teaching phonics is superior to teaching children to read by sight. With that information, I started experimenting with different reading programs. Alph-Phonics was one of the first that I tried. I’m sure I bought a used copy online or at a homeschool used book sale. It is a great phonics based reading program. It’s super simple, but it didn’t really help my daughter much. Just like most things we tried it helped a little, but she needed something different. We also tried Spell to Write and Read. I think it is a great program and works well for the average child but not so much for my dyslexic daughter. Now I want to emphasize that I am not knocking these reading and spelling programs at all. They are all very good, but they didn’t do enough for my daughter and her level of dyslexia. They work well for the average child and maybe even for a child with mild dyslexia. I think if I had to label my daughter’s dyslexia, I would say she had moderate dyslexia.

We also tried was Sequential Spelling. Once again, it worked a little bit, but not enough. There was something that just wasn’t clicking with my daughter. For some reason she wasn’t able to retain the information like my other children. We used this for a little while as I kept searching.

I even found a download of an old spelling book (I believe it was an old Webster’s Blue Backed Speller) from the 1800s and tried using that. I tried having her use letter tiles to spell words. I tried copy work. None of it connected the dots for her.

The Answer to Our Prayers

After a few years of researching and trying so many different programs, I finally came across The Barton Reading and Spelling System, and it was the answer to my prayers. If you ask my daughter what helped her the most with her reading and spelling she will not hesitate to tell you that it was this very program. It was created by Susan Barton specifically for people with dyslexia or other certain learning disabilities. I cannot do the program justice just telling you about it. Please go to the website and watch all the videos and read everything you can if you have a child with dyslexia. There is so much information on the website. I don’t know where my daughter would be without this program.

This is a program that you have to do with your child. You have to do the teaching. I believe she recommends doing it 2-3 times per week, but the more you do it the quicker the child will retain and learn the information.

The program itself may seem expensive to some, but it’s worth it. In my opinion there is nothing that compares to it, at least not that I have found. I believe there are 10 levels, and you will spend around $300-$400 for each level. Now here is my advice and what I did to be able to afford it. You can resell each level for almost what it costs new and then you are only paying about 50-100 for each new level you purchase. I do recommend ordering extra tiles with each level as you need them for the next level.

So, you purchase one to keep and the other you sell with the level when you are ready to move on to the next. This is how we were able to afford it. We were a one income family at the time. Again, I have to let you know that I am not affiliated with The Barton Reading and Spelling system or with Susan Barton at all. I just really believe in this program if you have a child with a level of dyslexia that other programs or curricula have not been able to help.

The Rest of the Homeschool Story

I am so proud of my daughter. She is 3 credits away from graduating college. She would not have been able to get where she is without the program mentioned above as well as some of the ways we tweaked her homeschool curricula. I will be writing another article next week detailing the different strategies we used to make our homeschool curricula work for her as I researched and then as she went through the Barton Reading and Spelling program. We had to keep moving forward, so there were several things we did so she didn’t get behind because she couldn’t read. More on that in the next post.

I would love to know your thoughts and if you have you have any questions.

Please send me an email Mary@whatabouthomeschooling.com

~”…and the sweetness of the lips increaseth learning.” Prov. 16:21

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