Basic Skills or Accommodations? Best Approach for Your Child with Dyslexia

Hello, we're Nick and Sonja, and this is Dyslexia Journey, where we discuss topics around supporting the dyslexic child in your life. And today, the topic we wanted to talk about was the balance between strengthening skills and using accommodations. Right, it's a really interesting topic, because I think a lot of the advice out there for students with dyslexia is to work on remediation, right? Like, that's a term that gets used a lot, remediation, and the idea is that we need to focus on the remedial skills of basic decoding and reading and writing and spelling and so on, almost to the exclusion of other more intellectually challenging activities.

So, you know, these children are spending all their time doing remedial work and not necessarily getting the benefits of the regular academic experience. Right, so sometimes like a child in a public school might be pulled out to do some extra work or that kind of thing. And I want to jump in and say that I think that, you know, a lot of the reason for this is because, you know, people want to catch it early, if at all possible, which isn't always possible, but we can talk about that another time.

And, you know, start having kids develop the way that they can learn and how they can learn those skills. And so we're sort of starting from basic assumption here that that that that is everyone's focus to start with. And so that will be happening probably in some way. Right, right. And also, I think maybe I came out of the gate a little bit, you can tell I'm a little bit critical of that approach.

And so I do want to caveat that obviously it's important to do everything we can to help our dyslexic children gain as much fluency as possible with reading and writing and spelling. So I think because that's the focus, right, because I think as parents, we just really, really want to help and fix it and go hard at that. Today, what we want to talk about is how there needs to be the balance to it.

And so if that's happening to the exclusion of some of some other things that could happen in the time that the child's in school or at home, too, as well after school, sometimes people are having extra lessons and help support in that way, too. I think one of the things that can happen is that the child might become really bored if it's a lot of time that's spent on it, possibly frustrated, too, because this is going to be really hard work for them, too.

This is their weakness that you're working on. So if you think about it as an adult, it's great to work on what we perceive as our weaknesses, right? But if we are doing that a very large amount of time, that would be really difficult, right? Right, definitely. And then a sort of second problem there is they're not getting exposed to perhaps some more interesting material. So, for example, if they're only focusing on remedial reading, they're not getting exposed to more interesting stories, more interesting novels, more interesting nonfiction work, poetry, whatever, that perhaps other people their age are because other students their age who have already developed reading fluency are able to read this more, quote, more advanced material.

Right. And so that's actually starts to get into something that accommodations really help with, which is allowing kids to do higher level work, you know, not be like we have to read and write only first. And then we'll get to the material because that might take a very long time. It might be an ongoing process and everyone likes to be challenged, right? And it's important to make sure that kids with dyslexia are challenged appropriately as well.

It's more interesting. It's helpful to their academics and just their learning in general and becoming lifelong learners and all these other really important long term goals that we also have for them. Right. And on the flip side, if we're not providing that for these children, you can see kind of a negative feedback cycle where they get bored with the remedial work and then they get disengaged and then they do worse on the remedial work.

And then we as sort of parents or teachers or educators or whatever who are involved with these children have a harder and harder time seeing that, you know, we tend to then just throw more remedial work at them. And then it's really just this negative cycle. Right. So it can definitely go that direction. And so, I mean, that's why we use the word balance there, right? Because I think a lot of the key to that is trying to assess what, you know, how much to be doing that.

Of course, a lot of programs try to make things fun, which is, of course, part of the goal. But I think it's not just me trying to make the weakness thing fun still isn't going to solve it. And again, I think thinking as an adult and like when we try to do things like that, I mean, yes, it's absolutely helpful. Let's say you hate exercise to try to pick the fun activity.

Sometimes people might completely love it. But let's say it's something that's really your weakness. Like it's not the exercise that you like because that's probably more equivalent in this case. It's something that you're weaker at. Like for me, I am not very strong. You know, I like to very slowly jog, things like that. But if I were to pick the thing that I like trying to do pull-ups, that would, even if I tried to play fun music in the background, I mean, sure, that would help.

Maybe have a friend do it with me that might help, but I'm not going to still want to spend oodles and oodles of time on it. So I think it's just sometimes nice to try to take the perspective of these are also people with human, you know, human needs, too. And so like they're still going to respond to it. You know, you still have to take the big perspective of this is like a difficult thing in the weakness.

And so really balance it out in terms of their life and their learning. Yeah, and we're really talking about motivation here and buy-in from the child, right? We all know that you can't learn unless you're motivated to learn, right? So that's, I think, a key aspect of this. Maybe we should talk a little bit more specifically about what we're talking about with accommodations. Like what kind of things do we mean here?

Yeah, and without getting too specific, we can go into this, you know, in more depth in another time. It's going to vary a little by age level to some extent. But, I mean, a lot of the big ones for dyslexic, because it's dyslexia, are things like having things read aloud to them or using e-books. So it's often things that really bypass those exact skills. So I think that's another reason why people feel hesitant almost to use it is because it feels like, oh, we're really bypassing reading and writing.

Like they're not getting the chance to practice that at all in this case. Occasionally you could have a book that, you know, an audio book that you're trying to read along with. Although our experience has been that that's actually pretty difficult to do, because a lot of the difficulty is in finding the lines and all that kind of thing. So if someone is reading at a different pace, it can be challenging.

Let's see, what am I forgetting? Yeah, well, I guess just to jump in on that. And one thing that we observed with our daughter, as someone with dyslexia, has a lot of trouble reading, you know, just the decoding and reading fluently. But when read aloud to her and listening to an audio book, she can digest and really appreciate much higher level, much, much higher level material than what she can read herself with the fluency.

And so we obviously read to her starting from a very young age. But I think just in sort of not necessarily even school accommodations, but we continued reading to her as she got older and read much higher level material than I think a lot of people would necessarily expect someone with dyslexia to be able to comprehend. So, you know, for example, when she was maybe 10, I was reading Agatha Christie books to her, which are not only complex stories, but the language, because some of them were written 100 years ago, is quite different from casual conversation today.

But when read aloud to her, she was able to follow and really appreciate those stories in a way that she maybe still couldn't even do when reading herself. And so that language example is a really, it's a very good example, because when you're learning early reading skills, you might not have nearly as high level words, right? So where is the child going to get those high level words, especially earlier on, to be building upon?

I mean, I think, I think personally, that some sort of accommodation, you know, where they're hearing it orally or that kind of thing is the way to go. And if you think about it, there's no reason it has to be through the written word that you learn a language. I mean, like a lot of language and learning definitions and words and vocabulary can be oral. Right. Right. Right. We tend to assume that if someone is going to be sort of academically strong, that they are doing much of their learning through reading to themselves.

And I think, I think maybe the point that one of the points that we're trying to get to here is that I want to question that assumption.

Just because someone is learning something in a more oral way, doesn't sort of devalue that, that mechanism of learning it. Right. Exactly. So, I mean, I tend to think of reading and writing as skills, which I think a lot of people think of them that way. But a lot of knowledge and learning, you know, the skill is the medium through which they're learning it. But there are other media through which you can learn things.

So it's really important that that we remember sort of the big picture of like all learning, you know, versus what this particular skill is, even though reading and writing is such an important one. I think maybe this could be a good time. If there's something else you want to add, feel free. But to transition into that question of but what about later? Like I'm picturing them later. Don't they have to be reading to themselves?

And like what I want to emphasize here is that it's really easy when, especially when a dyslexic child is younger, to feel like, well, we're going to get them exactly up to that level. We'll figure out the way, the mechanism. But someone with dyslexia is still going to experience things quite differently through their entire life. It is this Dyslexia Journey. Right. And so really accommodations are also a lifelong skill, a really important lifelong skill for the kids, to me, as important, if not more, than the actual reading and writing skill.

Yeah, I mean, definitely into high school, if they go to college, university, then even continuing the rest of their life in whatever work they do. So I guess learning how to how to figure out what accommodations they need in order to make whatever situation it is work for them. And so, you know, an example that was just popping to my mind is I spent a short amount of time as a reader for in college for a Ph.D. student in psychology who was blind.

No one would question the fact that she was able to learn and get to that high level with accommodations and, you know, and learning in this completely different way. And here she was at this really high level and she wasn't, you know, she she I'm sure did some Braille reading as well. But her main way that she got material because it was faster and more efficient for her wasn't having readers for her.

So, yeah, exactly. So, so, yeah, so I guess just to sum up, I think that, you know, we're we're trying to really emphasize even early on thinking about accommodations and thinking especially about the balance, I think, between how much remediation of skills is done versus other things in general. But accommodations can make the school and learning aspect of it certainly like easier and faster. That will mean that there is time in their lives for other things as well.

But just even only looking at schooling and learning, it will help them not be as bored with that, you know, and spend less time doing that. And then it will expose them to perhaps more intellectually interesting ideas. And then it helps them with this really big other skill, which is accommodations, like learning accommodations that will help them throughout their learning lives. So, right. So hopefully this was helpful to hear some perspective, our perspective on this.

It's obviously a very big topic that we could talk about in lots of different ways and different times. The balance, which we will cover, I'm sure we will revisit, as Sonja said, in subsequent episodes. But for now, we're just hoping to get the word out there that, you know, we can be a place where you can start to discuss some of these ideas and to support your child with dyslexia along their journey that you're your journey to.

So if this was helpful to you, we're hoping to get the word out more. We're doing this both as a podcast and on YouTube. So on YouTube, if you could like and subscribe, hopefully our message will get out to more people. And on our podcast, it's really helpful if you feel inclined to leave us a rating or a review. Thank you. Thank you.