The growth and development patterns of every child are entirely different. Each child acts according to his or her interests, preferences, needs, and attitude. As a result, their manner of social interaction, exhibition of emotional behavior, and approach towards learning processes becomes unique and distinctive. This pattern is especially true when it comes to a child’s reading comprehension skills.
In the early stages of cognitive development, reading comprehension is pretty much like any other skill-building activity. While some children are quick to learn letters, semantics, and sounds, many others struggle to keep up with their peers. However, if a child continues to display learning weakness, resulting in a general dislike for school and instruction, the problem might be developmental. In such situations, the child could be struggling with a specific learning disability called Dyslexia.
As troubling as it may sound, Dyslexia is not something you should needlessly worry over! With the right guidance and the best approaches, this learning disorder can easily be managed & controlled. Although there are a variety of ways that can be used to manage Dyslexia, the Dicker Reading Method is considered to be one of the best. With its unique one-on-one tutoring, the Dicker Reading Method ensures that your child can read with much higher fluency and understanding than ever before.
Nonetheless, if you are still clueless regarding what Dyslexia truly is, here are a few details to help you understand the disorder better –
What is Dyslexia?
Dyslexia is primarily a learning disorder that holds up the natural ability of a child to spell, write, and read appropriately. It affects mostly that part of the human brain that processes communication, expression, and language. Consequently, Dyslexic children have a hard time identifying linguistic sounds, manipulating phonetic alphabets, and interpreting speech perception.
In other words, it is challenging for kids with Dyslexia to understand, translate, or sound out new words. This challenge doesn’t just reduce their overall linguistic memory; it also severely affects their fluency and proficiency in both the written and spoken language. Nonetheless, it is essential to remember that a shortage of reading comprehension skills does not imply a lack of intelligence. Dyslexic children are as intelligent as everyone else in their age group. Their only deficiency lies in their inability to match their natural potential with their academic achievements.
At present, about 5%-15% of Americans, i.e., 14-43 million children & adults, are affected by Dyslexia and are trying to overcome it with reading, tutoring programs.
Signs of Dyslexia
As Dyslexia is considered to be a neurological disorder with a genetic basis, it is recognizable from a very early age. Its common signs and symptoms include:
Before School
- Experiencing an initial speech delay
- Problems in learning nursery rhymes
- Difficulty in distinguishing one letter from another
- Inability to form or learn new words
- Confusion in remembering similar sounding words
- Facing trouble while following directions
During School
- Problematic reading comprehension skills
- Inability to sound out new or unfamiliar words
- Difficulty in spelling, writing, and sequencing
- Stumbling while associating letters with sounds
- Reduced fluency & flow in the spoken language
- Reversing alphabets, numerals, and numbers
- Being excessively slow in finishing reading tasks
After School
- Mispronouncing common words and names
- Misreading logos, signs, figures, and symbols
- Difficulty in keeping track of time
- Finding it tough to learn a foreign language
- Struggling to participate in games with written rules
- Issues in memorizing mathematical formulae
Apart from those mentioned above, Dyslexic children might also experience a significant amount of mental and emotional frustration arising from their inability to be understood by others. If this stage employs no Dyslexia tutoring methods, the disorder might continue well into the teenage and adulthood of a Dyslexic child.
Strategies to Teach a Child with Dyslexia How to Read
The onus of improving the reading skills of a Dyslexic child falls entirely on the shoulders of the parents, caregivers, and teachers. They need to make sure that the best tutoring for kids with Dyslexia is regularly available so that these children can thrive within their academic, social, and emotional environments.
The strategies, approaches, and other dyslexia tutoring methods available for this purpose are:
1. Summarizing
Included as an essential part of most reading comprehension programs, summarizing is often considered to be one of the most beneficial methods when it comes to tutoring kids with Dyslexia. It helps children remember, recall, and retain the central idea behind everything they read in a productive and meaningful way.
Summarizing also enables them to identify the vital sections of a text while rejecting unnecessary pieces of information. As a result, Dyslexic children can join each concept, commit it to memory, and thereby strengthen their reading comprehension skills.
The Dicker Reading Method furthers the summarizing process by using a unique card flipping technique that employs focused, sustained, and efficient interventions to improve the reading skills of your Dyslexic child. This means that when compared to the traditional classroom approaches, this innovative method can literally work wonders!
2. Vocabulary
It is a known fact that memorizing a set of familiar phrases can quickly help Dyslexic children deal with their inability to understand, interpret, or pronounce new words. However, if improved via the building of a decent vocabulary, their reading comprehension skills can improve remarkably!
To begin with, you can consider assigning at least two words to spell and learn every day. Associate these words with an illustration and list out all their synonyms and antonyms. Create a word bank from where all this information can be collected and recovered at any point of time.
Such multi-sensory Dyslexia tutoring methods can undoubtedly go a long way towards laying the foundation for a strong vocabulary.
The Dicker Reading Method, too, can prove to be of immense assistance in this regard. As a repetition based tutoring program, this method enhances vocabulary through a unique ‘pyramid flipping’ technique. This technique teaches children to repeat new words hundreds of times within minutes. As a result, their current vocabulary and their ability to understand new words undergo considerable improvement.
3. Organizing Information
Many Dyslexic children tend to find the organization of information difficult. To make up for this deficiency, they either start committing the given text to memory or simply follow what the other students are saying. This habit results in a logical inconsistency where Dyslexic children can quickly reproduce a memorized text but are unable to organize it internally.
In such a situation, a reading comprehension program that focuses on providing a generic overview, building mind maps, creating spider diagrams, organizing writing frames, or using graphic techniques, can prove to be very helpful. These methods can help Dyslexic children in strengthening their reading comprehension skills by using the remarkable power of organization, understanding, and interpretation.
4. Inferences
Reading comprehension skills are mainly dependent on interpretations. Although a lot of things are often not clearly mentioned, they have implied meaning. As such, people reading words are expected to apply reason and logic, and thus, understand the implied meaning.
Dyslexic children generally have a tough time doing this. While they can understand the literal meaning of sentences, finding hidden information can be quite tricky for them. Therefore, activities like graphic illustrations, educated guesses, shared reading, and thought organizers constitute a significant part of most reading tutoring programs.
The Dicker Reading Method combines word recognition and focus-techniques to enhance the inference-making power of Dyslexic children. It uses a unique psychological component that is development-oriented at its core. That is, each inference-deriving story is designed to build on the previous one, thus reinforcing both the old and the new stories with every session.
5. Using Contextual Clues
One of the principal Dyslexia tutoring methods for children affected by this disorder is the use of contextual clues. The application of this method can be better understood with the help of an example. Let us consider you come across a word that you don’t understand at all. Now, you can choose to look up its meaning in a dictionary, or you can choose to ignore it completely.
Dyslexic children, in such cases, can use another adaptive method. They can go through the words surrounding this particular word and make a calculated guess about what its meaning might be. Contextual understanding and deduction don’t just lessen their interest in comprehension, but they also improve their reading skills significantly.
With the Dicker Reading Method, identifying such contextual clues to understand the meaning of new words becomes quite easy. The unique one-on-one tutoring, which this method provides, makes sure that disorders like Dyslexia do not turn your child into an inferior learner.
6. Using Previous Knowledge
Every time we read a particular text, we associate our personal experiences with it. However, the meaning we derive from it depends entirely on the knowledge we link with it. This element is what makes the text both relevant and meaningful to us. Nonetheless, children with Dyslexia are unable to do exactly this. They can neither connect prior knowledge to the text they are currently reading, nor can they extract any meaning from it.
The Dicker Reading Method can help a great deal in improving the situation mentioned above. With its unique card flipping technique, it can teach Dyslexic children to activate previous knowledge by building background stories, pre-teaching vocabulary, and enhancing contextual learning.
The Way Forward
Dyslexia, being a congenital learning disability, is a disorder that cannot be ‘cured.’ However, with the right Dyslexia tutoring method, this dysfunction can be successfully managed and overcome.
One such method which ensures that the reading comprehension skills of Dyslexic children improve within a short period is – The Dicker Reading Method. This development program primarily uses a unique card flipping technique to emphasize the principles of focus and concentration. Being a repetition based procedure, it aims to deliver hundreds of word repetitions in minutes so that the frustration and struggle that comes with the inability of a child to do something can easily be targeted and removed. The Dicker Reading Method also enables dyslexic kids to read better and faster. As a result, their confidence and self-esteem go up within and beyond the school confines.
With changing times, the strategies to counter Dyslexia are also bound to undergo a significant change. Nevertheless, if tutoring for kids with Dyslexia is the primary objective that you are seeking to achieve, The Dicker Reading Method can indeed prove to be your one-stop solution.
So, what are you waiting for? Introduce your Dyslexic child to the world of Dicker Reading, now!
Book your online reading lessons now with our live online reading tutoring now!
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