Home educating a child with dyslexia or dyspraxia

The single biggest advantage of home education for a dyslexic child is not a method. It is that nobody else can see how long it is taking. A classroom makes reading difficulty public every day. Reading aloud in front of peers, being on a different book band, finishing last. Removing the audience removes most of the shame, and shame is what turns a reading difficulty into a child who has decided they are stupid.

Structured phonics, for longer than feels normal

Dyslexic children generally need the same systematic phonics as everyone else, taught more explicitly, in smaller steps, with far more repetition, and continued well past the age at which schools stop teaching it. Many stop phonics at seven, which is exactly when a dyslexic child is still building the foundation. Keep going. Multisensory work, tracing, saying it aloud, building words physically, tends to help. Guessing from pictures and context does not, and it is the habit hardest to undo later.

Separate composing from handwriting

This one change transforms written work. Composing a sentence and physically producing it are different skills, and for dyslexic and especially dyspraxic children the physical act can consume everything, leaving nothing for the ideas.

• Scribe. They talk, you write. Their thinking is not limited by their pen.
• Use voice input for longer pieces, then work on the text together afterwards.
• Type instead of write, once handwriting is legible enough for daily life. Typing removes letter formation from the equation entirely.
• Mark the content separately from the spelling. A brilliant argument covered in red pen teaches only that writing is failure.

Take the reading load out of everything else

A dyslexic child doing a science worksheet is doing two hard things at once, and if the reading is the harder one you learn nothing about their science. Read the question to them. Use audiobooks freely, including for literature. Comprehension and decoding are separate skills, and there is no reason to hold a strong comprehender at the level of their weak decoding.

Dyspraxia specifically

Motor planning difficulty affects far more than handwriting: getting equipment out, organising a page, tying laces, catching a ball, sequencing the steps of a practical task. Shorter sheets with more white space, a fixed physical setup that does not change every day, and instructions given one at a time rather than in chains of four all reduce the load.

How Different Drums helps here

Dyslexia-friendly fonts, adjustable text size, colour themes and high contrast are built in, so the page itself stops being an obstacle. Voice input and voice output mean a child can work verbally and still have it count. There is a Learn to Read phonics programme, a narrated story library and a reading library, so the systematic work and the listening both live in one place. Worksheets can be generated short and at the child’s actual working level per subject, which matters when a dyslexic child is often well above their reading level in reasoning. Maths practice comes from 200,000+ hand-verified questions across arithmetic, maths, calculus, chemistry and physics, so a child who already distrusts written material is not being handed answers that might be wrong.