Melanie (00:00)
Faye, thank you so much for joining me here on the Homeschool Sanity Show. Before we get started on our topic for today, I would love to have you tell us more about you and your family.

Faye Bankler Casell (00:10)
Sure, thank you for having me. so I started teaching in New York in the early 2000s, and that's where my daughter was born. And I started off in early childhood special education.

And when my son was born, he had a variety of developmental delays and speech delays. And so I really was anticipating that he was going to struggle with reading because he had already struggled so much with language and motor skills. And so I kind of had it in the back of my mind that I was going to study dyslexia therapy.

So he was my first student and my first reading student. I've been teaching kids with dyslexia in my private practice and public school K through fifth, and this year I'm moving to middle school. I'm very excited about that.

Melanie (01:13)
Okay, so

can you take me back to a time when you say you realized that the school system wasn't going to solve your son's reading challenge for you and your family and what you decided to do instead?

Faye Bankler Casell (01:29)
Sure.

I really

was so grateful for that time because both of my kids learning was happening right underneath my nose and I really was able to see what was connecting and what was not and that pushed me into action. At different points in their education my daughter has

schooled

at home for a variety of reasons and I really value that.

The school where my children were, I I think they they did a very they did a lovely job in a lot of ways. But one of the things that I know from working in schools and from having my kids in school is that many, many schools, many educators do not know how to teach reading, and sometimes they teach it incorrectly.

a lot of them don't know the signs. So my daughter when she was in a pre-K program the teacher for the parent-teacher conference said she writes her letters backwards.

and I loved this woman, she's a wonderful, wonderful woman, and great with my daughter. And I said to her, Are you aware that that is developmentally appropriate right now? You know, I said if if you're indicating that you're concerned, you know, about a learning disability, she should not outgrow that yet. You know, that will come in a few

Melanie (03:15)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (03:15)
years. And I would say that

I find that really consistently. You know, I've had the good fortune of going on a lot of different podcasts and some of them have been, you know, hosted by educators

who will ask me, like, is dyslexia where they see things backwards? You know, it's just these very, very old ideas that our community has tried to, you know, educate people that that is not what's happening.

and the other thing that I am really finding

more and more is that I am finding more homeschooling families who are making a transition from a school system because in particular because they have a neurodivergent child whose needs are not being met. and so they are really reaching out and trying to figure out what they're going to do.

Melanie (04:19)
Mm-hmm. For sure. I think this would be a good time to talk about something else that is commonly believed, and that is that we can just wait and see if our child catches up with reading. So I wanted to ask you about the research on this.

Faye Bankler Casell (04:41)
Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that question. You know, the research is a little startling, honestly. So if a child is not clicking with the reading at what would typically be considered sort of an end of first grade, so you're talking about turning seven. If

they begin getting dyslexia services, then there's about a 90 to 95% success rate, meaning that as they reach that third grade age, they will reach grade level and stay on grade level for the remainder of their schooling.

Whereas if you were to wait until that child is nine or ten, then it would take double the time, four years, the success rate would drop to about forty five percent, and it would be longer, harder, and less successful.

there are certain groups of thought,

and a variety of parents who sort of feel comfortable and confident delaying the

Melanie (05:55)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (05:55)
introduction of reading. And my concern with that, is that the evidence that we point to about other cultures and countries waiting longer to teach their kids reading is that those countries are not speaking English.

And they are

Melanie (06:17)
Mm.

Faye Bankler Casell (06:18)
speaking with a very phonetic, reasonable language. logic

to it, but you really have to tease it out.

Melanie (06:28)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (06:29)
that being said

it's really rooted in ph phonology. It's really rooted in sounds.

as long as the families are really getting in there and playing with sounds and, you know,

Melanie (06:40)
Mm.

Faye Bankler Casell (06:40)
those sorts of things, you're you're off to a great start. That's

Melanie (06:43)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (06:44)
that's why we can identify dyslexia with I want to say ninety two percent accuracy at age five and a half. So

it's you can see the signs well before a child is reading. But yeah, English is just a very different beast from

Melanie (07:02)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (07:03)
a lot of languages.

Melanie (07:05)
Yes.

Can you share some of those signs with us?

Faye Bankler Casell (07:09)
Sure, absolutely. I do have a free mini ebook called The Dyslexia Roadmap for Families, and it covers a variety of topics, so that's free, and anybody can get that from my website, homereadingcoach.com.

So definitely if you have any speech or language delays, your child is at risk because again, the roots of reading, the roots of dyslexia are in oral language, in spoken language.

Other signs can be trouble connecting letter sounds to letter. It can be saying words that are close and approximate to what you mean to say, but not quite the right word. trouble retrieving information. A lot of the kids that I work with who have dyslexia, when I ask them a question, they go

So very quickly to good, bad

Happy, sad, very generic answers because the pulling forward of information is really a challenge. It just takes longer. so they'll kind of fall back on these patterns of very sort of general language. Usually there's a lot of struggle with hearing rhymes and

identifying rhymes, generating rhymes, you'll find that a lot. And then certainly once the child starts reading, very labored reading struggles with you could have just read this word on this page but then you get here or

Picking up on cues that they are guessing. So they

Melanie (08:57)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (08:57)
might see a word that starts with the same with the letter on the page and they'll sort of guess an approximate word that's not that word, or they might say dog instead of puppy because they're looking at the picture.

The kids that are the hardest to identify are the ones who are very precocious and

cognitively just extremely talented. They

Melanie (09:26)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (09:27)
are often very good at masking, at hiding their struggles and they're doing that for very understandable reasons, right? Like they they feel like

Melanie (09:37)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah.

Faye Bankler Casell (09:38)
they should understand this. If we're spending time teaching it to them, then there's the assumption from them that they should, you know, be catching on. So those kids tend to

memorize a lot of words by sight.

Melanie (09:52)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (09:52)
And so a good way for families to just kind of do a check to make sure your child is really in fact reading is, getting these decodable nonsense words so they

Melanie (10:05)
Mm.

Faye Bankler Casell (10:06)
will follow your typical consonant vowel consonant patterns, that sort of thing, but because they are not real everyday words, your child would not have an opportunity.

To have memorized them. So

Melanie (10:19)
Hmm. Hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (10:22)
that can be a good way to just, you know, feel out and make sure that the child is actually decoding because

Melanie (10:32)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (10:33)
the children who are able to mask it can usually do so until the curriculum really transitions from sort of a learning to read to a read-to-learn

Melanie (10:45)
Okay, so I have another question for you, just out of curiosity. I have done quite a bit of searching around on the research with dyslexia and spelling, and everything I have read asserted that kids with dyslexia are never going to be good at spelling. Is that what you have experienced also, or do you have a different take on it?

Faye Bankler Casell (11:14)
Well, I would never say kids with dyslexia are never going to I mean, you meet one person with dyslexia, that's one person. You know? Dyslexia is a very wide scope and kids are very different.

it's sort of obnoxious that anybody would say that. Now I will say that.

reading is kind of that receptive language. So when you think about a child learning to speak, they understand what they hear well before they can produce it, before they can express it. Written language is like that, where the reading usually comes first and the spelling is last. So in my experience, spelling is generally

Always harder, it generally takes more time,

Melanie (12:08)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (12:09)
but with the teaching of really explicit, reliable,

Patterns and then with the high frequency words, you know, a really big push to move away from those sort of memorizing flashcards, but just breaking it down because even those high-frequency words that seem very strange, like rough R-O-U-G-H, there is a true logic

Melanie (12:38)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (12:38)
to it when you learn the history of English. And if you can just focus on the parts of the word that

break the mold,

Melanie (12:47)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (12:47)
then it's not so challenging because the majority of the words are decodable with the exception of maybe a sound.

it's harder, it takes more work, it's longer. That's the last piece. but no.

Melanie (13:05)
Okay. Well that's that's encouraging. Okay, so I know that you are a certified academic language therapist trained in Orton, Gillingham. For those of us who aren't familiar with that approach, can you explain it and talk about why it's such a good approach to use for kids who have dyslexia, especially if we're a homeschool parent working with our child.

Faye Bankler Casell (13:31)
Sure. well you know, Orton Gillingham is an approach. It's a way of working with kids. And

Dyslexia therapies that follow Orton Gillingham are again very explicit. So we don't leave information to chance. So very explicit. and

Sequential, where everything is cumulative. So you're constantly circling back and reviewing, and things are building in a logical order. One of the things about a dyslexic brain is when you take

what would be considered a sight word, right? And I recently attended this webinar where a scholar was saying all words want to become sight words, right? Like you want to be able

Melanie (14:35)
Mm.

Faye Bankler Casell (14:36)
to recognize them really quickly so that you can read fluidly and fluently

for your typical reader who's very proficient in reading and has been doing it for a long time could see a word sometimes just once or twice and be

Melanie (14:53)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (14:54)
able to read it and spell it.

For kids with dyslexia, sometimes they need up to 200 exposures to a word in

Melanie (15:01)
Mm. Hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (15:03)
order to really map it in their brain. So there's a lot of just really coming back and cycling back through. The other thing that is really wonderful about Orton Gillingham approach is that it's multi-sensory.

You know, when you think about dyslexia, ultimately at the heart of neurodivergence is that something is processing

in sort of the diversity of human brains. So if you think about, you know, the computer hardware is all the same, but maybe the software is running a slightly different program. And so one of the things that we do a lot with kids is we really we present information and we practice it in multi-sensory ways. So that the body is moving, the eyes are looking, you're speaking in

talking you know and you're touching different things like textures and so really trying to bring the information in through the senses

Melanie (16:07)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (16:09)
and making it very visual

There are a variety of people who practice Orton Gillingham, so you have, and a variety of places that train and teach people. and those are in my dyslexia roadmap. The certified academic language therapist, we are among, I would say, the most rigorous trained in the nation and

globally. but there's a variety and and kids need different things.

Melanie (16:38)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (16:38)
I have a program that I am doing online. And one of the reasons that I started it was because I had conversations with several homeschooling families and

This one mother said to me, Well, can I read a book and do it myself? And I said, You could absolutely do it yourself, but maybe not a book. It's not gonna be a book, you know?

Melanie (17:00)
Mm, mm.

Faye Bankler Casell (17:01)
And so given that there are so many

nice co-ops in homeschooling communities. I'm like, look, if you invest some time in learning this, I bet your community will wrap around you and you can help, you know, other families, that sort of thing. But my program

is definitely for people who want to do things hands on,

Melanie (17:25)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (17:26)
who are participating in their actively in their children's learning and whether it's because of home

Schooling or most kids don't get identified in the school system. You know, I mean about

Melanie (17:37)
Mm, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (17:39)
20% of the population probably has some form of dyslexia, and of those kids in school, only maybe 20% of that 20% get identified

Melanie (17:49)
Mm, hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (17:50)
and get services. So there are a lot of people who just feel like they're having to figure it out on their own.

Melanie (17:57)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (17:59)
there are other home programs like Barton is a very popular one.

It's something that anyone can do, but you do have to learn what you're doing. Right? But if you're

Melanie (18:10)
Mm, mm, mm.

Faye Bankler Casell (18:12)
home schooling you're already committed to learning what you're doing, so

Melanie (18:16)
Right.

So if someone was interested in your program called Reading Breakthrough, I love the name, what can they expect to find in your program that makes it different from just buying a phonics curriculum?

Faye Bankler Casell (18:32)
Well, I've set it up so that there are home pieces that happen whenever they happen. the concept lessons are

I have recorded videos that could be used either way, where I am direct teaching your child with you there. I am always engaging as if it's the three of us. we start with the three threes where three minutes of movement and then we, you know, we together commit to reminding, whatever it is that day.

and then take three breaths and so it's meant to be done together for families who want, they can also just watch the concept lesson and deliver it themselves. I've included all of the decks, the cards, the everything, and then there are

separate parent videos.

where I'm just kind of giving the background of this is why we're doing it this way and then I've written a series of activities and things for them to do at home. So it could be used as an enrichment an enhancement to what you're already doing at home.

You just

have access to now how a dyslexia therapist would be walking through

Melanie (19:53)
Mm-hmm.

Faye Bankler Casell (19:53)
dyslexia therapy with your child and I'm very transparent about the kind of frequency and intensity that you know the International Dyslexia Association says will help the wiring of your child's brain. but then it's in your court, you know, to decide

Melanie (20:13)
Right.

Faye Bankler Casell (20:13)
how it fits.

Melanie (20:15)
Well, it just sounds fantastic. Where is the best place for parents to learn more about your program?

Faye Bankler Casell (20:21)
Sure. so you can go to home readingcoach dot com and then there are links to both the free roadmap and the reading breakthrough program. And there are optional sort of things that are enhancements to that, so cursive and

high frequency words and parent coaching communities, that sort of thing too.

Melanie (20:49)
All right.

Well, I will be putting those links in the show notes to make it convenient for everyone. But Faye, thank

Faye Bankler Casell (20:55)
Great.

Melanie (20:55)
you so much for joining me and sharing this information. I know it's going to be helpful to many, many of our listeners.

Faye Bankler Casell (21:03)
Thank you so much. And I I hope to hear from some of your listeners. I would be happy to help them and honored.