[00:00:00] Elise Orazem: It’s really interesting. When I started into the dyslexia world, what I heard all the time was, “Oh, dyslexia is letter reversals. They see letters backwards.” Now it’s– There’s so much information about dyslexia, which is awesome, I’m so glad, but also because I think we focus so much on dyslexia was underdiagnosed; now everybody’s like, “Oh my gosh, there’s a problem. It’s dyslexia.” It’s like, we need to bring it back to the middle ground here of, “Yes, it’s sometimes dyslexia, but unfortunately, it’s oftentimes dyslexia plus.”

[music]

[00:00:45] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show, and I am so excited today to have this conversation with Elise Orazem. I’ve known Elise’s husband since he was a teenager, and so it was a great privilege when I had the opportunity to make Elise’s acquaintance, and to find out she was a dyslexia specialist was particularly exciting.

I’m delighted to bring this conversation today to you all, talking about decoding dyslexia, because, man, there’s a lot of myth out there. I’m hoping that we’re bringing clarity to you all today, so many of you ask so many fabulous questions, and Elise has done some really terrific work organizing those questions. We’ll get to those eventually, but where I want to begin is allowing Elise to talk about how she got to here where we are today.

Elise, tell us about you.

[00:01:41] Elise: Hi, Gretchen. Thank you so much for having me. This is amazing. It’s a full circle moment. Your son was in our wedding. [laughs] Never thought we’d be here. Oh, my goodness. Yes, so it’s a crazy journey how I became a dyslexia therapist, and one of those things that are really just God’s hand leading me.

I went into college not really knowing what I wanted to do. I just had this call in my heart to work with at-risk youth. I didn’t really know what that meant. “Okay, I’ll study theology,” so I studied biblical and religious studies, and then added communication studies, and still like, “Hey, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.”

I had an opportunity to do some teaching and loved it. I spent a year teaching at a classical Christian school. I just love teaching, but the classroom, it’s hard. You have students at all different levels, and that was the first time that I interacted with a dyslexic student. I was told she was dyslexic, but that was all I was told. I didn’t know anything, so of course, she struggled in my class. At the time, I just had no idea how to help her, and that really bothered me.

After my husband and I got married, I knew some people who had done this Orton-Gillingham dyslexia training, and it was one-on-one, working with students with dyslexia, and I thought, “Why not?” It was a free training through the Children’s Dyslexia Centers, the Scottish Rite. All, in turn, you had to do was attend 60 class hours and 100 practicum hours.

[00:03:28] Gretchen: All.

[00:03:28] Elise: Oh, my goodness [crosstalk]–

[00:03:29] Gretchen: The operative word in that sentence, Elise, is “All.” Come on. [laughs] That’s a lot of work.

[00:03:35] Elise: I know, but it’s free, so you’re like, “Oh, I can do this.” When I got in it, I’m like, “I know nothing about the English language.” One of the first questions they asked was, “Okay, write down all of the letters or letter combinations that represent the sound E.” E says E, right? E-E? I don’t know. [laughs] It turns out there are a lot; things you don’t really think about.

I became a dyslexia practitioner and was blown away by how the dyslexia remediation transformed these kids and their families. That’s something I hadn’t realized before, either, and not being a parent at that time. When your child is really struggling, your family is struggling. When you give them that hope and the tools to be able to read and then spell and then write, it’s incredible, and I was addicted.

I worked at the Children’s Dyslexia Center of Western PA. Actually, I still do. [chuckles] It’s been almost 15 years, and I’ve worked with students from Pre-K up through 12th grade, and have had the opportunity to homeschool my two children as well. I have taught them from the Orton-Gillingham method from the beginning, and that’s been a really cool thing.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago, when I was teaching a class—because I’m an Orton-Gillingham trainer as well now, too—that it struck me as we were talking about the statistics of the from school-to-prison pipeline, and just how much, when students can’t learn to read, it puts them at risk.

I remember saying those words and going, [gasps] “Oh, my goodness.” That was what God had put in my heart two decades ago, and that’s what I’m doing now. I had no idea the path that that would take, but it’s been so rewarding.

I’m so excited to be here. Being homeschooled myself, I was homeschooled almost the entire way through my schooling, and then again, homeschooling my two children; I’m so passionate about homeschool parents being informed and empowered to be able to look at their own children and, if they’re struggling, to know maybe what they can do, or to know, how do I know if they are struggling?

[00:06:14] Gretchen: Right. Often, I will have conversations with parents, and parents will say, “Well, we suspect dyslexia,” and I will ask them, “What makes you suspect that?” The answers are as varied as leaves on a tree. It’s just amazing to hear the different things that parents suspect, but can’t necessarily quantify. I think I said to you while we were waiting to begin this, WebMD—where my monitor sits here—is not necessarily our best friend. You go read a list of symptoms, and you could think you had any number of diseases just based on the list of symptoms. There’s more to it than that.

Speak to me a little bit about being a parent, knowing something’s not right, because I remember being that parent. That kid is now 27, but when he went through three years of preschool and still could only recognize five letters of the alphabet, we knew something was different about him.

[00:07:26] Elise: Yes, absolutely. That’s the hard thing of just knowing– I wish there was just a dyslexia test where you get a blood test and it’s like, oh, positive or negative. Unfortunately, in most of these diagnoses and disorders, and such, there’s just not that clear-cut. It’s really an investigative process. That’s something that I had to learn over the years with my own children as well, is that looking at situations with curiosity and with asking, “Okay, what’s going on here that I’m not seeing because I’m focused so intently on the details?”

[00:08:09] Gretchen: I love the fact that you use the word curiosity because sometimes, I will encounter a parent who has already gone into full-blown panic. I think it’s hard to make good decisions when you’re afraid. Being curious is a much better place to come from when you’re examining what you see.

[00:08:32] Elise: One of the most humbling experiences of my parenting journey was when my eight-year-old daughter started complaining that it hurt when she was writing. Of course, I taught her to read and write and everything. Everything was perfect, of course, [chuckles] but at eight years old, the work is getting harder. There’s more demand, more writing, more reading. I just kept saying, “Okay, well, you’re just going to have to work harder. I understand.”

I was patient and gentle, but I didn’t think outside the box of, “Okay, is there something going on here?” One day, she threw her pencil down and said, “Mom, I cannot write any longer. It hurts too much.” I said, “Okay. All right. Well, show me, where is it hurting?” She holds up her pencil, and she’s got it gripped like this-

[00:09:32] Gretchen: Oh, she’s choking it. [laughs]

[00:09:33] Elise: -and I go, “Girl, where’s your pencil grip?” She goes, “I can’t hold it like that.” Her fingers were totally collapsed. She had hypermobile joints. She couldn’t hold her pencil correctly. I felt so terrible, of course, because I haven’t even looked at her hand when she’s writing. Because I taught her. She was doing it correctly. Again, just being able to step back and go, “Okay. What am I missing here? What are the facts, and what maybe do we need to pursue?”

I think it’s really interesting. When I started into the dyslexia world, what I heard all the time was, “Oh, dyslexia is letter reversals. They see letters backwards.” Now it’s– There’s so much information about dyslexia, which is awesome, I’m so glad, but also because I think we focus so much on dyslexia was underdiagnosed; now everybody’s like, “Oh my gosh, there’s a problem. It’s dyslexia.” It’s like, we need to bring it back to the middle ground here of, yes, it’s sometimes dyslexia, but unfortunately, it’s oftentimes dyslexia plus something else. There are a lot of coexisting conditions, and teasing apart what is what is really challenging.

One of the questions was asking about the prevalence of vision issues, or auditory processing, or these other coexisting conditions. The statistics are anywhere from 20%, 50%, 60% co-occurrence. They don’t have a good, solid number on that, but I can tell you from experience, it is very uncommon to have a child with just dyslexia.

[00:11:27] Gretchen: That’s a very true statement. Now I do know that the National Organization for Vision Therapists says the comorbidity is northwards of 87%. I know, if you have a dyslexia diagnosis, and you haven’t ruled out binocular vision as a mitigating factor, you really don’t have the whole picture. It may be something as simple as one of my children needed prism glasses because her eyes were tracking, but not on the same plane. She needed to bring her eyes into the same plane. She was a fully emerged reader, she was a college graduate, but she had migraines that were debilitating. When she got prism glasses, the frequency of migraines was more than cut in half.

It’s not just as simple as, “Oh, your eyes aren’t playing well together,” but I think it’s really important for us as parents to understand it’s not just letter reversals; it’s so much more than that.

Tell me, what are the things that you see? When a child comes to you and a parent says, “I suspect Owen–” We’ll use my youngest. He gets used all the time as far as an example. “I suspect Owen has dyslexia.” What are the questions that you ask of parents? What are you looking for?

[00:12:57] Elise: For me, I’m more on the side of remediation. This is a difficult thing. When I was the director of the dyslexia center, we’d get calls in and people say, “My child needs to be diagnosed. Can you diagnose?” Diagnosis is difficult in America because only licensed psychologists can do the formal testing to diagnose dyslexia.

Further complicating that is that in the public schools, because of the laws of most states, and this is starting to change, but they don’t even diagnose for dyslexia. They diagnose for specific learning disorder. I’ve had parents panic, saying, “Oh, no, I didn’t get a dyslexia diagnosis.” That’s okay. It’s the same testing. It’s just that that specific learning disability code is the legal term that unlocks interventions and resources and such, but it’s still functionally the same testing.

For me, looking at a student who– There’s a lot of different factors that make you go, “Okay, is dyslexia a factor here?” One huge: family history. If you have someone in your family who has not even diagnosed dyslexia, but just they’re a slower reader or had difficulty learning to read, I’m going, “Your kids,” I just, from the get-go, be like, “high chance, so I’m going to be watchful and proactive.” That’s family history.

Then there’s other signs, which, again, we get into it, can be a sign of early dyslexia, or it can be a sign of something else, but late talking is something. Then once you start into reading or phonological awareness– When we’re reading to our kids when they’re three and four years old, we’re reading them nursery rhymes. A lot of times, kids will pick up on the rhymes, and they’re rhyming the words without effort because it just sounds right to them. If your child can’t do that, that’s an early sign that there’s maybe some kind of phonological processing issue that’s there, and phonological, phone, phoneme, having to do with sounds.

Because when we start to think about reading, it is so complex. Our brains are hardwired for speech. We don’t have to do anything to explicitly teach our kids to speak; they just pick it up because the brain is already hardwired for that. Reading, though, we have to actually create neural pathways. In typical reading development, that would be in the back left hemisphere of the brain is where most of the word reading is going to happen, and a little bit towards the front, but just a little bit. We want mostly in the back.

In dyslexic students, that does not happen. It’s usually split between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere, and it’s bouncing around in an inefficient pattern and going to inefficient areas of the brain, and so it makes it harder.

[00:16:32] Gretchen: I’m laughing because I’m remembering when– Before my son Duncan was diagnosed with dyslexia, we worked with a neurodevelopmentalist for almost three years. He had a lot of retained primitive reflexes. He had difficulty having information cross the corpus callosum, so he couldn’t right-left march the way you’re supposed to. He couldn’t skip. He couldn’t do those kinds of things.

The neurodevelopmentalist said most of us have a file cabinet back here. He has a laundry basket. Everything goes in the laundry basket, and then when you ask him a question, he’s got to go sift through that laundry basket to find the information. That, to me, 20-plus years ago, was such a vivid illustration of how it’s so much harder for him to just retrieve the sounds in a three-phoneme word.

[00:17:29] Elise: I love that picture. I haven’t heard that. That’s great.

[00:17:31] Gretchen: Ain’t that great? Yes. [laughs]

[00:17:33] Elise: That is great [crosstalk]–

[00:17:33] Gretchen: I’ve never forgotten it because I’m like, “Yes, that makes a lot of sense.”

[00:17:37] Elise: Yes. You’re looking for signs, things, like I said, family history, the phonological processing. Then once they’re starting to read– Reversing letters in writing and in reading is normal. I was thinking, “Okay, what are some practical–” Because I’m like, “I want people to walk away with a shift in perspective or a different perspective, but also some practical things.”

What I did with my second child was I printed out the typical speech development timeline. You can just Google it. Typical phonological awareness. They’re very short. They’re very simple. You’re keeping an eye on that. Hey, “Are we meeting these milestones?” Like when you go to the doctor, and they do the growth charts every year, it’s like, “Are we doing good? All right, we’re on track.”

If you start to see that, “Hey, we’re starting to have a little bit of difficulty here,” that’s when you start going, “Okay, I need to watch this a little closer.” Again, that investigative approach. My mother-in-law constantly says to me that English is totally crazy, and I can’t convince her otherwise. I’m like, “It is crazy.” It’s just, there are reasons for it. We have all of the different languages that have influenced our writing system, reading system, everything, and it is. Sometimes, I’m like [crosstalk]–

[00:18:59] Gretchen: We just stole spellings and pronunciations from other languages. That’s what we did.

[laughter]

[00:19:07] Elise: Yes. Our letter ‘b’; if you rotate it, is a ‘q’; if you reverse it, is a ‘d’. It’s the same shape; it’s just a different orientation. If you struggle in that area, it’s– we didn’t make it easier on them [crosstalk]–

[00:19:28] Gretchen: I wonder, as you say that, if that also would be kids who have a lack of spatial awareness. If you can’t [crosstalk] see that the ‘b’ is the ‘d’ is the ‘p’ is the ‘q’, I wonder if that also means you don’t have spatial awareness.

[00:19:51] Elise: That’s one of the things when they do a formal assessment for dyslexia or specific learning disorder, the reason parents– and I know, as a homeschooler too, typically, we don’t like labels. We don’t like formal things. It took me a long time to really understand that, “Hey, if my child has a broken arm, I really want them to give me a diagnosis of broken arm, so that we know the therapy to remediate it.”

It’s not about, “My child is the broken arm. That’s her identity.” No, it’s just something. Now that we have identified it, we can solve it. If we don’t identify it, we run into the risk of there’s a bunch of different things, and we just chase them around and don’t actually get there and help our child. That’s what we want to do.

[00:20:47] Gretchen: I heard a special needs specialist who did a webinar with me a year ago say that a diagnosis is like a handhold on a rock wall. That’s not where you’re going to hang out, but that is the vehicle by which you’re going to make progress up the wall. I thought, “Wow, that’s just such a great visual to recognize, you’re not going to hang out there, but if you have the information, then you know how to adjust where you’re going.”

[00:21:18] Elise: Right, and if you don’t have that handhold, you’re sitting there going, “How do I get where I need to get?” When a psychologist does the testing, there’s two separate batteries of tests. One is cognitive testing, and included in that is visual-spatial, and fluid reasoning, the ability to deduct and infer verbal comprehension. You’re taking the reading. This is all auditory-visual, not reading anything, so that you can isolate those skills. What’s the child’s potential in these areas? Working memory, which is a huge one that we see tied with dyslexia, and working memory– I love Dr. Cheryl Chase in Cleveland. She calls the working memory your kitchen counter. If you’re in a camper and you’re cooking in a kitchen, and you’re trying to bake a cake, you have a tiny little counter space. You’ve got your ingredients up here, stuff is falling on the floor. You have the recipe in your mouth. You’re trying to look at it. You can’t remember it. Very frustrating. Whereas if you have one of those Food Network kitchens where everything’s all pre-measured out and everything, and you can just use it, that’s what your working memory is, or your short-term memory—what you can hold in your memory at this moment to use. It’s past information that you can use to apply to the present, and present information that you can use to look ahead to the future.

That was a huge thing. I have a child with a lower working memory than her other abilities. I had no idea. She does not have dyslexia. I’ve only seen dyslexia and a working memory deficit, and that goes along with ADHD.

[00:23:16] Gretchen: Kids are going to play with their strengths. They’re going to lead with those strengths. When we find a deficit, it’s a little bit jarring, almost, as a parent to go, “Wait, what?” [chuckles]

[00:23:31] Elise: It is, but once you have that information, again, you can go from there. It’s hard. Certain things– like working memory is something that can be increased somewhat, but it’s mostly what you’re born with is what you have to deal with, but there are lots of skills and lots of things that you can learn how to manage that.

Getting that assessment to have that cognitive piece that says, “Okay, this is where the child’s”– and I hate the term intelligence testing because it’s not. It’s just your cognitive skills. Where is that skill set at? Then your academic achievement. That’s when they do their word reading, spelling, passage comprehension, and say, “Oh, my goodness. These scores are really high. These scores are really low in comparison.” That’s when we say there’s dyslexia.

However, again, one of the first things a lot of the kids that I’ve worked with had a developmental speech disorder first. Sometimes that wasn’t fully remediated. Then you add reading on top of that. They’re already not producing the speech sounds accurately. That really has to be taken care of before dyslexia remediation.

It’s hard. Over the years, I’ve talked with several parents who they want the dyslexia tutoring, and they’re focused on that and they’re committed. I’m going, “This is only going to get your child so far. They do have dyslexia, but if you don’t take care of the speech, if you don’t take care of the auditory processing–” and auditory processing is something that’s still emerging field. 10 years ago, we never heard about it very much. It was very niche.

Now it’s like auditory processing and dyslexia, and sometimes there’s confusion over, “Oh, are they the same thing?” No, they’re not. The auditory processing has to do with the sounds, how you’re hearing them, whereas dyslexia is the speech sounds and how you’re processing them. They are distinct, but they’re related [crosstalk]–

[00:25:59] Gretchen: To the layperson, that sounds a whole lot like the same thing.

[00:26:05] Elise: For sure, but remediation is very different.

[00:26:10] Gretchen: Yes.

[00:26:10] Elise: That’s where it becomes important of determining the difference. I had one student who I worked with and worked with, and she just– she made progress, but it was– The kids who just have dyslexia, you start remediation and man, they take off, and they’re good to go. When you start meeting, like, “Hey, this is not going as quickly. There’s something else.” That’s when you start digging into, “Hey, maybe you need to do some more testing. Maybe we need to see what else is going on.” The auditory processing is a really- I call it an insidious one because it can look like dyslexia so easily, but dyslexia remediation isn’t going to solve it.

[00:27:00] Gretchen: It also looks, unfortunately, like you just didn’t hear what I said, and that’s not it at all. One of the most valuable sentences I learned with my acute dyslexic, who also has auditory processing disorder, was to say to him, “What did you hear me say?” “”What did I say to you?” is a little combative. It’s going to be off-putting, but saying, “What did you hear me say?” gave him the entree to think, “Well, this is what I think I heard.” About half the time, that was not what I said. [laughs]

[00:27:45] Elise: Yes. Well, and then you have ADHD as well, which can cause attention lapsing. Also, I know, for me, it’s something I didn’t realize until I was an adult, is that I can’t focus when there’s a lot of voices in a room. My attention is- I’m like, I don’t want to be trying to listen to other people’s conversations, but my brain just gets pulled off, and I have to focus really hard on what is being said in front of me. I’m thinking, “What about a kid?”

[00:28:17] Gretchen: Right.

[00:28:18] Elise: [chuckles] How challenging, if they’re struggling with that. There’s just so many things. Then anxiety is another one. I’ve had so many people say, “My child is dealing with anxiety.” It’s like, is it a primary– is anxiety the first piece, and then there’s also dyslexia or something else? Or is the anxiety because– [laughs]

[00:28:47] Gretchen: Because of the dyslexia or something? It is hard to ascertain that, but I also think as parents, it’s up to us to be the detectives, to be the observers, to be the people who sit carefully and pay attention. “What am I seeing? When does this manifest itself?” Not to be so quick to be diagnosticians.

[00:29:14] Elise: There’s that balance between the confidence of, you know, your child. If we’re honest, I think most of us know when something is going wrong. We just have that intuition, but we’re like, “Well,” but we don’t really know, and so you do the best you can, and you gather information.

I think with something like dyslexia, it’s great to have the “Okay, what are the risk factors?” Knowing, “Hey, there’s no family history for this in my family.” That can put you a little bit at ease. “They’re meeting their milestones. Okay, reading is a little difficult.” Dyslexia is a continuum, too. In the International Dyslexia Association definition, it says it’s on a continuum. You can have a student who it takes him longer to learn to read and to spell, but they eventually get there. Were they dyslexic? Maybe.

[00:30:17] Gretchen: I’ve always found it remarkable. We take a baby to the pediatrician, and the pediatrician says, “This baby will walk somewhere between 7 and 18 months,” and we all go, “Great, yay,” and we’re content with that. Then we turn around, and we say every five-year-old should be beginning to learn to read. What happened to that latitude that we provided them for the motor coordination to walk, and we just sort of evaporated it when it came to reading?

One of the questions you had was, how do you recognize dyslexia in a four-year-old who is a late-talker? How do you handle these children with gentleness? What would you say to that parent?

[00:31:02] Elise: Yes, gentleness is such a huge thing. I think that’s not panicking. Remember that knowledge is power, and that you– I was going to say, if you’re a Christian, then you can trust that God has set you as a parent for this child, and so he will equip you. That would be my first thing.

[00:31:27] Gretchen: I might have been known to stand in my kitchen on more than one occasion and say, “I need the equipping right now because I need to know what’s going on here.” [laughs]

[00:31:40] Elise: Had a few of those moments myself, yes. [laughter] There are so many things that we as parents can do for our children and their reading success, even outside of if they have dyslexia. One of them is, I know we as parents hear this all the time, but read to your child. Really read to your child because that background knowledge that being able to read is–

There’s a formula—for the math people. It’s called the Simple View of Reading formula. It’s Decoding—which is reading, so being able to place the sounds on the letter code and retrieve them and make meaning out of it—Decoding times Language Comprehension equals Reading Comprehension. You need to be able to read the words. You need to be able to understand the words. When you multiply those together, then you get your reading comprehension, because that’s the whole point of reading. We’re not just reading to read the words. We want to gain information, be able to interact with it, and then produce it as well, and teach other people. Share it.

That background knowledge that children get from us reading to them varied books and stories, and stories with rhymes and memorable—that poetic lilt to it—and interacting with them, and asking them questions before you start reading, “Look at the cover. What questions might you have?” Then, while you’re reading, when you pause at a place and say, “What do you think the character is going to do next? What do you think is going to happen? What do you hope will happen?” It’s developing those language skills that are so important for reading, so there’s that phonological awareness.

Phonological awareness, it’s, again, based on that our speech and our words are made up of individual sounds. For fluent readers, we can identify and manipulate those sounds seamlessly. For students with a phonological deficit, they cannot do that, and so that gets in the way of them being able to rapidly, fluently decode and speak the words that they’re reading. Then spelling definitely as well, because they’re inverse processes, of course. Reading is you’re looking at the code–

[00:34:21] Gretchen: Right. Reading is the decoding, but spelling is the encoding. Man, they’re opposite skills. I think as parents, we need to not get wrapped around the axle. It’s normal for spelling to lag behind reading because– and they’re not the same skills. Unfortunately, sometimes we confabulate them, and we think, “Oh, you can’t spell. You have a disability.” Not necessarily. I know lots of people who read extraordinarily well and still can’t spell their way out of a wet paper bag, but it depends. It’s yes, and there’s more to it in that instance. We’re talking about a four-year-old now. That was the question I handed you. At what age would that parent begin to say, “Maybe I should explore more in depth”? Because four is not necessarily it, right?

That’s where you’re going to be reading to that student, and you’re just going to be making it a rich environment for them.

[00:35:35] Elise: Yes. I think, again, we said, “No panicking.”

[00:35:41] Gretchen: [laughs] Yes, I think that’s going to be the overarching theme here for parents to understand is no panicking. [laughs]

[00:35:48] Elise: On the other end of the spectrum, “Don’t do nothing.”

[00:35:51] Gretchen: Yes. I love that you have said that.

[00:35:53] Elise: Both are attested to because a lot of times, unfortunately, it’s so many stories of parents who said, ” I thought something was wrong when my child was in kindergarten, and they were having trouble learning the letter sounds. Their peers were all learning the sounds, and my child was still stuck on the first three that they learned at the beginning of the year.” What were they told? “Let’s wait and see. Let’s wait another year. Let’s see if they catch up.” Wait and see is not a intervention program.

[00:36:30] Gretchen: No.

[00:36:33] Elise: A couple of things. It’s that kindergarten age. It’s a little harder with homeschoolers because sometimes we’re involved in co-ops or groups, and sometimes we’re not. It can be hard to see where are other kids in comparison to yours. It’s not about comparison, but just knowing what’s normal for this age or what you would expect at this age. Some homeschool kids are ahead. There you have to– [laughs] Us homeschoolers, we’re just a fun lot.

What we don’t want is, and this is something, we never want kids to be guessing. If you see your child guessing a lot or trying to memorize everything, those are cues that, hey, they’re not processing this correctly. That could be, “Hey, I need to switch up how I’m teaching this. They need a more explicit, direct approach.” You try that, and if it’s still not working, then you go, “Next step is a dyslexia screener.”

A screener, anybody can do. You can look it up online, just a free dyslexia screener. It just tells you, “Hey, is my child at risk?” Or if the child is old enough to check themselves, “Is my child at risk?” Then that’s when you– if it’s, yes, they are at risk, then you start taking steps. For homeschool parents, it can be a little trickier. We have our local school districts, and they, as far as I know, across all the states, are required to provide testing for students.

[00:38:24] Gretchen: From a school, but also recognizing in some states, you got to get in a long line at the back of the line before you can get anything that looks like diagnostics.

[00:38:35] Elise: Sometimes they can say to you, “Hey, we don’t think there’s a problem here. We want you to wait a year.” Then you have to wait or go do private testing. Unfortunately, this is something I’m really passionate about, sometime in the future, is we need a better private diagnostic pathway for parents that don’t cost thousands of dollars.

[00:39:01] Gretchen: Yes. As a parent who took that private diagnostic pathway and spent way too much money way too many years ago, almost– well, no, 20 years ago now, there needs to be a way for parents to get answers in a timely manner that does not cost a fortune.

[00:39:25] Elise: Cost-accessible manner as well, especially if you have multiple children that you’re suspecting have some difficulty. It can really add up. We’re not even talking about the remediation part yet. [laughs] Just the diagnosis.

[00:39:42] Gretchen: Just trying to get to where you need to go.

[00:39:44] Elise: Yes.

[00:39:46] Gretchen: I loved the fact that you highlighted this question, which is, what is the most beneficial things parents can do to help their children, and what teaching methods will help best? I know there’s not a singular answer to that latter part, but what can a parent do? I’ve got a child. I know I’ve got an issue. I’m waiting to get diagnostics. I’ve talked to parents who have been waiting a year for diagnostics. In that blank space, what does a parent do to help their child?

[00:40:25] Elise: The science of reading is really big right now. That’s the term. Science of reading, structured literacy, Orton-Gillingham, these are all science-based reading approaches. It’s not a curriculum. If a curriculum tells you, “We are Orton-Gillingham,” it should say, “This is from an Orton-Gillingham approach,” but I have seen some out there that are like, “We are the end-all and be-all.” I’m going, “[skeptical sound].” That makes me a little question what’s going on here.

There are no silver bullets out there, but it’s that sequential, systematic, direct, explicit, multimodal, so using all of the senses, and that diagnostic and prescriptive, looking at your child and identifying errors as they happen. No guessing, no coping skills, but going, “Okay, what skill do they need to learn, and do they need to learn that I can explicitly teach them?” We’re not trying to get them to guess, “Oh, what’s the sound of this letter?” No, you teach them what is the sound, and then you expect them to be able to say it. If they can’t say it back, you teach it again. You don’t try to get them to guess it. It’s not there, it’s not there. You got to put it there.

[00:41:54] Gretchen: I like the fact that you’ve said that, though, because I think sometimes we have the misapprehension that, “I’ve taught it to you, so now you should know it.” Sometimes with a dyslexic child, you might have to run that neural pathway a dozen times before they [crosstalk].

[00:42:16] Elise: Probably more. I’ve had parents that, how do you stay patient and keep doing the repetitions? For every person, we all need repetition to learn something. For dyslexic students, because those brain pathways are being literally forged in the brain, it is a physical process that is happening. It is tiring. It is a lot of work. It takes a lot of energy. You have your general things, adequate sleep, getting to bed early enough, eating well, because you need to feed your body and give it what it needs to be able to make these pathways. It can’t just be, “Just work harder.” We need to equip, and equipping is, again, that direct, explicit instruction.

There’s two paths. The first path you can take is find a dyslexia practitioner or therapist. Practitioners are at the initial level, and the therapists, they’re the highest level. You’re going to pay more for a therapist than a practitioner, but if you have a younger child or a student who just has dyslexia, practitioners are great. You don’t need–

[00:43:36] Gretchen: What is the difference in what those two kinds of people can do for my student?

[00:43:43] Elise: Dyslexia therapists can do more advanced coursework. That’d be like for high school. Some practitioners– and this is something that there are different certifications out there. The IDA, the International Dyslexia Association, ALTA, who I’m certified through, the Academic Language Therapist Association. There’s the Children’s Dyslexia Centers, or the CDC. Those are ones that accredit that are good ones to look for. There are other ones, like IMSE and such, that have accreditations as well.

You’re looking for someone who has been trained in Orton-Gillingham. The Literacy Nest, Emily Gibbons, is someone who has a ton of resources on her blog. She has a great article on what are you looking for in a practitioner. I recommend checking that out. Look for in your area if there’s a nonprofit that offers reduced cost or free tutoring colleges and universities, because the science of reading is becoming legislated in some states. It’s, hopefully, moving closer and closer in other states to be having dyslexia laws and such. A lot of universities are training their teachers, and so you can get reduced-cost or free tutoring.

[00:45:11] Gretchen: That’s an idea to go find a university who might be willing to have students assist you in that process.

[00:45:23] Elise: Yes.

[00:45:24] Gretchen: That’s a good idea.

[00:45:25] Elise: I know there’s not many, but hopefully that’ll become more and more common, or pay for a private tutor. The nice thing with that is you can hire someone online so that you don’t have to go anywhere, or someone in your area. Again, I listed the accreditation agencies. You just want to make sure that someone who is trained. There’s Wilson and Barton are other ones that are curriculum that people can be certified in. Remediation is expensive when you hire a private tutor.

If that’s not an option, then path two is. A lot of homeschool families that I’ve worked with, they’ve chosen this route because homeschoolers, a lot of times, are pioneers and go, “I can do this.” You can get trained yourself. There are free training programs that might be in your area. Also, Reach All Readers is a website. Anna Geiger, who she has tons of resources and phonological awareness activities, tons of information. The Orton-Gillingham Mama. She has a blog. It’s great. She has Orton-Gillingham lesson plans. What are the components? What are things that I need to be doing with my child?

If you’re super nerdy and want to really understand structured literacy, the book Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language Skills by Birsh and Carreker, that’s like the Bible of Orton-Gillingham. Also, there are lots of Orton-Gillingham curriculum out there. The caution I put with that is that Orton-Gillingham is not a curriculum. It’s an approach. I had someone tell me one time that if you have a trained Orton-Gillingham practitioner, they can use any curriculum and still do OG. If you have an OG curriculum, if you’re not trained, you’re still at risk of it not being OG.

That makes sense because it’s the principles. If you can learn the principles, they’re not difficult. You can watch an hour video and learn the principles, and if you can really embody those, that puts you way ahead. Some practical things that I had noted is have your child read aloud to you for 10 minutes every day. There’s a five-finger rule, the frustration level. You want to look at, if you can, decodable stories. That’s something you’re looking, they’re controlled.

[00:48:17] Gretchen: How do I know that it’s a decodable story?

[00:48:20] Elise: It’s going to be labeled decodable.

[00:48:20] Gretchen: Thanks for making it complicated, Gretchen. [laughs]

[00:48:23] Elise: No, it has to be labeled decodable. If you Google Reading Universe, it’s all free, decodable sentences and stories. There are free books online. Reach All Readers has free decodable readers that you can print. Literacy Nest has some free sets of decodables. There’s tons of resources. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look. UFLI, University of Florida, has a lot of resources as well. Then there’s homeschool curriculum as well.

That five-finger rule, if they are struggling or stumbling on more than five words on a page, and if there’s only five words on a page, then you have to go a couple of pages. If they’re struggling on more than five words, that is above their frustration level, and we need to bump it back. What we want is them to have success in reading and be able to get to that reading comprehension and get excited about reading. That’s underlying all of this.

I know as a homeschool parent, I can get very intense, like, “Okay, we have to sit down and work on this.” My one daughter hates math, and this past year, it’s like, “We have to sit down and do this.” It was like, “Okay, this is counterproductive.” Keep it light, fun, games, interaction. Have fun with your child.

[00:49:51] Gretchen: Can you talk a little bit about building the skill of fluency? I think as parents, sometimes we make the misapprehension when a child starts to emerge as a reader, we start handing them everything around us, “Read this, read this. Oh, here I’ve got 10 Level 1 books for you to read,” instead of giving them the time to become fluent with a single work before we move them into multiple works. Why is that important?

[00:50:26] Elise: When they’re first learning to decode, it’s laborious. They’re segmenting out the sound. The more that they do that, the greater the fluency becomes because their brain goes, “Oh, yes, I know those sounds. I know how to put those together.” Because when we speak, we’re not speaking in segmented sounds. We have to put those together, and when we put them together, the sounds change a little bit. It’s called coarticulation. That process of splitting words into their sounds and putting them back together is difficult, and like we’ve said, “It takes a lot of work in our brains.”

Exposing the brain over and over to the same text builds that automaticity, and so when you’re doing a word list or sentences, or you’re up to a paragraph, repeat readings. Oral readings, reading with your students, modeling that because fluency is not only being able to read smoothly, but it’s also to read with expression, to have an appropriate pacing and a pausing, and so modeling that. It’s all about explicitly teaching everything.

To us, it’s self-evident that, yes, you stop when there’s a period, but teaching that. If they’re not doing it even after they’ve been taught, then falling back on the gradual release of responsibility, so, “I do,” I model it, “we do it together,” and then “you do it independently.” With especially dyslexic students, you’re going to jump back and forth between those.

You’re going to model it, do it together, and then you’re going to model it and do it together. They’re going to try it, and then you’re going to do it together again and keep going back and forth. It’s really a collaborative process where you’re working together, and still an investigative process. You’re looking at, “Okay, they’re making an error. They’re struggling with this. Why? What can I do to enhance this skill?”

I know several people would ask about older students. Older students, it’s really hard because once you get to high school, there’s a higher cognitive demand. The expectation is that reading, writing, and composition are now automatic, and so now they’re focusing on the higher metacognition skills. I really encourage you to embrace adaptive technology. I know, for me, I was skeptical at the beginning because I never wanted my students to become reliant on technology or something, and not learn the actual skill.

What I found, and what studies find too, is that if we give them the assistive technology to help them learn those skills, now they’re learning the skills, and they have tools for when they need something else. Things like using audiobooks, using AI to help them understand a word or searching for the roots in search of a word.

Morphology in high school, so the history of the language, the etymology, and then morphology, the meaningful parts of words that are Latin roots or Greek combining forms. Understanding those, they make up a lot of the English language, and so if you learn the meanings of the Latin root, tract means to pull, now you know that tractor is something that pulls something. That helps with vocabulary, again, explicitly teaching that.

Interest-driven learning. Whatever your child is interested in, giving them as much as you can in that area, because I know in the high school years, you run into motivation issues.

Executive functioning, if that is falling behind, if there’s ADHD or just a little lag in executive functioning skills, that’s a whole nother we could do, a whole nother series on executive functioning. That often goes along with dyslexia, and that can affect study skills and organization skills, and such. There’s so much. What I really want, because I see, I’m like, “How are we out of time?”

[00:54:56] Gretchen: Yes, I know. I can’t believe. I’m like, “We need maybe a part two for this thing.” There’s so many more questions I want to ask you.

[00:55:07] Elise: You can do it. There’s so many resources out there. There’s so much help. Yes, sometimes you will have to be an advocate for your child. I’ve worked with parents who have had to advocate, and it’s hard, but you can do it.

[00:55:25] Gretchen: I think it’s also really important, at least everything that you have said here is something that a parent can do, but you’ve got to be intentional. You can’t just expect that this is going to happen by happenstance. You have to be willing to do the research. You have to be willing to dig in. You have to go find the decodable books. You have to spend the time. If you’re a homeschool parent, you have to make the time to do this extra work. I think that’s an important thing to say. It doesn’t happen without the investment of you.

[00:56:07] Elise: Yes, investment and remembering, too, that the relationship is the most important and that the child knows that you’re on their team and working with them. Yes, keeping them just a part of that journey the whole way, “Hey, this is what we’re doing. This is where we’re going.” Just explicitly intentional. I love that intentional–

[00:56:36] Gretchen: Before we walk away from assistive technology, I will say that for my dyslexics, Learning Ally was one of the most beneficial things that we accessed, particularly at their high school years. I had kids who, by then, they had expressed a preference to be in public school. They were in honors-level classes.

I did not physically have the time to sit down and read 30 pages of biology in an evening. Learning Ally was something that my kids could access, and their little ADHD brains could put it on 2.0. Then they could read and have it read to them, and they would walk away with a greater comprehension. It’s doing that thing you mentioned earlier, which is bring as many modalities to the table as possible. Somebody is reading to them as they’re reading, and they’re processing. It was a huge difference maker for my kids.

[00:57:38] Elise: Writing too. Explicitly learning how to compose. There are so many great curriculums, like IEW, that just systematic– it breaks it down. Because again, these skills that so many of us can just do naturally, they need to be broken down into smaller parts. Yes, there’s so many great tools out there. It’s just a matter of what is right for my child and figuring that out through prayer and experimentation and asking questions and investigation. [laughs]

[00:58:09] Gretchen: Well, at least in this last couple of minutes, for the parents who have listened to the questions that we’ve talked about today, what would you want them to take away from our conversation? I know one of those things is that they are capable, but I want to hear you say, how would you tie the bow on this package?

[00:58:31] Elise: Keep an open mind about what’s going on with your child. Consider, don’t rule out things that could be going on. Go into assessment or just with that open mind of, “Okay, maybe it’s dyslexia, maybe it’s vision. Maybe it’s auditory processing. Maybe there’s a speech-language.” Just calmly and rationally being like, “Okay. We’re going to figure this out and go from there.”

Then just ask questions, be an advocate. Don’t be afraid to push back. Something I’ve learned as I’ve got older, you have to. You have to stand up for yourself, your child, and advocates, and good for you for doing that. There’s lots of little things that you can do, even if your child isn’t dyslexic, so many things you can do to help enrich their reading journey, and do it with intention and passion.

[00:59:33] Gretchen: I love all of that. I love the fact that you’re saying intention and passion, and recognize that– you said something earlier that I want to bring back around and close with. If you think something’s not right, something’s not right. That parental intuition is really important. We need to lean into that and recognize how important it is for our children, for them to see us advocate for them.

Elise, I want to thank you for joining me this afternoon. Doggone it, this time just went way too fast. I think maybe we need to have a conversation about having a second conversation sometime because I think there’s more information here that I could learn from you, and then I know our families would benefit from. I just want to say how grateful I am for you to spend this hour with me in the middle of a busy summer, with two girls who are patiently waiting for their mom’s time because you’re spending it with me. I feel blessed and grateful.

I want to thank our audience for joining us today. We don’t take lightly that you allow us to come into your living rooms. I hope you found this information to be valuable. Elise is going to help me put together these show notes because they’re going to be extensive, but I think you’re going to appreciate them. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time today to learn more about your children, because they’re the blessings that we have for the future. Take care, everybody. Have a wonderful afternoon.