Happy New Year! Hard to believe it is 2025! I have thought about starting this blog on our website for the past year. As therapists, we often don’t regularly communicate with parents when student sessions occur at school. Hopefully this platform will be a source of information to help parents on their journey helping their students with dyslexia.
A question I get asked frequently by parents is how to get their dyslexic child to read more. What should they do? What kind of books? How often? Parents want to help but don’t know how. Let’s start by assuming that the first steps, completing educational testing and receiving a diagnosis of dyslexia or a reading disorder, and finding a dyslexia therapist are completed. Now, it’s time to take a breath….One of the main goals I have for my students is to foster the joy of reading. Children with dyslexia do not enjoy reading. They avoid it both at home and at school. It doesn’t bring them joy. It’s a constant reminder that they struggle with something their peers find easy. It’s often a battle. So what should parents do? It is time to step back and remember our goal of instilling the love of reading in the next generation. Let’s model the love of reading, by routinely creating family reading time. As an adult, model reading with a good book. Find time to read to your child. Choose a story you loved as a child, or choose a new series to enjoy. Don’t try to force your child to read. If there are tears, it's time to stop. Let's try a new approach by listening to an audio book together. Engage your child with questions about the story. What did they like or dislike about the story? Finding time daily to spend together enjoying a story is a great way to begin the love of reading. There is great educational value in listening to someone read. Children learn about vocabulary, paragraph and sentence structure, and character development. They learn to feel empathy for story characters. Listening to books and independently reading books are both valuable learning tools. While your child increases their independent reading skills with dyslexia therapy, help develop their love of reading though listening to great stories. A typical student reads 82 books in second grade. Dyslexic children fall far behind that number, and the gap just widens with each year. Hopefully through hard work with a dyslexia therapist, your child will learn to read independently on grade level. Until then, help them learn to love stories.
We hope you enjoy these posts aimed to help families with dyslexic children. Got a question? Let us know. We will post new topics monthly. - Jen
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