If you are watching your child fall behind in school, slip up on basic words, or actively fight you when it’s time to read, the word dyslexia has probably crossed your mind.
“Dyslexia” is a heavy word for a parent to hold. It often feels clinical, overwhelming, and scary, doesn’t it? To some, it can sound like a serious affliction, maybe a life sentence.
Personally, I blame this on the word’s Greek origins. Once you see that “x” and “y” in the word, it’s easy to believe that dyslexia is a big, and insurmountable problem, like anaphylaxis. But please resist that temptation! Together, let’s shine a light on the term dyslexia: what it means, what it doesn’t mean, and what you can do to help your child.
If you strip away the diagnostic jargon, the word literally just means “difficulty with words.”
It isn’t a reflection of your child’s intelligence, and it doesn’t mean they have a broken engine under the hood. It simply means their brain is wired to process written language differently, and they need a different user manual to crack the code.
| dys- | -lexia |
| doesn’t work typically (like in dystopia, dysfunction) | Greek root for reading/writing (like in lexicon) |
Whether your child has a formal diagnosis from a psychologist, or you just have a strong gut feeling that something isn’t clicking, the path forward is the same. They don’t need a medical cure. They need a systematic, step-by-step way to understand how print works.
Open Source Reading: How to Help a Dyslexic Mind (Starting Today, For Free)
I don’t believe in paywalling basic educational concepts. Between tight family budgets and the reality that specialized reading support in Kingston often comes with a long waitlist, too many parents find themselves stranded with no immediate options. You shouldn’t have to wait for a calendar spot to open up just to get some answers. You deserve to know exactly how this process works so you can start making a difference at home right now.
Children who struggle with reading are almost always master guessers. According to the landmark Ontario Human Rights Commission Right to Read public inquiry (see page 25-28), teaching kids to guess words from pictures or context actively holds struggling readers back.
Because looking at the letters feels confusing, they look at the first letter, look at the picture, look at your facial expression, and take a shot in the dark. To fix this, you have to completely remove the guessing game and rebuild their reading foundation using three core steps:
1. The Auditory Gym (Before You Ever Open a Book)
Before a child can look at a letter and tell you what it says, they have to be able to hear the distinct sounds inside a spoken word.
Before we look at pages, we play games using only our ears and our mouths. I ask questions like: “What is the first sound you hear in sun?” or “If I say the sounds /k/ /a/ /t/, what word did I just make?”
Because of my background as an opera singer, I am intimately familiar with how the mouth, tongue, and vocal cords physically produce sound. I teach kids to notice what their mouths are doing. Is your tongue behind your teeth? Are your vocal cords vibrating or quiet? Feeling the sound physically gives an anxious reader a concrete anchor for their memory.
I understand that some kiddos aren’t going to be interested in that. We need to find a way to get them interested. Every student will be different, but as an example, you can have them try out this hilarious (but nevertheless educative) website that mimics a human mouth. I guarantee that anyone who uses this will end up laughing (and learning).
Click here to try the hilarious voice simulator app, to encourage your child to think about how sounds are formed in the mouth.
2. Side-by-Side Whiteboard Mapping
Once they can hear the sounds, we map them directly to letters. We don’t do this with giant, intimidating paragraphs of text. We start with a tiny, manageable set of letters (like s, a, t, p, i, n).
We sit side-by-side with small whiteboards. In my opinion, being side by side is important! Face-to-face learning will create unneeded upside-down mirroring. You want to be sharing the same perspective, and taking the the same journey together, side by side.
To start, I write a simple word, and they write the exact same word next to me. We point to the letters together and blend them: /s/ /a/ /t/... sat. By physically writing and reading the words simultaneously, the brain builds a permanent highway between the shape of the letter and the sound it makes.
If you don’t know the work of Toddlers Can Read on YouTube, please check it out! I think you’ll find it quite practical and inspirational. Lately, they have taken to selling their own products in videos. But in the early videos especially, they offer free and valuable help and examples.
3. Bring in Tactile Tools (The Japan Method)
During my years running an English school in Japan, I fell in love with a brilliant study tool used in elementary schools there: red memorizing sheets. When you place a transparent red plastic sheet over specially printed text, certain letters or tricky vowel patterns completely disappear.
Kids in Kingston have usually never seen this before, and they love it. We use these sheets to play hide-and-seek with spelling rules like the “magic e”. It turns a frustrating memory exercise into a visual, tactile game where the child feels in control of the text.
You can find them on Amazon.ca for under $20.
Why the Kitchen Table Becomes a Battlefield (And How a Third Party Changes Everything)
If the steps above are straightforward, you might wonder why you would hire a tutor at all instead of just working through it at home.
The honest answer is that the emotional stakes are often too high at home.
When you try to teach your own child, years of school frustration, classroom embarrassment, and deep-seated anxiety sit at the kitchen table with you. A child who is struggling will often shut down, make jokes to distract you, or completely freeze because they are terrified of failing in front of you—the person whose approval they want most. The lesson quickly turns into a power struggle, tears flow, and the evening is ruined.
That is where I come in.
Because I am not Mom or Dad, and because I’m not a rigid classroom teacher, kids tend to drop their defensive shields around me very quickly. We build a warm, genuine rapport right from the start, and that trust acts like a safety net.
Together, your child and I can push hard and do the heavy, intense brain-work required to rewrite those reading habits—but we do it through trash-can basketball, whiteboard games, and laughter. I take the burden of being the “instructor” off your shoulders, so you can stop playing the enforcer and just go back to being their parent.
If you want to use the methods above to help your child at home, please do. But if you need a calm, encouraging guide to step in, diffuse the tension, and systematically rebuild your child’s confidence from scratch—that is exactly what I am here for.
~Chris