Depending on your child's age and the severity of her difficulty, the school will recommend a specific intervention. Interventions range from special help from your child's classroom teacher to small group or individual help from a teacher trained in special methods of teaching reading.
An appropriate remedial reading intervention for a child with dyslexia includes direct instruction in learning the code of sounds and letters. This is often done through the use of a special program such as the Orton-Gillingham program. The Orton-Gillingham program, and similar programs such as the Wilson System, Project Read, and Alphabetic Phonics, offer direct, intensive instruction in phonics and spelling. These approaches are ideal for students with dyslexia because they are multisensory approaches that offer children opportunities to learn through seeing, hearing, and touching. They also utilize a large amount of repetition that helps children with dyslexia learn.
In addition to providing a remedial program to help a child with dyslexia catch up in reading, schools can also offer a number of accommodations that help a child keep up with material being presented in class. For instance, a third-grade student reading at a first-grade level may use audio tapes of a third-grade novel so that she can participate in class discussions about the novel. A child with weak handwriting and spelling may be allowed to dictate a story to a teacher or aide who will write it for her. This allows the child to express her ideas without having to struggle with her weak areas.
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