You may be wondering what’s the difference between dyslexia tutoring and dyslexia therapy. Aren’t they the same thing? The short answer is no. When I think of tutoring, I think about a child who needs help with their homework and understanding skills that were already taught at school. Dyslexia therapy gets to the root of the student’s struggles and generates long term success for the student.
A child with dyslexia needs far more than some help on their homework. They need help overcoming the challenges of dyslexia. Dyslexia challenges include phonemic awareness, word-finding struggles, reading impairment, spelling difficulties, and much more. Dyslexia therapy includes structured strategies that help with all of the components of dyslexia.
Tutoring tends to involve helping a child learn to read with traditional instruction methods, that do no always work well for a child with dyslexia. The reason many children with dyslexia struggle to learn to read is the way it is being taught in schools does not fit their needs. Additional tutoring with those same methods only produces limited results. It may help a child get their homework done, but may not help them overcome the lifelong struggles of dyslexia.
Dyslexia therapy includes systematic and structured reading instruction surrounding the idea of reading being comprised of phonemes, graphemes and syllables. We teach students to read by helping them break the code of the English language and the many combinations of letters to generate sounds and words. Students learn using a mastery approach which feeds into success and confidence.