Overcoming Dyslexia through Homeschooling: Our Second Year
During our second year of homeschooling to overcome dyslexia, my oldest child’s reading level jumped 4 grade levels from a sixth grade equivalent to a 10th grade equivalent. Here are the programs and methods we used during our second year of homeschooling:
OUR SECOND YEAR Overcoming Dyslexia through Homeschooling:
For our second year of overcoming dyslexia through homeschooling, we used Sonlight’s “Non-Western Nations of the World”, their fifth grade level curriculum. We continued with each child reading an entire chapter aloud on a daily basis. By the end of the year, each child’s reading fluency and reading speed was significantly improved.
During the second year we continued using the Orton-Gillingham reading program, the Language Tool Kit. I had each child memorize every phoneme, the alternate spellings, and order of frequency of use. All of this information is on the cards in the LTK card deck. These drills were completed by having me call out a sound, and the child responding with all of the possible letter representations, in order of frequency of use.
Additionally, I used the spelling rules from The Writing Road to Reading and had each child memorize each spelling rule. One spelling rule was added to the “Memory Cards” each week, and the cards were studied every day. Spelling is an ongoing challenge, but my child did rise from the second percentile in spelling to the 27th percentile. This was a great increase given the total ineffectiveness of other spelling programs we’ve tried. The Writing Road to Reading is an Orton-Gillingham reading program.
The second year of overcoming dyslexia through homeschooling, we repeated Levels 4 and 5 in Lexia Learning’s S.O.S. for reinforcement. Afterwards, we used “Simon Sounds it Out” software offered by Don Johnston. This is another game-like edutainment program which helps a child sound out words for spelling and reading. We used Simon S.I.O. on a daily basis for about 20 minutes per day. We also have Earobics software which the children could use daily, but were expected to use at least twice per week. Sadly, Earobics has been discontinued, but sometimes you can still find it on Amazon.
For our workbook, we switched from Spectrum to Megawords. Our children like Megawords better, and the program is much more incremental. I’m not sure I agree with the order of concept presentation in Megawords. They begin with compound words, but that is a relatively small segment of the program in the beginning.
We moved into our third year of homeschooling to overcome dyslexia with great anticipation after the great progress our boys made during the first two years.
