5 Things To Know About Your Student With Dyslexia

Our students with dyslexia sometimes wished that they had the courage to tell their teachers some of the things below. The rest we gathered from 3 decades of close interaction with them.

1. Results may not reflect effort. Many of our students used to spend several hours a night on homework, even in primary school. Their parents, and sometimes even grandparents, often helped alongside. Yet this monumental effort yielded little, before their processing difficulties were cleared in Dysolve. As a 7th grader said, “Teachers don’t realize how hard we worked to get 70 in a test.”

2. They do need to use the restroom or see the nurse. Some of our students have sought refuge in the restroom when the background noise or their anxieties become overwhelming. Sometimes, of course, it’s to avoid reading aloud or performing in front of their classmates. Many of our students actually experience cognitive overload and physical symptoms such as recurrent headaches or gastric problems.

3. Break up information into even smaller chunks. Teachers know how to communicate with young children, yet our students still fail to understand them at times. A 5th grader explained, “My teacher tried to help me by breaking things into smaller pieces, but they were still not small enough for me to grasp.” Relay information in even smaller bits to children who struggle to understand, store and retrieve it.

4. They may be even more intelligent than you think. The processing problems that underlie dyslexia restrain their ability to demonstrate their true intelligence. Even parents are often surprised by how much greater their children’s potential is, when they can finally express themselves. When the processing restraints are removed, our students amaze us by how much higher and further they can reach.

5. Processes have to run efficiently before skills can be acquired. Many of our students were taught the same spelling rules over and over again. “They didn’t make any sense,” said a 4th grader. Skills can’t be acquired when the brain can’t function efficiently to execute them. The effort is not just wasted—students get demoralized when they think they cannot learn. We should only teach skills when their brains are receptive to acquiring them.

For that, we need a way to “read” their brains: