How to Support a Child with Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental difference that affects how the brain processes language, particularly reading and spelling. While it presents ongoing challenges, the brain is adaptable – due to its neuroplasticity - which means that with the right support, children can make meaningful progress.
Effective intervention involves addressing the underlying difficulties, not just the visible symptoms. Building foundational skills, boosting confidence, and tailoring teaching to the child’s needs can significantly reduce the impact of dyslexia on learning.
Below, there a range of strategies and tools that may help. The type and intensity of support needed will vary depending on the individual child and the severity of their difficulties.
1. Improve Eye Control
One of the first areas to consider when supporting a child with dyslexia is their visual processing, particularly how their eyes work together when reading. To read fluently, children need to focus both eyes on the same letter and smoothly track across a line of text.
Some individuals with dyslexia have difficulties with eye convergence and visual tracking. Instead of making precise, efficient eye movements, they may make frequent, erratic jumps - looking at up to 1,000 points per minute instead of the typical 150. This can cause visual confusion and place an extra processing load on the brain as it tries to filter out irrelevant visual information.
When a child’s eyes don’t work together effectively, their brain receives two slightly different images. This can result in blurred, doubled, or moving text, which makes reading tiring and frustrating. These visual challenges may also lead to skipping words or lines, letter reversals, or difficulty maintaining focus on the page. This difficulty is known as convergence insufficiency or binocular vision, which may not be picked up during standard optician eye tests.
These visual skills can often be improved. Engaging Eyes is an online vision training program that uses 3D games to help children develop better eye convergence and tracking. Practising regularly using the program can improve reading and fluency over time.
2. Developing Phonological Awareness
Some children who struggle to learn to read using phonics have underlying phonological awareness difficulties - often referred to as a phonological deficit. This means they may find it hard to hear and identify individual sounds within words. For example, it’s difficult to learn that ‘oa’ makes the long o sound if a child cannot hear that ‘goat’ contains a long o.
Research consistently shows that children who enter primary school with weak phonological awareness are much more likely to experience ongoing reading difficulties - unless they improve their phonological awareness.
Phonological awareness can be improved with short, focused daily practice. Just ten minutes a day of targeted activities can make a significant difference. Structured programs like Reading Unlocked and Fluency Builder are designed to strengthen phonological skills in a way that is engaging, clear, and accessible for children who need extra support.
3. Phonics Instruction
Once a child has developed their eye control and phonological awareness, they are better prepared to benefit from systematic phonics instruction. Phonics teaches children to connect sounds (phonemes) with letters or groups of letters (graphemes), enabling them to decode unfamiliar words.
Using a phonics program – such as Reading Unlocked - can help build confidence and reading fluency step by step. These programs break down the reading process into manageable stages, offering plenty of repetition and review, which is especially important for children with dyslexia or related learning difficulties.
Ensuring that pre-reading foundations are in place before moving on to phonics can greatly increase the effectiveness of teaching and reduce frustration for the child.
4. Supporting Spelling Development
Once a child is making progress with reading, it is then time to begin focusing more closely on spelling. While phonics provides a strong foundation for reading, spelling requires additional skills and strategies - especially in English, where many words don’t follow regular patterns. This means children often need to memorise the spelling of individual words, particularly those that don’t follow typical phonetic rules.
One highly effective method for helping children remember spellings is spaced repetition - revisiting words multiple times over days or weeks. This repeated exposure supports long-term memory by strengthening neural connections. Each time a child successfully recalls a spelling, their brain reinforces both the letter sequence and the visual shape of the word, helping to store it in the brain’s orthographic lexicon (the brain’s internal ‘dictionary’ of word patterns and shapes).
Multisensory learning - hearing, seeing, and writing words - can make spelling practice more effective and engaging. Spelling Tutor supports this approach by dictating words and sentences for the child to write. The program automatically revisits words the child finds difficult, repeating them until they are consistently spelled correctly. This ensures children learn the most commonly used words through personalised, meaningful practice.