What does a lesson look like?

Each lesson has several components including listening, phonics, reading, spelling, and writing.  Some students also work on handwriting or typing. The hour is designed to keep the student involved while building skills.  Each student picks topics to learn about, and decodable reading materials are chosen on these topics. In the last five minutes of each lesson, we play an educational game.

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Students of different ages bring different challenges and strengths. Younger students are often the easiest to teach with structured literacy because they have not yet been discouraged by school failure. Middle-grade students may feel embarrassed by their dyslexia, so lessons must connect to their interests and personal motivations. For example, one student who loved fishing learned the ou sound with the word trout. High school students often benefit from assistive technologies such as text-to-speech and speech-to-text, while continuing to strengthen decoding skills through structured phonetic instruction.

My strategies use multisensory techniques, such as “see, say, trace.”  Lots of practice in every lesson builds a strong memory for phonics and spelling patterns.  A student’s personal interests determine the target picture for each phonic pattern, what reading materials we choose, and what we write about.  The pacing of lessons is designed to match each student’s learning style and memory capacity.

Many dyslexic students also have attention deficit disorder or other barriers to learning. In my home office, students are free to wiggle, fidget, or interrupt while they work. Our dog, Panda, also models good learning behavior—she greets each student enthusiastically and then settles down calmly nearby.