Practice Makes Progress

We all know the saying, “Practice makes perfect.” However, it really should say, “Practice makes progress!”

Students with dyslexia need up to 3 times more practice than students without dyslexia or a learning disability (Hughes & Riccomini, 2019).  Therefore, it is vital that students have plenty of practice opportunities and that practice is structured in ways that facilitate deep learning!

Practice that Makes Progress

For practice to help students with dyslexia develop their literacy skills, here are several guidelines:

1. Make sure you and your child know the purpose of the practice activity and that they have a way to receive feedback and error correction.
2. Your student should have the opportunity to set their own goals.
3. Practice should be appropriately spaced out in short sessions, for example 15 min. 2 or 3 times a week.
4. Practice should have a cumulative review of previous concepts and encourage fast retrieval of target concepts.
5. Practice can be made fun by incorporating multisensory activities such as games and novelty activities (e.g., using shaving cream for spelling words or bouncing a ball while drilling through letters/sounds), or having your students create their own songs, stories, or pictures to remember key concepts (e.g., ninja e  or sleepy schwa).

Creating Expert Readers and Writers

Practice should make progress happen, not just fill in lesson time.  With carefully crafted lessons and practice sessions, we can build the capacity of our students with dyslexia to become expert readers and writers.

Contact us today about our structured literacy/dyslexia therapy services!

References:

Edmonds, A., Gerbier, E., Palasis, K., & Whyte, S. (2021). Understanding the distributed practice effect and its relevance for the teaching and learning of L2 vocabulary. Lexis, 18. https://doi.org/10.4000/lexis.5652

Hughes, C. A., & Riccomini, P. J. (2019). Purposeful Independent Practice Procedures: An Introduction to the Special Issue. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 51(6), 405–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040059919850067

Kirschner, P., & Hendrick, C. (2024). How Learning Happens Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and what they mean in practice (second). Routledge. (Original work published 2020)

Vaughn, S., & Fletcher, J. (2023). The Practice Gap. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 49(1), 15–19.