Child Diagnosed With Dyslexia? What to Do Next

Receiving a dyslexia diagnosis can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. This diagnosis, while challenging, can actually give you a lot of answers. If your child was just diagnosed with dyslexia, you may be wondering what comes next.

First of all, you’ve already made a huge step. Many parents and children lose valuable time waiting to see if a child’s reading difficulties “go away” with a new teacher, new school, or simply more time. Getting to the root cause of a child’s reading difficulties is essential, and if your child has been diagnosed with dyslexia, that step is already complete.

Here are some suggestions as you navigate what’s next.

Provide Your Child With Proper Support

One of the key next steps is making sure your child has the right support to learn to read successfully. Talk with your child’s teacher to understand what kind of reading support your child receives at school. When evaluating a reading intervention, look for these essential factors:

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics

Instruction should focus explicitly and systematically on phonemic awareness and phonics. Concepts should follow a clear sequence, building on skills your child has already mastered.

Strategies for Unknown Words

Your child should be taught real strategies for reading unknown words. A major red flag of an ineffective program is having a child guess a word based only on context or picture clues. Instead, children should look at the letters in a word and blend the sounds together. They can also learn to read longer words using syllable division strategies, and to read words that don’t follow standard phonics rules and patterns.

Reading Connected Words

Reading connected text while learning phonemic awareness and phonics skills is essential. Decodable texts, passages containing words with letter-sound patterns your child has already mastered, are the best form of connected text for this stage. They build confidence, let your child apply their knowledge of letter-sound relationships, and show them that they really can read.

Reading Programs

Complete reading programs incorporate phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. While a child with dyslexia typically needs more intense instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency, their vocabulary and comprehension skills shouldn’t be ignored either. After all, what’s the point of reading if not for comprehension?

Communicate With Your Child About the Diagnosis

While making sure your child is set up for success with the right reading instruction, take time to talk with them about the diagnosis too.

• Tell your child that the reason for their reading difficulties is called dyslexia.
• Share that dyslexia is a common challenge people have with reading, and talk about the “sea of strengths” perspective, the idea that dyslexia is one small piece of a much bigger picture of who they are.
• Explain that this reading difficulty comes from having a hard time pulling apart the sounds of words, confusing words that sound alike, reading aloud, spelling, and pronouncing words.
• Reassure your child that this is a common experience. There are likely other students in their class who also have dyslexia. Despite the diagnosis, let them know they will learn to read.
• Share that many successful, well-known people also have dyslexia, including Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Cher, and Anderson Cooper, among many others.

You may also want to read some books together that feature main characters with dyslexia. Here are a few we recommend:

• Cartwheels by Tracy S. Peterson
• Finding My Superpower by Sarah Prestidge
• Magnificent Meg by Andra Harris
• Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt

Educate Yourself

If you’d like to dig deeper into what a dyslexia diagnosis means, consider these books:

• Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz
• The Dyslexic Advantage by Brock Eide and Fernette Eide
• The Gift of Dyslexia by Ronald Davis

Stay confident. Your child can learn to read, and now that you have a dyslexia diagnosis, you know that getting the right kind of support in place as soon as possible is the best thing you can do to help ensure their success in reading.

Dyslexia Support From Enrichment Therapy & Learning Center

Sometimes the support a child receives at school isn’t enough. If that’s the case for your family, we strongly encourage you to consider extra services. At ETLC, we use evidence-based dyslexia treatment practices to optimize reading outcomes. Every session incorporates a multisensory, research-proven approach to reading, along with one-on-one services that identify the root issue holding your child back and build an individualized treatment plan to help them succeed. Contact us to learn more.