I would like to introduce you to two basic principles, which you should bear in mind when doing all these activities. The first one is working in structure. Working in structure means that you will not put the child in a situation when she will have to read or spell words where the grapheme, some of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences have not been seen yet with multisensory links. So, in other words, you introduce words whose phoneme-grapheme correspondences have all been seen beforehand with multisensory techniques. This is very important, because it induces a relationship of confidence between the child and you, in the sense that they know that you are not going to ask things for which they don't have the knowledge yet. The second point, which is very important and which appl(ies) across all four domains of reading, spelling, comprehension, and composition, is to promote, whenever you can, to give the children self-assessment tools, self correction tools, sorry, so that the child is not confronted with you having to take a red pen and saying, no, this is wrong etc, especially for tracking exercise which I mentioned earlier, for spelling also; rather than taking the sheets away, and correcting the spelling of the children, you can give them the correct spelling of the words, and they can compare their own production to the correct spelling, which should be written, ideally, in cursive script. And from experience, I can tell you that most dyslexic children are able to spot their mistakes, so this is a very powerful tool. Self-correction tools, actually (are) very positive for the child because it reinforces self-confidence; The child is not spotted (marked) as being weaker than the others. It also develops the internal motivation, so the child is going to tell herself, 'I want to learn for my own sake'. Self-correction tools will also induce in the child Intrinsic motivation to learn, as opposed to extrinsic motivation to learn. It won't come from you, the child is going to tell herself I want to learn for my own sake. It also promotes autonomy because the child is responsible for finding the mistakes, especially ... thinking, especially about spelling. And it also promotes metacognition which we have seen is paramount for teaching with dyslexic learners. 'How do I avoid to make the same mistakes next time?' So now we moving to reading. For reading there are two basic principles. I'm only touching on two principles, but you can also try other tricks. One is grouping words into FAMILIES. Dyslexic children will often not realize that '-ight', I-G-H-T, has the same spelling and the same corresponding phonemes in 'right', 'bright', 'fight', etc. So you need to make those families, you need to group word into families explicitly, ideally, with color, with the color coding. You can do that with onset. Think about the regular onset, 'sp' as in 'spell', 'spill', 'spun', '-ing', as in 'string', 'spring', 'hoping'. '-ed', as in 'planted', 'lifted', 'omitted'. Common syllables like '-tion' in 'station', 'mention', 'portion' or '-sion' with an 's' (as) in 'pension', 'television', 'tension'. '-ture', (as) in 'capture', 'picture', 'furniture'. You may have a progression in the teaching of grouping words into families. The first thing you could do is to introduce each family on ... different pages, so you would have the '-ight' family, the'-ing' family, the '-ed' family, etc and the children need to circle, or to color, the common sequence and to read them aloud so that you will use more than one modality for the teaching. In the second phase, what you can do is add words from the various famil(ies) and you ask the child to which family this word belongs. And so they can add words to the existing family they have seen already, and then you can introduce other words which have not been worked on before. Watch out not to ask the child to read the word because then remember the principle of working in structure but just to circle or to color the sequence of letter which we're working on in the families. The second principle is helping children to segment longer words into smaller chunks. You can do that with syllables, with onset/rimes. (The) phoneme is not really useful, because decoding is reading phoneme by phoneme. You may use several techniques. For example, for longer words, you can ask the child, or all the children, to underline the complex grapheme(s), which have more than one letter, to cross out silent letters, to frame the prefixes and the suffixes in the word. And so, a word like 'knowledgeable' will be much easier read when it is marked as opposed to when it is not marked. And this is going to free some attention and resources away from decoding because the decoding will become easier and so there will be more attentional resources to build the comprehension of the sentence or the text. So please let the child read the text a first time and mark the difficult words, the longer words. You can also ask them to circle final regular syllables like sion, etc. If you have word with soft 'c' and soft 'g' or hard 'g' you can also ask them to find the little trick so that they know it's pronounced as a soft 'c', hard 'c', or soft 'g', hard 'g'. Obviously the marking up is not suitable for irregular words but do not forget, as I said already, that in every irregular word there are regular grapheme-phoneme correspondences. I will take again the example of 'said', where the correspondences s, 's' and d, 'd', are both regular. You should draw the attention to these regularities even in irregular words because that's going to help the children. You can also make a reading pack of irregular words, flash cards, which the child may study at leisure at home or with you in the classroom. Dyslexic children who often display a better visual memory compared to the auditory memory will benefit from seeing the words, as they can sort of take a picture of these irregular words, and that's going to ease memorization, retention and the ability to spell them correctly.
