Empowering Writers with Dyslexia
How Engaging Content Builds a Fund of Knowledge for Dyslexic Readers
Read Time 2 mins | July 8, 2020 | Written by: Empowering Writers
This is the fifth article in the series, "Empowering Writers with Dyslexia." If you missed the first one, you can read it here: Empowering Writers with Dyslexia.
Whether your students are annotating a 5-paragraph essay, or identifying an inappropriate detail within a paragraph, students will be engaged by the high-interest content of Empowering Writers lessons.
Focusing on fascinating places in the world and other compelling topics, the content helps them build a rich fund of general knowledge. Why is this important? In The Knowledge Deficit, author E.D. Hirsch, Jr. says “There is no way around the need for children to gain broad general knowledge in order to gain broad general proficiency in reading.”
Children with dyslexia are perfectly capable of acquiring general knowledge and doing so is of limitless value to them as they work to become fluent readers. But, since these unpredictable students tend to read less than their non-dyslexic counterparts, it’s more of a challenge for them to build their own rich fund of general knowledge.
To help, Empowering Writers provides lessons that support the development of excellent critical reading skills. This lesson, “Read Like an Author,” teaches students to ask framing questions in order to build reading comprehension. "Strategic Reading Lesson" focuses on strategic reading and reviews the proper usage as well as the purpose of text conventions such as keywords, captions, and subheadings. This lesson, and others like it, teach how to effectively “skim and scan” text.