1. Structured Literacy
The Expert: Educational Therapist, Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT), or Specialized Tutor. The Strategy: Shifting from "Phonics" (Sounds) to "Morphology" (Meaning).
If you have watched your 10-year-old struggle to "sound out" a long word like transportation or biography, you know that standard phonics has its limits. In late childhood, the rules of reading change. The vocabulary becomes complex, multisyllabic, and rooted in Latin and Greek.
For a neurodivergent child, this isn't a barrier; it is an opportunity.
Why It Works: Playing to Their Strengths
While dyslexic students often struggle with processing sounds (phonology), research shows they frequently possess a "compensatory asset": Logic.
A 2009 study found that while adolescents with dyslexia struggled with sound-based spelling, they were able to successfully use Morphology—the study of word roots, prefixes, and suffixes—to read and spell complex words (Tsesmeli & Seymour, 2009).
The Shift: Instead of asking a student to memorize the string of letters in magician, a therapist teaches them the logic: Magic ends in a /c/; therefore magician must use a /c/, not an /sh/.
The Result: This approach bypasses the "glitchy" sound processing center of the brain and engages the high-functioning logical center. It turns reading from a memory test into a code-breaking game.
Directives for Home & School
How can you support this shift at the kitchen table?
Stop Saying "Sound It Out": For a child in 5th grade, this advice is often frustrating because the words are too big.
Start Saying "Be a Word Detective": When they get stuck on a big word, cover the edges and ask, "Do you see a root word hiding in the middle?" or "Do you know what the prefix 'Re-' means?"
Pre-Teaching Vocabulary: Ask teachers to provide a list of key terms for the next science unit (e.g., photosynthesis) a few days early. Breaking these words down by meaning before the lesson reduces cognitive load during class, allowing your child to focus on the science rather than the decoding.
