Anabel Walters,CALT

Although I'm no longer in the public school sector, I still wanted voices heard! Dyslexia Awareness Month ended yesterday, but awareness of the 1 in 5 should be 365! Voices of Dyslexia 2025

A final daily Dyslexia Awareness Month post. Be your child’s number one advocate. This example will help prepare them to advocate for themselves and possible their own child in the future. Remember, an informed parent is a weapon.

It’s mixed feelings. It can strike fear…will my child struggle like me? I made it through, they don’t need extra help. Or, I struggle too, there is help now. It can be a time of reflection, facing the identification of their kid & remembering the past. We know better now.

During our ALT sessions, I am very intentional in hitting each of these! It is not just about phonics.

Spell check is a tool and should not replace explicit spelling instruction.

Be a bridge for our dyslexics. Teach phoneme/grapheme correspondences so they have an anchor and don’t have to guess.

These kids often fly under the radar due to compensatory strategies and masking which leads to delayed identification.

Don’t discount the perceptive nature that some people with dyslexia have. “They say I gotta learn, but nobody’s here to teach me? If they can’t understand it, how can they reach me?”-Coolio

For all the Goonies dancing in the rain!

Fatigue can look like; refusal to work, lack of motivation, acting out, tiredness, inattention, headaches, eye strain, inability to maintain posture doing desk work, eloping, disrupting, tears/anger, clowning, anxiety & more. Think about a tackling a struggle 24/7. Empathize.

Some of the most brilliant brains are masked!🎭

The daily test can be a life or death situation…make a wrong turn, misread a prescription. The world is saturated in texts, it’s not just a “in school” thing.

Remember, fluency isn’t just about speed. Even some of the quickest of readers do not comprehend what they’ve read. If we take a bit longer and can still comprehend in the end, that’s a win.

Phoneme to grapheme (sound to symbol) correspondences need to be taught explicitly and require frequent opportunities for practice. Brain to paper.

Automaticity with decoding/word recognition when reading is a major obstacle for people with dyslexia. It impacts fluency and can in turn impact comprehension. At times so much cognitive effort is spent in lifting the words from the page that not much is left for comprehension.

It is so important to saturate your child with spoken language well before they enter school. Tap into that phonological processing!