In my day-to-day life, whether I’m trying to save money, move my body, drink more water, or be the best parent I can be, I love coming back to this mantra. I don’t have to do something huge. I can take one tiny step toward my goal. Every little thing makes a change.

So here is a little thing that can make a change for your child with dyslexia in the early stages of learning how to read. It’s something called connected phonation. And it’s hot off the research press (June 2020). In a nutshell, connected phonation just means that you drag the sounds out in a word, never stopping between them. So ccccccaaaaaaaattttttt would be how we practice the word cat instead of tapping out the individual sounds c-a-t. To learn more about this, you can watch this video (4:55) to hear Ruthie Swibel break down the concept. You can practice this with your child by looking around your home, out the window while driving in the car or riding the bus, or out on a walk in your neighborhood for items that you can practice dragging out the sounds. This doesn’t mean that we throw tapping sounds, or segmented phonation, out the window. Instead, it means we add this information to our toolbelt and try it with our child. How do they respond? Does it seem to support them in learning how to decode?

Here is a little thing that can make a change for your child with dyslexia in the middle stages of learning how to read. It’s something called chunking. If your child is reading a text out loud to you or silently to themselves for a homework assignment or applied practice, you can help them draw brackets around chunks of the text. Instead of looking at a whole page of text and feeling overwhelmed, they can tackle one chunk at a time. They can practice focusing on one chunk without getting distracted, and then taking an intentional 30-second or 1-minute break where they focus on something else. Chunking may sound overly simple, and it’s not a magic bullet, but it can make all the difference in supporting your child with building stamina over time. Remember, if your child has dyslexia, they are exerting much more energy than someone without dyslexia to read and write. Honoring how much energy they are exerting with a strategy like chunking can help them feel seen and understood as they navigate their literacy journey.

And finally, here is a little thing that can make a change for your child with dyslexia after they have learned how to read proficiently. It’s called assistive technology. There is still some stigma around assistive technology, assuming that using it to help you read and write is somehow less valuable than reading and writing without it. That’s a myth! If I have poor eyesight, using glasses or contacts to help me navigate my life doesn’t make my accomplishments any less real. If I have a health condition that requires me to rest more than the average human, that doesn’t mean that what I do with my life is any lesson impressive. If I have dyslexia and know that my brain has to work harder to read and write than a non-dyslexia brain, it’s a no-brainer that using supports like assistive technology to save my cognitive energy for comprehension and analysis is a win. To read more about how transformative assistive technology can be for students with learning differences, check out this blog post by Kelsey Dadey, Lead Writing Instructor at Redwood Day School.

So what little thing are you going to try this week to make a change for your child with dyslexia? If you aren’t sure where to start, I’d love to chat with you. You can book a call with me anytime. Talking to parents about their beautiful kids with dyslexia is one of my favorite things to do.