Last updated on November 26, 2023
Anne is now nine, which for our schools would be the age for entering fourth grade. Instead, we’re back to homeschooling her and trying to identify why she struggles so much with academic tasks. My cousin has a master’s degree in speech and language pathology (SPL) and helped guide us toward the right questions.
Reading and writing are key to academic success. For Anne, reading and writing have never come naturally. She was a delayed reader and her writing is developmentally delayed. Every subject relies on reading instructions, reading new materials, and writing responses to questions.
By third and fourth grade, reading and writing delays translate into more serious overall educational delays. These delays and struggles can be traumatic, especially for a sensitive child like Anne.
Anne’s struggles include a late start to reading, unusual writing, working memory deficits, poor phonemic awareness, sound confusion, syllabic misidentification, and other signs of dyslexia and dysgraphia. Young children with dyslexia and dysgraphia struggle to connect the letters and letter combinations (graphemes) we use in English to represent sound sets (phonemes).
Like many dyslexic children, Anne taught herself to sight read, often guessing words and substituting likely synonyms when reading aloud. “The boy was disappointed after dropping his ice cream,” became “The boy was sad after dropping his ice cream.” Anne substituted on the fly. She continues to swap “a” and “the” when she reads. We recall her substituting some complex words she knew for shorter words she didn’t know as a beginning reader. “Tiny” became “minuscule” because she knew “Minuscule the Lady Bug” from a movie. Amazing… but wrong. Not even close to the word on the page.
Guessing words is a poor reading strategy, which often leads to misunderstanding a text. Minor word swaps make major differences in meaning.
Unfortunately, sight-reading was a popular strategy for reading instruction for several decades. Some teachers still cling to sight-reading despite research supporting phonemic awareness as a superior approach for most learners. Even for Deaf students, phonemic parts have graphemes with important meanings. English relies on Latin, Greek, and other languages for significant parts of our words. Knowing prefixes, suffixes, and bases is how many of us infer the definitions of unfamiliar words. These graphemes, such as “-ology” for “study of” have phonemic pronunciation and predictable spellings.
Inventive spelling is not dyslexia. It’s normal and a positive sign when children experiment with employing their phonemic skills. Yes, letters might get dropped, especially vowels. Some phonemic units might replace others. Spelling “photography” as “fotografie” demonstrates an attempt to spell the word using phonemic knowledge. Eventually, the reader-writer will learn “graph” is a base meaning “to draw or write” and “photo” means light. An image drawn with light is a “photo + graph.”
Anne isn’t making these connections that come naturally to most other people. Teachers and parents guide us as we learn to read, but many children quickly develop reading and writing skills independently.
Anne wants to read, especially in a house filled with so many books and three other active readers. Her sister, Leigh, reads non-stop and didn’t struggle with learning to read or write. Even Leigh’s teachers have commented on how fluently she reads and how beautiful her writing is.
It’s understandable that Anne compares herself to Leigh and feels inferior. Anne calls herself “stupid” or “slow” as a result of her reading and writing challenges.
Students with learning differences experience school as a series of traumas. Homeschooling Anne might reduce the trauma but doesn’t eliminate the self-doubt and negative self-talk that comes with struggling to read and write.
Though I am trying my best, I do get frustrated when we spend an hour on a short reading or writing assignment. We both need breaks, so I walk about with Anne, and we drink some tea. She knows I’m frustrated, and that upsets her. I can say positive things about effort and trying her best, but I cannot completely mask my concerns or frustrations.
Anne will be whatever she wants to be. I have faith in her. She will learn at her own pace and eventually read and write well enough to pursue her dreams. Right now, she says she wants to be an engineer someday, like Mommy. She won’t quit, but there will be difficult days.
We are here for the bad days and good ones.