I have been working with a year 2 child who I think is dyslexic. When I first started working with him in year 1 He did not know any of his letter sounds so I made cards with picture clueson for each letter of the alphabet. He now Knows them and when he looks at a letter he often says the picture then the sound. He is able to read Cvc words individually but when it comes to reading them in a book he can not read them. The progress is very slow he can now point to each word but does not remember repeating patterns so says any old thing. I was wondering if anyone can give me any new ideas that may have worked for them.
Thanks

Is the Senco of your school aware? There is quite abit of dyslexia training and testing about at the moment.

Yes the SEN Co is aware but is snowed up with so many special needs children to deal with. This makes progress so slow and training does not seem to be a priority.

I wouldn't expect him to be able to remember 'repeating patterns'. He probably has short term memory problems and remembering 'patterns' is just too much for him.

Build on the sounds, encourage him to associate the sounds with letters, rather than pictures, and then practise putting the sounds together to make words. It sometimes helps to get the child to say the sounds very slowly at first, running them together to say the word, then getting them to speed up. Also, things like asking him to get his b-a-g, or a b-oo-k, so that he gets the idea that words are made up of separate sounds. When he comes to be asked to read a word by sounding it out it may make more sense to him if he realises that all he is doing is 'reading' the sounds and putting them together!

A good dyslexia programme would work on sounding out and blending skills, so you wouldn't be doing anything contrary to the work he might get if he were actually diagnosed as 'dyslexic'.

(use Jolly Phonics with him?)

hane you tried the irlen method of coloured overlays experiment with diffentent colours 2 at a time

Agree with Miss H re the overlays. Also if you have worksheets photocopied for the class it may help him to have them on yellow or pink paper. Let us know how it goes.

Thanks, MG - but the suggestion came from happychick - I only supplied the link.

I know of a girl with this syndrome, who is supposed to use overlays when reading, but doesn't always bother!!

Hi
I saw aprog about dyslexia that said it doesn't really exist.
Is this true? Did ne1 else see that prog?

What books are you giving him/her to read?

With children who suffer with dyslexia you have to be careful with the font. You need very clear ascenders and descenders also a large font size. It’s quite useful if you can get the child to dictate a story to you. If you then type it up with double line space and every alternate line use a different font colour. (black, green, black, green) experiment with the colours. If you can then insert a few graphics and print it out. The child will be familiar with the story and it will help them to recognise individual words.

Eliza, yes I saw the programme. The gist seemed to be more that because it is nigh on impossible to define and because poor readers exhibit the same problems with reading and spelling the term is not useful and is probably inaccurate. I can't remember a lot of it but one thing that came out was that if there is a neurological reason for dyslexia type symptoms it is generally of an auditory rather than a visual nature. I.e. there is a problem processing what is heard (sounded out in the case of beginner readers) rather than what is seen. Thus overlays, coloured backgrounds or whatever will not help.

However, visual disturbances can interfere with seeing what you are trying to read and I have known children for whom overlays have made a difference. They still needed lots of blending and segmenting practice though and both also had short term memory deficits, either visual or auditory.

I would recommend the Eye Level Reading Rulers available from

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as a very good and inexpensive way to check for visual difficulties.