This blog post was written by an undergraduate student, Kendra St. Clair, in the College of Education.
As a teacher, how can we benefit all students at once? How can we benefit all students including those with dyslexia? In my experience being a one-on-one instructional aide to a child with dyslexia in a mainstreamed classroom, I learned quickly that the simplest ideas are the best ideas. Do your research on dyslexia! Yes, a dyslexia module is required for teachers at licensure, but the more we research and understand the struggles our students go through, particularly with reading, the more prepared we are to support them and their education. Giving one-step directions with visual cues is a wonderful idea with any elementary-aged child. Chunk reading into smaller parts in order to connect each lesson to the last. This not only helps learners with dyslexia to process, it helps all students connect lessons to make them relevant and remember information more accurately. When learning to read, decoding can be a struggle for children with dyslexia. A lot of children with dyslexia may lack phonemic awareness. They are also much better with oral and auditory learning. Audiotapes are wonderful tools! Communicate with parents about reading to their kids at home. If a parent is not able to read the selection aloud to their child, record yourself reading it and email it to the parent/student for use at home. Tumble Books Library provides audio recordings for students to listen to. Any time spent on our students is time well invested in the future. Every child deserves the accommodations to succeed.
Ideas in this post were pulled from this article on classroom accommodations for dyslexia as well as this article on differentiation for dyslexia.