I want to tell you about Rita.
Rita was a student I worked with MANY years ago (more than I can believe!).
I was a new teacher and knew almost nothing about dyslexia. I had heard of it, but got no training on it in my credentialing classes to become a special education teacher (education specialist). Can you believe that?!
Poor Rita. She couldn’t rhyme, blend, or segment in kindergarten. And I didn’t really know what to do about it except to practice MORE rhyming, blending, and segmenting. For a few years, we kept at it, while also working on sight words and other reading skills.
Rita was able to stay at grade-level in her reading but couldn’t rhyme, blend, or segment much at all. (Despite all of the practice we had been doing!)
I’m a researcher by nature. I love to read and research any topic I’m interested in, and especially ones around problems I’m trying to solve for myself, my family, or my students!
So I read and read and realized I needed to do something more fundamental than the rhyming, blending, and segmenting that I had been doing!
Eventually, we found success and Rita was able to segment and blend and read unknown words, although rhyming was never her strong suit! She became a strong reader who could figure out some rhymes.
The first things that helped a little was just an overall increase in Rita’s exposure to rhyming. We played rhyming games, practiced rhyming, books, poems, songs, videos. This was the stuff I did early on that seemed to help some, but not nearly enough.
Eventually, I used a systematic phonemic awareness instruction. It included a lot of specific segmenting and blending practice. For more on how that works, check out the episode/blog on Phonemic Awareness and Dyslexia.
Takeaway:
Rhyming isn’t easy and isn’t automatic for some kids. They need systematic interventions.
If you want to learn how to teach your own child with dyslexia, email me at Kimberlynn@DecodingLearningDifferences.com
