Reasonable Homeschooling

While every student will benefit from a systematic, explicit, intensive literacy program, dyslexic student REQUIRE it!  This is where Structured Literacy comes into play.  Read about it here. 

Structured literacy differs greatly from balanced literacy.  The University of Michigan has wonderful information here.  

Don’t forget about the MULTISENSORY part, too! That doesn’t have to be elaborate, using all sorts of manipulatives. You can do it with just your fingers, your voice, a pencil, and paper! Fun stuff is fine to use, but it isn’t necessary to make things multisensory!

Good instruction can mean many things to different people. Here, and especially this month, we want to talk about the specifics of good instruction as it pertains to reading.

Structured Literacy info from the IDA (Spend some time reading this!)

While this information is old (2004), it is based on the science of reading and includes basic instruction on the vocabulary behind the science of reading, which can be helpful for homeschoolers new to the ideas behind this movement.

Components of effective instruction

Though written for educators in the state of Tennessee, the PDF here is wonderful!

While this Timeline of Reading Wars has not been updated in years, but it does a good job on the earlier stuff.

The Washington Post noticed that the war is back ‘on’

Here’s a podcast about the resurgence of the reading wars

I’m all for bring you both sides of the equation so you can make up your own mind:

This is the link from the above report about how kids learn to read.  It’s a classroom-based model, though, so it might not seem very useful to you. Look beyond the classroom, school-y ideas and think about what they would look like if you did them 1:1 around your kitchen table.

The Reading Wars don’t have to be waged in your home!

In schools all across America these days, there is something called RTI taking place. RTI means Response to Intervention and it is a way of grouping kids, especially when talking about reading. Tier 1 is all about average readers in a classroom, so it doesn’t really apply to homeschoolers.  Because of our ability to target our instruction, almost all homeschoolers are going to be Tier 2, with Tier 3 being reserved for the kids who are struggling for whatever reason. Interestingly, all homeschooled kids could have what is known of as Tier 3 Instruction. Here’s more about what the different levels mean. 

If getting the testing for dyslexia done wasn’t enough of a struggle, once the test is done, what do you do with the report that is provided? Some of them are not easy to read! Understood has some help, as does this page at UMich. Every practitioner has their own way of writing reports. Reports also differ if they are only are going to be seen by a parent and not be used as part of an IEP or 504 meeting. For example, since I only work with homeschoolers, I have no need to provide something that would be used in court or for a meeting with the public schools. Instead, my reports contain information on the assessments used, how the child performed, and what I think would be a good plan of action going forward.

Dyslexic kids usually need explicit, intensive instruction in anything that is language based, study skills are no different. Yesterday, I suggested a course of study in reading comprehension using a science or history textbook. Today, I have a fabulous link to some helps for learning to study. I’ve posted this on FB before, so if you remember if from there, sorry for the repeat.

This link talks about how to explicitly teach comprehension. It goes into more depth than my steps yesterday. My goal yesterday was to show you a way that homeschoolers can “double dip” by teaching comprehension via a content subject. If you need more information on how to teach summarizing, you should look into IEW’s flagship product, Teaching Writing: Structure and Style, which has the happy effect of teaching a ton of comprehension without you realizing it. If this is your first time with IEW, you should either find a tutor or use the new SSS lessons. For a dyslexic student, plan to go down a level to start because you want the sources to be easy to read and they do not use decodable text. For this reason, many people who work with dyslexic students wait to begin this.

On my FB page today, I opened the testing and diagnosis conversation. As I was reviewing what I have scheduled for you this week, I found two interesting posts, both from Lexercise:

and this page

Here’s a graphics organizer MAKER!

This page has a bunch of graphics organizers and how to use them.

Originally created for use with Tapestry of Grace curriculum, Writing Aids can be used by anyone with any curriculum. At it’s heart , it is a bunch of graphic organizers (contained on the CD or if you buy in digital format, in PDF) that are used to organize the information you will eventually use to write whatever your teacher or the curriculum has assigned. Included are also ways to assess the resulting writings. I’ve seen it used, but do check to be sure the CD is useable. You’ll also need to ensure that you have a way to access that CD! Hard to believe that’s “old tech” already!

I don’t know if this will still be on sale when you click on it, but Walking with Jesus is a very nice reading curriculum that focuses on the Reading to Learn stage of reading. I’ve used it successfully with my own dyslexic kids. This one also has graphic organizers but it also has explicit teaching for the teacher, which can be helpful if you are only just learning these things.

I usually recommend this technique once a child is fairly competent at decoding many words, but still behind where you would prefer them to be compared to established norms. While you can certainly have your child listen to a novel or even a textbook, once you are ready to more explicitly work on fluency and comprehension, a great way to go about this is through a textbook/student approach in one of the content areas. Pick science or one of the social studies areas, not both. I usually go with science because my more challenged dyslexic kids liked that better. Here’s what to do:

1. Buy both the teacher and the student book.
2. Buy any workbooks or a notebooks that go along with the course.
3. If you choose a science course, get the experiment kits. You want this study to be as in-depth and enriching as possible.
4. Review the teacher’s manual for the publisher’s proposed schedule. You are going to need to double or triple this timetable! Due to this, most people find that it’s best to do this type of remediation at some point between 5th and 8th grades, although I’ve done it in early high school, too.
5. Map out a proposed schedule for yourself, but remember that you will have to take as long as it takes! You can’t go faster than the student is able and the goal is not the stuffing of information into his or her brain. The real goal is to make the information STICK!
6. Begin to read. You will read together every single day, but you are going to do it with an eye toward utilizing study skills that will help the learning stay in the brain. This means that you are going to teach vocabulary in an explicit manner, teach note-taking skills, teach how to summarize information, teach how to answer comprehension questions, and even teach how to study for and take tests. All of this is golden for your struggling learner to we working on with you.
7. Go through the text in this step-by step manner, with both of you taking turns reading. Use “think aloud” strategies so that you are explaining to your student what you are doing as you grasp the information. It’s fine for you two to study something that is hard for you and that you don’t know well. In this way, your student will see that learning isn’t easy for anyone.

The main thing to remember as you are doing this is that nobody is born knowing how to do this stuff. Yes, it does come easier to some people, but everyone can learn it–even if it is hard to do. By tackling this together as a reading exercise, you are not only teaching the content subject and applying best practices in teaching reading, you are also tying heart strings–and that’s worth it!