A new school year is coming fast. For families navigating dyslexia, a little intentional preparation before the first day and a few consistent habits once it starts can make an enormous difference in how the year unfolds. Here is exactly what to do before school starts, what to ask the school about structured literacy instruction, which assistive technology tools to set up now, and the single most important thing you can do at home all year long.

By Troy Hubbell, CALT | Certified Academic Language Therapist | Your Dyslexia Expert You just got the diagnosis. Maybe you already suspected it. Maybe it came out of nowhere. Either way, you are probably feeling a lot of things at once, and that is completely normal. Many parents feel a sense of relief or vindication that they finally know what is happening to their child, overwhelmed and panicked about how to help, or both. This post is for that moment. Here is what to do in

By: Troy Hubbell - Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT) and CERI-certified Dyslexia Specialist, M.A., B.A "They Just Need More Time": Why This Advice Hurts Kids with Dyslexia 'They just need a little more time' is some of the most common advice parents hear when their child is struggling to read or spell in the early grades. It is well-meaning, and often heartfelt, but when dyslexia is involved, waiting is almost always the worst thing you can do. Early intervention f

By: Troy Hubbell - Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT) and CERI-certified Dyslexia Specialist, M.A., B.A Scarborough, H. S. (2001) What is the problem? If you have a child with dyslexia who is struggling to read, you may already sense that something is wrong with how schools are teaching reading. You're not imagining it. Why schools fail at teaching reading is one of the most important, and most frustrating, questions facing parents today. It starts with something as

By: Troy and Lisa Hubbell - Your Dyslexia Expert Expert Dyslexia Support, Any Time, Anywhere One complaint that I hear frequently from parents who hire us for online dyslexia help and expert online dyslexia support is that their child’s school isn’t listening. They are frequently told to give the interventions more time, or wait and see, or that there are more steps in the MTSS process. The entire process can be overwhelming and frustrating, and all the while you can see th

It can be frustrating, terrifying, and overwhelming to watch your child struggle to read or to find out that they have dyslexia. Most parents who come to me report monumental difficulties. Oftentimes the school wants to take a wait and see approach or doesn’t seem to know how to help, the amount of information (or lack of helpful information) is beyond exhausting. Where do you turn? What do you do? I created this post to offer you a roadmap. Whether or not you choose to

Working memory is like the brain’s workspace. Imagine a brain as if it were a person. The job of that person is to manage the information coming in, organize it, and respond to it. Imagine that this person is sitting at a desk. Whatever they can fit on that desk is what they can pay attention to at any given time. This desk is their working memory. When reading, they need to fit information about the letters and spelling patterns, the sounds those spellings refer to, the mea

Dyslexia is a phonological processing deficit. That means that those with dyslexia have trouble isolating and manipulating the sounds (phonemes) in oral language. It turns out that this skill is crucial for reading. Why? In order to read the word “cat” I need to know that each of the little squiggles that we call letters actually represents a sound. I then need to connect the letters to their sounds and be able to blend those sounds into a big sound that we call a word.

What is Dyslexia? Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that affects many individuals. According to the International Dyslexia Association, “Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation

What is reading? Reading is an extremely complex process, and there have been many theories about how people learn to read. In 1997, the U.S. government commissioned a study that is called The National Reading Panel. The goal of the study was to analyze all of the available research to determine what, if any, practices were effective in teaching children how to read. In the decades since the National Reading Panel, its findings have been expanded on, but every major study