If your child is struggling to make literacy gains, the educational fallout can feel overwhelming. The right special education distance learning program can help your child navigate literacy hurdles with creative approaches to teaching basic phonetic skills.

Here are some literacy techniques used by special education distance learning programs.

Musical Phonetics

When students struggle with literacy, their vocabulary can fail to keep pace with their intellectual development. Special education distance learning programs often use music to reinforce phonetic patterns and identify root-word construction.

• Vowel Hunting: one special education distance learning program game you can use with your child involves printing out the lyrics to their favorite song. Once you have the lyrics, give your child a highlighter and have them listen to the song's first verse. After listening to the verse, instruct your child to highlight the primary vowel sound in each word. If your child struggles to identify the primary vowel sound, have them listen to the verse again. This special education distance learning program game will help your child work through the phonetic patterns they're likely to see when they read and write.
• Syllable Hunting: like the vowel hunting game, you can have your child use a similar technique to identify root words, which can help them define unfamiliar words more accurately. For instance, if your child encounters the word "primary" in the song, you can have them break the word into parts. In this case, "pri" and "mary". After your child identifies a few of these words in each verse, spend a few minutes going over how the syllable in each word is pronounced. Next, list words with similar constructions and discuss what the definition of each word might have in common. Thus, "Primary", the first or main thing, and "Primal", our first; instinctual impulses, can be connected by the syllable "Prim".

Broken Words

Many students who struggle to make literacy gains can be paralyzed when they encounter unfamiliar words. Special education distance learning programs often use a technique to help identify words students don't know, while also helping them master the phonetic patterns of these new words.   

• Broken Words: take a few sentences from a text that corresponds to your child's current reading level. Next, identify the most difficult words in the text. After you identify these words, remove them from the text and break each word into syllables. Have your student read through the text and attempt to identify the word that should complete the sentence and the appropriate syllable construction of each word.

Contact a child education service near you to find the right special education distance learning program for your child's needs.