Mild dyslexic child recently diagnosed . How I help?

[Carminia]

Right, DC 8, has recently been privately diagnosed as mild dyslexic. We got him tested as he always struggled with reading and specially spelling.
We got recommendations to school, we also have a tutor to help him. Still eary days but I appreciate that may be a long road to get him up to speed with spellings as he is so behing.
The test came up as areas where he above average, visual, following complex patterns, verbal analogies, etc. He is bright, we know and we praise him for efforts and for the things he can do well.
But still he really lacks confidence in English as he has been made feel unable to do stuff all these years of systemic education...but we are working on this and the school has started to provide more positive praise.
Anyone with experience and what worked well? Did you consider private education? Did it help? Any ways to learn spellings at home that helped?
Thank you !

Hi Carmina
We've got a similar DS and there is tons you can do to help. We did Tinsley House when he was younger, which was great. Since then we've taken him to Lindamood Bell in London, which was eye wateringly expensive, but his reading improved significantly and more importantly, gave him a massive boost in confidence, which in turn is helping with school now. There big thing is visual imagery for each word and air writing it.

There is a very helpful book by Noel Janis-Norton, which covers lots about homework / what to do and how to approach it. There is a list of 250 words to learn to spell first. It is not aimed at dyslexia, but has lots of useful info on how to help your DCs at home. here

Hope that helps.

Sorry, posted in haste - their big thing....

I found the dancing bears and apple and pears books to be really helpful about that age: www.soundfoundations.co.uk/

They are very structured, repetitive and a doddle to use. The 'stories' in dancing bears can be eye raisngly odd and DD started taking exception to them around the age of 8. We kept apples and pears spelling going a bit longer. You can do it in short 10 min a day but if your child is anything like ours you will probably still need to bribe them to do it, we gave stickers for each session with sweets every 5 stickers!

But key with dyslexia is overlearning. DDs spelling has really slipped back since we stopped apples and pears - I've elected not to care. She has tutor an we are targeting reading, maths and structuring writing.. am going to let technology take care of the spelling (we write with Clicker).

Thank you so much for the replies! I will have a look into both your recommendations and see what may help.
I recently came across this website, which was an eye opener for me and made me see it in a positive way, which I definitely think it is if we provide them with the right tools.
madebydyslexia.org/

We're probably about 6 months ahead of you in the same process. So far the things we've found that help are:

• behavioural optometrist - turns out DD has problems tracking lines of text, we had lots of good exercises to help, but have to say not cheap
• private tutor - alongside school we found a lovely lady who works with DD 2 hours a week, it's worked really well, particularly in terms of confidence
• talk to school a lot, I've had meetings with SENCO to talk about intervention strategies, they do frequent, but short reading interventions.

It's also been important to find books that interest her, so while she can't read all the books her peers can, it's been important for DD not to be reading KS1 books, but simple chapter books

We've bought some speech to text software to help with the longer written homework, that has made it quicker and easier for DD to write longer answers.

So we have started ‘toe by toe ‘ very focused on overlearning, could be described as dull, ds happy to complete in short chunks

We are doing ‘touch type read spell’ as I think laptop maybe the way forward

We have done some of the ‘nessy’ stuff but ds did not really enjoy although they look fun

I agree about the sound foundations book

We did ‘spelling zappers’ from the twinkl website to help learn spellings

We bought the ‘word shark’ game which looks old fashioned but ds enjoys

Squeebles is a good app for learning spellings but not necessarily focused on dyslexia but as it was on the iPad ds would complete!

I forgot - look at Barrington Stoke publishers. They focus on chronological age interest AND reading age. Ds has enjoyed the merlin books. They are also published on dyslexia friendly coloured paper and in dyslexia friendly style.