Homeschool Reading Programs

Homeschool Curriculum For Dyslexia and Struggling Readers

If your child is over a year behind in reading or has dyslexia, a homeschool dyslexia reading curriculum that targets remedial phonics,  language, and cognitive skill delays can be transformational for your child and for you.

Homeschooling a child with dyslexia or reading difficulties has unique challenges.

• Many standard curricula are not designed for dyslexic learners
• Difficulty with processing, oral instruction, and note-taking slows progress
• A dyslexic child requires more one-on-one time than a typical homeschool schedule
• Parents often need training or external support

Homeschooling a child with dyslexia or reading challenges requires both patience and resilience. Furthermore, in certain states, the pressure of standardized testing mandates can exacerbate the situation, as they often fail to account for these reading difficulties.

Tackling Reading Problems At Their Source

Until you resolve the underlying cognitive skill delays, homeschooling will be a struggle for you and your child. However, most homeschool reading curriculum options reteach reading instruction, relying on added repetition to work around these delays, leaving them untouched and unresolved.

Our homeschool curriculum is different.

Our software exercises target the causes of reading delays, not the symptoms. Our reading curriculum starts with phonics and pre-reading skills such as sequencing, working memory, and attention stamina. From there, it works through automaticity in decoding, literal reading comprehension, and then thinking while reading.

The exercises are adaptive, varying in speed and intensity as needed. Children who are better readers but still need help will spend time optimizing their cognitive skills, but they will typically spend more time on comprehension, reading speed, and accuracy.

When To Choose Gemm Learning

Homeschooling a child with learning difficulties is a challenge, and one of the hardest parts is knowing when to be more proactive in seeking help.

If your child is a willing reader and is not far off grade level in her reading, the best starting point is more reading practice. Here’s an article on selecting “just right” books to create a pathway to better reading that involves more reading practice.

However, if your child is more than a year below grade level or resists reading because he doesn’t find it easy, we may be a better fit. We provide an intensive reading homeschool curriculum with proactive oversight for children 5 years and older.

Our goal is to break the cycle of reading frustration – once and for all. Once reading is easier and more automatic, learning is more comfortable.

At that point, homeschooling is easier for you and your child, which is why we serve many homeschool families.

Our Curriculum & Service

Our homeschool reading curriculum is built around Fast ForWord software, a series of rapid-fire language, cognitive, and reading exercises with the intensity required to move the needle and accelerate cognitive and reading development.   

After Fast ForWord, depending on your child’s needs, your program managers may add ClearFluency – guided reading using speech recognition – or Reading Plus – guided reading.

Gemm Learning provides a comprehensive reading intervention – from phonics through to reading comprehension at a high school level – that suits families who are homeschooling children with dyslexia or reading challenges:

• No parent training or tech skills required
• Live coaching and support
• Adaptive software that is engaging and keeps your child moving forward
• We create individualized plans

Our program managers monitor activity daily, check in regularly or as needed, and provide remote coaching. We send weekly reports, completion certificates, and background information on the science behind our programs.

Fast ForWord is used in schools, IEPs, and clinician offices. Gemm Learning provides Fast ForWord at home using the same approach. It’s the equivalent of sending your child out for services, except you can manage at home with our help.

Homeschool Reading Curriculum Progression

Start with Cognitive Skills and Phonics

Our program starts with a phonics curriculum, or a pre-phonics curriculum for homeschool.

Instead of spending hours with flashcards—all intended to work around an underlying cognitive weakness—our homeschool phonics curriculum focuses on phonological and language processing. It helps students process more quickly and accurately, making them more phonics-aware and reading-enabled.

Our goal is to provide a reading makeover that prepares your child to learn phonics and read. Without this fundamental cognitive improvement, reading will always be a challenge.

Reading Comprehension

Most reading comprehension difficulties stem from inefficient decoding (reading). The reader concentrates so hard on decoding that little mind-space remains for extracting meaning (comprehension). Gemm Learning has a two-step program:

1. Make decoding automatic. If a student can decode effortlessly, subconsciously, like riding a bike, their brain can fully focus on comprehension. Our program removes the cognitive impediments to reading automaticity.
2. Reading comprehension. Once our program improves reading fluency, our homeschool reading programs focus on comprehension and accuracy—undoing prior bad reading habits, teaching language structure, vocabulary, and syntax, and practicing both literal and inferential comprehension.

We tailor our homeschool supplemental reading programs by age and to each child’s needs.

Not All Children Need Intensive Reading Help

Our homeschool reading curriculum is an intensive program to help children overcome dyslexia or deep-seated reading delays. It can be hugely transformational, but it takes effort and commitment.

If your child’s reading delays are minor, our program is overkill.

Separating a perfectly normal but slow start to reading from a more serious reading difficulty that is unlikely to resolve itself is not easy. See if any of the reading problems here fit your child. Or call us for a free consultation.

We offer a free online reading assessment that will give you a good idea of where your child stands. It takes about 30 minutes.

To find out if our solution can help your child and to have your questions answered, start with a free consult with a Gemm Learning team member.