Homeschool Facts

In every class you will find children displaying this phenomenon.

There will be bright children in the class, who work hard but struggle to read.

Stranger still, everything seems OK at first. But then they start to fall behind and eventually hit a plateau at around the age of 6 or 7. As the text gets more complicated they start to guess wildly and they become steadily more confused.

And then their confidence collapses under the pressure. They can feel everyone’s concern and don’t know what to do to fix the problem.

Sometimes this leads to a diagnosis of dyslexia, which is quite wrong.

Dyslexia suggests there is some underlying problem that cannot be overcome.

But these children are usually just trying to read the wrong way. There is no reason why they should not be able to read.

Here is what’s really happening.

A very visual child will find the alphabet easy to memorise. Then the first words they are show they will memorise as well. Everyone praises their progress and as far as they know, they are reading. The early reader books feed into this by using a very limited vocabulary that repeats a lot.

So everyone thinks it is going fine.

But this approach implodes on them as the text gets more complicated. Some children will be able to switch to decoding words phonetically, because they also have a strong natural auditory ability. They can see how the sounds within the speech relate to the text.

Others cannot naturally distinguish the sounds within the words (phonemes) and so cannot relate them to the letter patterns that represent them in text (graphemes). At least not without quite a bit of careful instruction.

And these are the ones that have major problems.

They will use the context to guess wildly, taking the first letter of the word as a guide.

They are baffled by their predicament and have no idea why it has gone wrong. They can feel people’s frustration, but have actually been working hard.

One in five children reach the age of 11 unable to read properly and these children make up a large proportion of that group. It is a disaster for their academic career and working life.

And that is a tragedy for each of them because they are just trying to read the wrong way. We routinely see them successfully crack it in just a matter of weeks.

The label dyslexic carries a great risk that everyone will just relax into acceptance of the situation as inevitable. That leaves the child to deal with a much harder path through life.

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