What is Dyslexia?

If you look up dyslexia in the dictionary, it simply says dyslexia is difficulty learning to read, write and spell, despite having intelligence, motivation, education with no sensory damage. That means…. to have dyslexia, a person must be bright, motivated, educated and have normal hearing and visual skills and yet have problems with reading. Dyslexia is not a delay in reading achievement; it will not resolve itself over time.

How Many People are Affected by Dyslexia?

According to recent surveys, about 3 ½ percent of all public-school children are receiving special education for reading difficulties…. that’s 3 or 4 out of 100. In 1998, the National Research Council’s Committee on Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children did a study. They gave hundreds of kids an intelligence test and a reading test. A whopping 20% of these children were reading below their grade or ability levels. Clearly the public schools are not picking up the majority of these children with reading challenges. That’s discouraging news knowing that dyslexic readers will NEVER catch up with their classmates without appropriate intervention.

What Causes Dyslexia?

Let’s start by clarifying a common myth. Children with dyslexia are NOT prone to seeing letters or words backwards. Children with dyslexia do not SEE “was” as “saw” or “saw” as “was”. The deficit responsible for dyslexia resides in the language system of the brain. It is not an overall defect in language, but rather a localized weakness in the phonological system of the brain. That is the part of the brain where the sounds of language are put together to form words and where words are broken down into their component sounds. The word “cat”, for example, has 3 sounds….c-a-t. Before a toddler can understand the meaning of cat and learn to pronounce it, that toddler’s brain must break the word “cat” into phonemes (sounds). Children with dyslexia have difficulty doing that…. identifying the phonemes in words.

What are the Earliest Symptoms of Dyslexia?

Children at risk for dyslexia can be identified very early. The first factor for parents to consider is the family history. Dyslexia is a genetic disorder, so if any family member, including aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins, were diagnosed with dyslexia, your child has a greater chance of suffering from dyslexia too.

The first physical symptom to look for is a delay in speech and language development. Babies should be speaking their first words by 12 months of age, 18 months at the latest. Toddlers should be combining words into phrases by age 2. Parents should be able to understand 50 – 60% of their one-year-old’s speech and at least 70% by the time a toddler is 2. Children who don’t meet these standards are warning us of a potential problem.

During the preschool years, 3-year-olds should be speaking in 4 – 5-word phrases and 4-year-olds should be speaking in complete sentences with occasional grammatical errors. Language should be almost adult-like by age 5. Parents should understand at least 80% of a 3-year-old’s speech, 90% by age 4 and 98% by age 5.

Preschoolers at risk for dyslexia may also be identified by their malapropisms; they may make pronunciation errors like saying “hangaber” for “hamburger” and “puzghetti” for “spaghetti”. Other red flags are difficulties with rhyming and learning/remembering the letters in their own names.

What Symptoms are Most Common in Kindergarten and First Grade?

This is the age at which many children begin to struggle. These are the kids who have difficulty understanding that words can be pulled apart into sounds. Many of these kids have difficulty remembering the names for the letters of the alphabet and/or they may have problems learning the sounds that go with the letters….in other words, they may have difficulty with early phonics.

Kindergarten and first grade are the years when children learn to read. The way our schools are set up, kids better learn to read during those first years of elementary school, or they are at risk for reading failure.

Why do so Many Kids Slip Through the Cracks Until Second or Third Grade?

Just as kindergarten and first grade are the years when children learn to read, in third grade and on, children read to learn. Second grade is a transitional year when phonics acquisition is reinforced, and children learn to break long words into syllables. If children don’t have the ability to “sound out” words by third grade, they are inevitably in trouble.

To complicate the issue, their assigned stories and novels are becoming increasingly complex with fewer pictures to help them. A second-grade child who was previously relying on the pictures to understand the plot of a story will fall apart in third grade when the pictures are reduced to one or two per chapter.

To identify dyslexic individuals in second grade and on, look for kids who are having difficulty pronouncing unfamiliar, complicated words like “aluminum” and “obstreperous”. Look for challenges with oral language like word-finding problems and slow response times. Look for difficulty remembering isolated pieces of verbal information like phone numbers and birthdays. Also look for dysfluent speech with many “ums’ and “ahs’ or imprecise language that occurs when children substitute empty words like “stuff” and “thing” for proper names of objects.

Another big red flag is a problem with word identification strategies during reading. These are the kids who have difficulty reading unknown words that must be sounded out…this problem is especially noticeable when they try to read lists of words like spelling words, class lists or phone contacts. These kids rely on contextual cues to read words, because they don’t have reliable word identification strategies. Another common symptom is problems with writing, especially spelling. These kids often have disastrous spelling. They may do OK on spelling tests because of their excellent memories. But ask them to write a story using their spelling words, and their spelling goes right out the window.

Can you Prevent Dyslexia?

Remember the motto…. the best intervention is prevention. Very early intervention can prevent a potential problem with dyslexia. And even when prevention was not possible, early intervention can nip a problem in the bud and enable at-risk children to read. In fact, early intervention and treatment facilitate more positive changes at a faster pace than intervention provided to older children.

What is the Optimal Treatment for Dyslexia?

• Early intervention. A child needs help before he fails. Don’t use the “wait to fail” model. There is too much at stake here. Fluency comes from correctly and repeatedly reading the same words over and over. Poor readers avoid reading, so the longer you wait, the farther behind your child will get. A dyslexic child who is not identified until 3rd grade is already thousands of unlearned words behind his peers.
• Intense instruction. A dyslexic child must progress faster than his neuro-typical peers. Optimally, instruction should be individualized and take place at least 3 – 4 times a week.
• High quality instruction. Sally Shaywitz, a leading expert in dyslexia research, says teaching IS rocket science. The teacher’s knowledge and experience are key. And the reading program must be based on scientifically proven methods that address phonemic awareness, decoding, spelling, memorizing sight words, fluency, written expression, vocabulary building, worldly knowledge and comprehension strategies.
• Sufficient duration. The most common error parents make is prematurely withdrawing from instruction that seems to be working. Some dyslexic children need over 300 hours of intensive instruction to close the reading gap. The longer identification and effective reading instruction are delayed, the longer the child will need intervention to catch up.

Like any reading disorder, treatment for dyslexia begins with an accurate diagnosis. Does the problem go all the way back to a problem with phonemic awareness, and thus a problem utilizing phonics? Or is the student having difficulty breaking words into syllables? Alternately, the student’s phonics and syllabication may be intact, but the problem is rooted in sight word recognition.

Once the root of the problem is revealed, treatment should begin from the ground up. Students need mastery of the building blocks that form the basis for reading fluency. And then they need repeated practice to build confidence and fluency. At Therapies for Success, we will diagnose the root of the dyslexia and then provide the treatment needed for success.

What Can Parents do to Help?

Parents are their children’s advocates. Parents must do everything possible to get help early and then insist on proven reading programs with qualified teachers and optimal instructional settings. Home is the place for reinforcement of new skills and for pleasure reading. Home is the place to build word and worldly knowledge. Parents can do this by reading to their child at her interest/intellectual level but above her reading level. This will enable her to gain new vocabulary words and new knowledge about the world that would otherwise be unavailable to her. Think of how much easier it is to read the word “Yosemite” and visualize the gushing waterfalls, towering rocks and lush meadows if you have heard about it, and better yet, you’ve actually been there.

Parent’s number one priority should be nourishing their child’s soul and preserving his self-esteem. That starts with helping him understand the nature of his reading problem…. helping him understand that it has nothing to do with his intelligence, but rather, a very specific challenge in one little part of his brain. Point out other people who have suffered from dyslexia including relatives, Tom Cruise, John Irving and Charles Schwab. Help your child identify an interest or hobby in an area where he can have a positive experience…either through enjoyment or excellence. Make sure that school is a positive experience and teach him to advocate for himself. That starts with speaking up and asking for more time on tests or sitting closer to the teacher. And that starts at home….by having parents who listen to their children and respond thoughtfully to their concerns.

What Can Teachers and School do?

Realizing that the best intervention is prevention, teachers can educate themselves about dyslexia and encourage parents to seek early identification and treatment. Schools can also provide early intervention programs in their preschools and kindergartens…. programs that will build phonemic awareness and mental imagery skills.

What are Executive Functioning Skills?

These are the mental skills that help people complete detailed, high quality tasks in a timely manner. Intact executive functioning skills enable people to:

• Pay attention and remember/record important information;
• Prioritize their tasks depending upon importance and due dates;
• Plan and organize their tasks;
• Develop timelines and manage their time, allowing enough time for necessary breaks and revisions;
• Use information and experience from the past to solve or prevent problems from reoccurring;
• Complete tasks with quality control in a timely manner.

What Causes an Executive Functioning Disorder?

Individuals with ADD or ADHD are often inattentive. They may also struggle with impulsivity and/or hyperactivity. These symptoms often interfere with the ability to make deadlines and complete tasks with the necessary detail and quality.

What is the Optimal Treatment for an Executive Functioning Disorder?

The best way to address an executive functioning disorder is to work with one of our specialists to build the scaffold needed for success. That often means modifying the environment, teaching deficient skills and then practicing the new skills in short, manageable segments while providing the support and incentives needed until success is achieved. At Therapies for Success, we build this scaffold for success.

What is Math Comprehension?

Math comprehension involves reading and understanding the written problems. Math word problems often pose a challenge, because they require students to read and comprehend the text of the problem, identify the question that needs to be answered, and then create and solve a numerical equation.

What is the Optimal Treatment for Math Comprehension?

This requires a combination of fluent reading, comprehension, problem solving and math fluency. At Therapies for Success, we diagnose the cause of the problem and then  address it from all angles.

What is Math Fluency?

Math fluency is the ability to apply mathematical procedures accurately, efficiently and flexibly to complete basic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. By the time they reach the mid-elementary grades, students must have the math fluency skills to complete multiple-step procedures using all of the basic operations to solve a single problem.

What is the Optimal Treatment for Math Fluency?

To make math fluent and effortless (automatic), students often need a combination of methodologies to help them remember the facts as well as a system of tools to figure out the facts when their memories fail. At Therapies for Success, we do it all!

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is having the ability to hear, identify and manipulate the sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. It usually emerges around age 4 when preschoolers realize that words are made up of sounds. For example, the spoken word “cat” has 3 sounds…c-a-t. Next, preschoolers and kindergartners learn to isolate these sounds, enabling them to tell you that the first sound in “cat” is “c”, the second sound is “a” and the last sound is “t”. Soon these children learn to blend the individual sounds into the whole word and, conversely, to take the whole word and break it into sounds. Eventually, 5-year-olds can replace the “c” in the word “cat” with an “f” to make the word “fat” and replace the “t” in “fat” with an “n” to make the word “fan”.

Children who can perform these skills have phonemic awareness and are ready to learn the letters that go with the sounds… the skill otherwise known as phonics. We know for a fact that phonemic awareness is critical for the emergence of reading and writing. Kindergarten children who lack phonemic awareness skills are at risk for reading failure.

What is the Optimal Treatment for Phonemic Awareness?

The best time to address phonemic awareness challenges is when children are in preschool and kindergarten. That is when children should be learning to play with words by reciting songs and poetry with rhyme and alliteration. At Therapies for Success, we will diagnose the child’s phonemic awareness weaknesses and then teach the skills in developmental order.

What is Reading Fluency?

Reading fluency is the ability to read phrases and sentences smoothly and quickly, recognizing that they are expressions of complete ideas. Problems with reading fluency are typically caused by difficulties with phonemic awareness, which in turn, causes challenges with phonics acquisition, decoding and breaking long words into syllables.

Sometimes, the problem stems from identification of sight words. Children with reading fluency challenges typically struggle with comprehending and remembering what they read, because their efforts are devoted to decoding the individual words rather than processing the meaning of the text.

What is the Optimal Treatment for Reading Fluency?

Like any reading disorder, treatment for reading fluency challenges begins with an accurate diagnosis. Does the problem go all the way back to a problem with phonemic awareness, and thus, a problem utilizing phonics? Or is the student having difficulty breaking words into syllables? Alternately, the student’s phonics and syllabication may be intact, but the problem is rooted in sight word recognition.

Once the root of the problem is revealed, treatment should begin from the ground up. Students need mastery of the building blocks that form the basis for reading fluency. And then they need repeated practice to build confidence and fluency. At Therapies for Success, we will diagnose the root of the reading fluency problem and then provide the treatment needed for success.

What is Reading Comprehension?

Reading comprehension is the act of understanding what you are reading. It is an intentional, active, interactive process that occurs before, during and after a person reads a piece of text. When students read text, they are using a complex array of cognitive processes. They are simultaneously using their understanding of phonemes (sounds), and phonics (connections between letters and sounds) and their ability to construct meaning from the text. Optimal comprehension cannot occur unless phonemes and phonics are mastered, enabling rapid decoding, and reading is completely fluent. If decoding is not intact and reading is choppy, students will devote too much energy to sounding out the words to completely understand what they are reading.

Once reading fluency is mastered, there are four other requirements necessary for optimal comprehension: vocabulary knowledge, understanding of sentence structures and the higher order language processes known as critical thinking and in addition to executive functioning. To understand a piece of literature, readers must comprehend the vocabulary. For example, knowing the meaning of “gushing waterfalls” and “massive granite boulders” enables the reader to picture scenes from a national park.

Readers must also comprehend syntax and grammar, the components of sentence structures. For example, the more advanced sentence, “The dog was chased by the cat.” conjures up a dramatically different image from the simple sentence, “The dog chased the cat.”

Assuming that fluency, vocabulary knowledge and sentence structure comprehension are all intact, the ultimate level of reading comprehension requires a higher order of language processing. This involves the critical thinking process of inference-making, including predicting outcomes and drawing conclusions. It also involves understanding text structure, whether it is a narrative format for short stories and novels or a main idea and supporting details format for textbooks like history and science.

Finally, a great comprehender must use excellent executive functioning skills. This means monitoring our understanding and rereading or asking for help when necessary. It also requires relating new information to previously learned information about the subject. Executive functioning also prompts readers to take notes for long-term memory and to allow time to process, organize and memorize information for test preparation and writing essays.

What is the Optimal Treatment for Reading Comprehension?

Reading comprehension requires excellent reading fluency combined with excellent oral language skills to get to the deeper meaning. Not only that, students must have excellent study skills to record information and organize it in a meaningful and memorable manner. Therefore, optimal treatment must begin with an accurate diagnosis of the problem and then include a balanced approach that addresses all of the skills needed to get to the deeper meaning of the text and remember it. At Therapies for Success, we treat reading comprehension challenges from the ground up.

What is Reading Comprehension?

Reading comprehension is the act of understanding what you are reading. It is an intentional, active, interactive process that occurs before, during and after a person reads a piece of text. When students read text, they are using a complex array of cognitive processes. They are simultaneously using their understanding of phonemes (sounds), and phonics (connections between letters and sounds) and their ability to construct meaning from the text. Optimal comprehension cannot occur unless phonemes and phonics are mastered, enabling rapid decoding, and reading is completely fluent. If decoding is not intact and reading is choppy, students will devote too much energy to sounding out the words to completely understand what they are reading.

Once reading fluency is mastered, there are four other requirements necessary for optimal comprehension: vocabulary knowledge, understanding of sentence structures and the higher order language processes known as critical thinking and in addition to executive functioning. To understand a piece of literature, readers must comprehend the vocabulary. For example, knowing the meaning of “gushing waterfalls” and “massive granite boulders” enables the reader to picture scenes from a national park.

Readers must also comprehend syntax and grammar, the components of sentence structures. For example, the more advanced sentence, “The dog was chased by the cat.” conjures up a dramatically different image from the simple sentence, “The dog chased the cat.”

Assuming that fluency, vocabulary knowledge and sentence structure comprehension are all intact, the ultimate level of reading comprehension requires a higher order of language processing. This involves the critical thinking process of inference-making, including predicting outcomes and drawing conclusions. It also involves understanding text structure, whether it is a narrative format for short stories and novels or a main idea and supporting details format for textbooks like history and science.

Finally, a great comprehender must use excellent executive functioning skills. This means monitoring our understanding and rereading or asking for help when necessary. It also requires relating new information to previously learned information about the subject. Executive functioning also prompts readers to take notes for long-term memory and to allow time to process, organize and memorize information for test preparation and writing essays.

What is the Optimal Treatment for Reading Comprehension?

Reading comprehension requires excellent reading fluency combined with excellent oral language skills to get to the deeper meaning. Not only that, students must have excellent study skills to record information and organize it in a meaningful and memorable manner. Therefore, optimal treatment must begin with an accurate diagnosis of the problem and then include a balanced approach that addresses all of the skills needed to get to the deeper meaning of the text and remember it. At Therapies for Success, we treat reading comprehension challenges from the ground up.

What Makes a Great Speller?

People who excel at spelling are also fluent readers. They understand the rules that form the foundation for our English spelling system. They understand that there must be a letter or group of letters for each spoken sound (phonemic awareness) and also that morphemes (root words and affixes) have predictable spelling patterns (morphemic awareness). In addition, they understand the rules that govern how English words are spelled (orthographic awareness) as well as the role of meaning on spelling variations (semantic awareness).

What is the Optimal Treatment for Spelling?

An ideal spelling program targets all the rules. Students must learn and master the rules for phonemic, morphological, semantic and orthographic awareness. At Therapies for Success, we teach our students the spelling rules to improve their reading fluency and written expression.

What are the Best Study Skills?

Excellent study skills are not based on speed reading, they are based on reading for the deeper meaning. Then successful students record the high-points with excellent note-taking skills. At Therapies for Success, we teach our students to read at the deepest level and take efficacious notes.

What is the Optimal Treatment for Study Skills?

To learn effective study skills, students need to team-read their literature with literacy specialists as they practice critical thinking and note-taking. At Therapies for Success, we practice excellent study skills and then gradually fade our support until our students are independent.

What Makes a Great Proofreader?

To excel at proofreading, all the learning skills must come together. Students must have strong reading skills to identify their syntax and grammatical errors. They must have excellent comprehension skills to figure out when they have left their readers hanging. They must have strong spelling skills to identify their spelling errors. They must also understand and implement the rules for the other mechanics like capitalization and punctuation. And finally, they must have the executive functioning skills to finish their written assignments in advance with enough time remaining to get feedback from other readers and refine their compositions.

What is the Optimal Treatment for Proofreading?

To learn effective proofreading skills, students need to analyze their written compositions with literacy specialists, critically looking for oversights regarding clarity, completion and redundancy. Then they need to repeat the process, looking for oversights regarding tense usage and writing mechanics like capitalization, punctuation and spelling. At Therapies for Success, we practice excellent proofreading skills and then gradually fade our support until our students are independent.

What Skills are Needed for Written Composition?

Writing is a complex multiple-step process that incorporates all of the reading, comprehension, spelling and proofreading skills. Then, on top of it all, writing requires the executive functioning skills to determine the steps and time needed, the organizational skills to do the tasks in an efficacious manner and then the discipline to invest in the task and stick with it until the product is complete.

Here is a breakdown of the writing process:

Prewriting Processes

• Analyzing the directions;
• Brainstorming a plan;
• Organizing the plan to develop the main ideas and supporting details.

Writing Process

• Following the plan to create a well-organized essay with a thesis or topic sentences;
• Supporting the topic sentences with details and facts followed by explanations and examples cited from the text;
• Writing transitions between the sentences;
• Summarizing the essay with a conclusion;
• Adding a universal thought or idea to motivate others to act on the information provided.

Post Writing Process – Editing

• Rereading the essay to fix any major roadblocks that interfere with readability;
• Rereading the essay to make sure each sentence is clearly written with interesting; choices of vocabulary and syntactically and grammatically correct sentences;
• Rereading the essay to make sure the same verb tense was used throughout the paper;
• Rereading the essay to make certain the mechanics are correct including the spelling, capitalization and punctuation.

Why do so Many Students Struggle with Written Expression?

Writing a well-organized succinct essay is one of the most challenging skills that children must acquire. There are so many pitfalls that can occur.

First, students must have excellent executive functioning skills. They must assess how much they already know about a subject and then determine where they will look for reference materials and how long it will take them to collect the information necessary to write their papers.

Then, students must allocate enough time to research the internet, interview experts on the subject and /or go to the library to complete their written assignment.

Finally, after their research is complete, students must allow adequate time to develop and refine their writing. Those who wait until the night before the due date to start their papers are struggling with executive functioning.

Equally important are the skills necessary to develop an essay. This requires perspective-taking and organizational skills. Students must take the perspective of their readers and determine how much their audience already knows about a subject and what the author must make explicit. For example, if students are writing about the process of training ordinary dogs to become canine companions, they may assume that their audience understands that there is a need for service dogs for people with certain handicaps. However, they may need to explain to their readers that dogs are selected based on their temperaments, intelligence and obedience and are specifically matched to the personalities of their companions. This requires perspective taking.

Students must also use an organized approach to develop their essays. That process begins with brainstorming their thoughts followed by categorizing their ideas into main ideas and supporting details. These facts and details must be followed by explanations and examples that clarify the authors’ ideas for their readers. Excellent writers also add a touch of creativity and imagination that brings their writing to life.

Essays must not only be well developed, they must be fluent as well. Written fluency is measured by how easily the reader can navigate the student’s writing. Run-on sentences are typical problems that interfere with fluency. Sentences with syntax and grammatic errors such as subject–verb and noun–pronoun agreement issues are problematic as well. Readers also get confused when authors omit capital letters and punctuation marks and spell words incorrectly.

A student with a problem in any one of the above areas is going to struggle with writing. Unfortunately, there are many students who struggle with all three!

How Important is the Ability to Express our Thoughts in Writing?

Expressing their thoughts in writing is critical to students’ success in school. It begins in kindergarten when students are asked to write in their journals. They are not expected to have perfect spelling, but they are expected to write a sentence about a picture they have drawn in their journals or write a sentence about their day. In first grade, teachers tend to expect simple book reports and more extensive journals. By second grade, students are expected to use conventional spelling for most one-syllable words and phonetically correct spelling for the rest. They are also expected to write multi-paragraph book summaries in well-developed paragraphs with grammatically correct sentences and excellent mechanics.

Single-paragraph essays are typically assigned during the beginning of third grade. Students are expected to write a topic sentence followed by facts and details and summarized with a concluding sentence.

Three-paragraph essays are introduced later during third grade. By fourth grade, students are writing persuasive essays and simple research papers. Every year the expectations grow with assignments like “compare and contrast” essays and thesis papers by the end of elementary school.

Since 2005, the college entrance exams have included a writing component. Students are given 25 minutes to develop and execute a persuasive essay on a particular theme. They are expected to take a stand on the topic and then support their assertion with examples from literature, history and personal experiences. They are also expected to edit their mechanics during that 25-minute period.

Clearly, children are expected to write their thoughts throughout their lives in school. It is critical that they learn each step along the way so the mounting expectations of writing do not become overwhelming for them and cause writer’s block or other types of anxiety.

What is the Optimal Treatment for Written Composition?

Treating written language challenges must begin with an accurate diagnosis. If the challenge is handwriting, that student should go to an occupational therapist for treatment. On the other hand, if the problem involves spelling, oral language, reading fluency, comprehension, study skills, spelling, proofreading or executive functioning, that student should come to us at Therapies for Success.