Brain Links
Fluency for the Dyslexic Learner
Fluency
Myth Buster
Myth: Dyslexia only affects people who speak English.
Fact: Dyslexia appears in all cultures and languages in the world with written language,
including those that do not use an alphabetic script such as Korean and Hebrew. In
English, the primary difficulty is accurate decoding of unknown words. In consistent
orthographies such as German or Italian, dyslexia appears more often as a problem with
fluent reading – readers may be accurate, but very slow (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005).
Tips
- Provide children with opportunities to read and reread a range of stories and informational texts by reading on their own, partner reading, or choral reading.
- Introduce new or difficult words to children, and provide practice reading these words before they read on their own.
- Include opportunities for children to hear a range of texts read fluently and with expression.
- Suggest ideas for building home-school connections that encourage families to become involved actively in children's reading development.
- Encourage periodic timing of children's oral reading and recording of information about individual children's reading rate and accuracy.
- Model fluent reading, then have students reread the text on their own.
High Yield Strategy
1. Teacher provides groups of students a variety of novel (text) excerpts.
2. Students will have 2 minutes (for each excerpt) to read and jot down as many pieces of evidence as possible from the text(s) to show that the story is set in alternative reality or a place different from the world we know today.
3. Each piece of evidence must be no more than 4 words long.
4. The winning team is the one who has the most solid evidence.
Helpful Resources
A good resource on the web is http://www.dolchsightwords.org
Math and Science Connections
Use multiplication charts and/or make calculator readily available to students during class.
Use place value chart.
Use 100’s chart.
Highlight or circle the operation to be used.
Use acronyms/ lists.
Use formula charts.
Use picture clues and visual aides
When doing mental math, let the student jot down notes as they are completing the problem.
Encourage to verbalize and talk through each step of a multi-step problem.
- Mark decimal point in colored ink.