Why I Created Defeating Dyslexia with Darci: Helping Struggling Readers Find Confidence

teacherdarcis
2 hours ago
15 min read

When your child is struggling to read, it can be hard to know what to do next.

Maybe your 7-year-old still struggles to remember letter names and sounds.

Maybe your elementary student has practiced the same spelling words over and over, but they simply don't stick.

Or perhaps your middle or high school student can read, but longer academic words, spelling, vocabulary, and reading comprehension continue to be a struggle.

Homework takes forever and cannot be done independently and causes lots of stress in your home.

And as a parent, you may find yourself wondering:

Is this normal? Will my child catch up? Should I be doing more? Why isn't what we're doing working?

You want to help. You want your child to be successful. But you aren't a reading teacher, and you shouldn't have to become one just to help your child learn to read.

I understand that uncertainty because I've lived it myself.

My journey to becoming an online reading teacher—and eventually creating Defeating Dyslexia with Darci—began with my own daughter.

I Had a Degree in Elementary Education and I Thought I Knew How to Teach Children to Read

I graduated with a degree in elementary education and taught kindergarten for five years. I loved teaching young children, and I believed I understood how children learned. Reading was my favorite subject and I thought I knew how to teach reading.

Then I became a mother.

I left teaching to stay home with my own children, and naturally, I wanted to teach them to read. I had read to my children from birth. I knew how to make books fun and interesting. I knew how to encourage children and create engaging activities.

But when my daughter was the age that I thought she should begin reading, something wasn't right.

She had all the red flags for dyslexia

There was a family history of reading struggles.
She had experienced speech issues.
She had trouble learning the alphabet and the sounds associated with letters.
Rhyming was difficult.
She struggled to manipulate sounds in words—for example, being asked to say feet without the /f/ sound.
She had difficulty remembering and recognizing common high-frequency words.

But I did not know what the red flags were. I had learned nothing about dyslexia in my teacher training.

My daughter wanted to read. She loved books and would “read” to her dollies and teddy bears all the time.

So I thought reading would come naturally for her. But it just didn’t.

Even though I had a college degree in elementary education, I had not learned what I needed to know about dyslexia. In fact, I hadn't really been taught how to teach reading at all. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know so I wasn't even aware of it.

I had learned how to make reading fun and interesting. I had learned how to get children excited about books and reading.

The assumption in my teacher training had seemed to be that children who were surrounded by good books and engaging experiences would automatically want to read and because they wanted to read they would find it fun and easy.

But even though my daughter was surrounded by many good books and engaging experiences she did not find reading fun or easy at all. In fact it just wasn’t happening and it was becoming more and more frustrating as time went on.

I had no idea what to do and I tried many things.

First I just tried to relax. Maybe she is just not ready yet I thought, relax and let her enjoy being a kid, it will happen. But as all her friends started reading and she seemed to be falling farther and farther behind it became impossible to relax and not worry.

I tried many of the things I had done successfully with my kindergarten students. Most of those children had learned to read, so I assumed those strategies would work for my daughter, too.

They didn't.

We had her eyes checked.

We spent money on a listening program called Tomatis Sound Therapy.

Eventually, we had her tested.

That's when we learned that she had dyslexia.

Getting a diagnosis of dyslexia was a huge relief. Now we had an explanation of what was causing this to be so hard.

We began using the Barton Reading and Spelling System, and one of the most important things we did was spend a great deal of time on phonemic awareness—the ability to hear and work with the individual sounds in spoken words.

For my daughter, this was one of the biggest keys for success. It helped open the door to reading.

But learning to read was still hard work, and for many years, we worked very hard together.

That experience changed the direction of my life.

I Became Determined to Understand Reading

As I taught my daughter, I realized how much I didn't know.

And I wanted to know.

After learning about her dyslexia, I began attending the International Dyslexia Association's annual Reading in the Rockies conference.

One year, I happened to sit at a table with several Certified Academic Language Therapists (CALT).

I had never heard of the Academic Language Therapy Association (ALTA).

But as these therapists explained their training and the practicum they completed, I remember thinking:

This must be one of the best programs available for understanding dyslexia and language.

The training was thorough and demanding, including a 700-hour practicum.

I knew I wanted to do it.

At that time I was homeschooling my own children. I knew that I was certainly not supper-mom. I could not handle going back to school and doing a rigorous program like the ALTA training at that time. But I kept the thought in my mind and waited.

I ended up homeschooling all the way through high school and when both my children were finished with high school I began to think about what I wanted to do now.

I spent a few years substituting in public schools. I went to almost all the schools in my area. I subbed in preschool through high school. I mostly subbed for special education aides. I wanted to see what was happening in schools and decide if I wanted to work there.

I saw a lot of need for teachers who were educated about reading and dyslexia.

Finally I decided to go back to school and earn a master's degree in literacy and become a Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT).

I learned so much more about the English language through my advanced training than I had learned during my college years in elementary education.

I often wished I had known these things before I had children.

But the truth was, I didn't even know what I didn't know and if I had not experienced it with my daughter I probably would never have felt the need to learn these things.

Many times teachers think that students are struggling because the parents have not been helping them. The parents do not read to them or help them with their homework.

I read to my children more than probably anyone else ever did and my daughter still struggled. We worked harder than most people do to learn the letters and sounds but we still struggled.

If your child has dyslexia it is not your fault and no matter what you did - right or wrong - they will still struggle to become a good reader. But they can be successful.

And that is one reason I have so much compassion for parents of struggling readers today.

It is never the parent's fault when the child is struggling to become a good reader.

Parents of struggling readers are often put in an impossible position.

They know their child is struggling, but they don't necessarily know why or what to do.

They hear many conflicting opinions.

They may hear one person say, “Don't worry. Your child just needs to mature. They'll catch up.” (Homeschoolers are especially likely to hear this.)

Then they hear about research emphasizing the importance of early intervention.

They may ask the school for an evaluation and be told to wait.

Months can turn into years.

Some children spend years receiving reading intervention at school but still continue to struggle.

And parents may wonder whether what they're seeing is actually outside the range of typical reading development or not.

Parents of children with dyslexia may face another challenge: dyslexia is heritable.

If a parent has dyslexia their children have 40-60% chance of also having dyslexia.

This means sometimes the parents struggle with reading and spelling, too. They may not feel confident teaching reading or even reading aloud to their children and helping them with their homework because reading isn't easy for them either.

I want those parents to know something:

There is help.

Your child is smart.

Struggling to read does not mean your child isn't capable of learning. Your child can become a successful adult.

Sometimes a child simply needs instruction that addresses the underlying difficulties and gives them the time and support they need.

Every Struggling Reader Is Different

One of the most important things I've learned through my own experience, my education, and years of working with students is that there isn't one single “key” that works for every struggling reader.

For my daughter, phonemic awareness was tremendously important.

But I've worked with students who have already spent years working on phonics at school and still struggle.

For those students, the missing piece may look different.

They may need help understanding

academic vocabulary,
word structure,
morphology,
reading comprehension,
spelling,
grammar or
multisyllabic words.

That's why my tutoring is individualized.

When a student first comes to me, I give them a simple assessment. I want to know what they already understand and where there may be holes in their learning. I also talk with parents and review any previous testing or information they have available.

Then we begin where the student actually is.

Not where their grade level says they should be.

Not where another student is.

Where they are.

Why I Began Looking Deeper Into Words

My own teaching has continued to evolve.

Early in my tutoring career, I used the Take Flight curriculum with students. It's a well-researched curriculum for students with dyslexia. During my practicum, I had to take a student through the entire curriculum with fidelity.

It was valuable training.

But after using it for several years, I began noticing some things I wanted to approach differently—One of the biggest things was the way syllable division was taught.

At a reading convention, I was introduced to another curriculum, Really Great Reading, and began incorporating it into my tutoring.

Then something else happened.

I had two students return to me around the same time specifically for help with spelling.

I began teaching them conventional spelling rules and having them sound out the words in order to spell them but there were many words that were very difficult for them to spell.

Around that same time, I read Sue Hegland's book Beneath the Surface of Words and began learning more about a community of reading teachers who approach words in a different way.

This led me to Structured Word Inquiry.

And it changed the way I thought about words.

What If Words and spellings Aren't Random?

One of the things I love about Structured Word Inquiry is that we don't simply tell students:

“This word is weird. You'll just have to memorize it.”

Instead, we notice words and investigate.

We look at the structure of words.
We look at their meanings.
We look at their history and their
relationships to other words.
We ask why a word is spelled the way it is.

Take heal and health.

The letters ea represent different sounds in those two words. If we were only thinking about sound, that could seem confusing.

But the words are related in meaning.

The spelling is telling us something.

We're not simply spelling sounds. We're spelling meaning.

We can also take a base such as <STRUCT> and explore related words such as structure, construction, and instructor.

Did you notice that in the word structure the <t> sounds like /ch/? And in the word construction the <t> sounds like /sh/? And in instructor the <t> makes the sound you expect?

Structured Word Inquiry is an instructional method that notices these things and teach students not only that this happens but also when and why it is going to happen. The things you learn about this will be able to be applied to lots of other words.

Instead of learning three unrelated vocabulary words, students begin to see a relationship between them.

One base word such as <STRUCT> can become the foundation for understanding dozens of other words. This way of learning vocabulary has been shown in studies to be more effective than learning random lists of words or learning lists of prefixes and suffixes.

And that can be especially valuable for older students who need to read increasingly complex academic language.

Reading Instruction Doesn't Have to Be About Memorizing More Facts

Many struggling readers struggle with rote memory. And yet they are always being asked to memorize so many rote facts.

Memorize the alphabet.
Memorize all the sounds the letters make.
Sound out this word. Memorize the part that isn’t doing what we would expect.
Memorize the spelling list.

But random facts can be difficult to remember.

Understanding is better than memorizing. And once something is understood it is much easier to remember.

When students understand why words work the way they do, they have something to connect new learning to.

That is one of the things I love about my work.

A student might begin by studying one base word.

Then we explore its relatives.
We talk about prefixes and suffixes.
We learn spelling conventions.
We examine how sounds can change when parts are added to words.
We read those words in sentences and longer passages.

All the while, we're building phonics, spelling, vocabulary, morphology, reading, and comprehension together.

Even students who are just beginning to read can begin reading longer words and building up their confidence very quickly with Structured Word Inquiry.

What 1:1 Tutoring Makes Possible

Most of my students meet with me twice a week for an hour, although some students come three or even four times a week when that works for their families budet and schedule.

Every student is working at a different level, so our sessions are individualized.

We usually begin with a short review of what we've learned previously. Then we spend most of our time learning something new. We finish with a game that gives the student a chance to practice and review the skill we've been working on.

The work might involve short words for one student and complex academic vocabulary for another.

We might work on phonics, spelling, vocabulary, morphology, multisyllabic words, reading comprehension, or writing.

We write the words we're studying, and when a student is ready, we will write in cursive. We read the words in sentences and longer passages or short stories.

And perhaps most importantly, we can go at the student's pace.

A student with dyslexia may need more time to process information. Even if they are sitting in a classroom with an excellent teacher who is doing everything right, they may need more time to think and process than the other students. They may also need more repetition and practice.

In my Zoom room, they can have that time.

They don't have to compete with the student sitting next to them.

They don't have to feel embarrassed because everyone else finished first.

They can slow down.

They can think.

They can ask questions.

They can learn.

The Goal Is Bigger Than Reading

I've seen what can happen when a struggling reader begins to experience success.

One student came to me embarrassed to read in front of anyone. He often cried and said, “I can't do this.”

This student worked with me for almost two years.

Shortly after he finished tutoring, he was the narrator in his school's Christmas play.

He stood in front of the entire school and all of the parents and read his part.

The child who once cried because he couldn't imagine reading in front of anyone was now standing on a stage doing exactly that.

His reading had improved, but something else had changed, too.

His confidence had changed.

Another student came because her mother was worried about her reading comprehension and wondered how she would manage high school.

We worked on slowing down, stopping at punctuation, and building vocabulary.

Eventually, her mother told me that her daughter could read better than most of her friends.

Another student had already completed a very structured reading program but was struggling to write a report.

His mother was concerned about his future and wondered how he would eventually get into a good college.

We worked on grammar and sentence structure.

That year, his teacher chose his report as an example to show the rest of the class what they needed to do.

These are some examples of things that make me excited to do this work.

But don't just take my word for it.

The progress I see in my students is the reason I love this work. But it means even more when parents tell me what they are seeing at home.

Here are a few things parents and students have shared about their experience:

“Darci was an excellent dyslexia tutor for my daughter and helped her test out of her literacy class! She was very patient and flexible with our schedules and always had a positive attitude when working with my daughter.”

— Gac.

“I highly recommend Defeating Dyslexia with Darci. She combines deep expertise with genuine compassion, taking time to understand each learner’s unique needs and tailoring her approach accordingly. Her structured, engaging methods build both skills and confidence, and the progress we’ve seen has been remarkable. Darci creates a supportive environment where students feel empowered, making a meaningful difference not only academically but also in their self-esteem. She has been a blessing to our children and we will be forever grateful. Thank you!”

— Chanda H.

“Defeating dyslexia with Darci is one of the best teachers I've ever experienced. Her knowledge of the English language is incredible. Going all the way back to the beginning building blocks. Like understanding how letters interact with one another to make a word. Being able learn the rules of the English language that allow you to build words and spell them correctly. Understanding prefixes, suffixes, vowel teams, and open and closed syllables, made a huge difference in my spelling and reading. I'm 33 years old, and I've struggled with spelling my whole life. Being able to go back to the beginning and understand the rules of the English language really helps. So, regardless if you're young or old, I Strongly recommend.”

— Joel S.

“We initially met and used Darci for reading help for our son who has dyslexia. She was absolutely amazing. Now we are back with Darci for help with spelling (4.5 yrs later) as it was still a struggle even though his reading has greatly improved. We have seen some really solid progress in only 5 months! Plus our son looks forward to his time with Darci twice a week! Would highly recommend her! She is fantastic and an answer to prayer!”

— Beth A.

What I love about these reviews is that they describe more than academic progress. They talk about confidence, understanding, patience, and even looking forward to tutoring.

Those things matter to me because the goal isn't simply to help a child read more words. I want students to understand what they are learning, recognize that they are capable of learning, and become more confident in themselves as readers and learners.

And sometimes the most meaningful progress is when a child who once dreaded reading begins to look forward to it.

I Want Struggling Readers to Not Just Memorize Lots of Sounds and Blend Them Into Words but to Understand Words and Enjoy Them.

I don't want struggling readers to spend their childhood feeling like they're always behind.

I don't want them to believe they're not smart because reading isn't easy for them.

I don't want them to feel pressured to hurry or to be perfect.

Instead, I want them to discover that words are fascinating.

Words have structure.

Words have meaning.

Words have histories.

Words have relationships.

And once students begin to see those relationships, reading and spelling can become much more understandable.

The more you understand about anything the easier it is to remember and apply it.

I want students to know that it's okay to slow down. It's okay to need more time.

It's okay to learn differently.

And I want them to leave my Zoom room not only with stronger reading skills, but with the confidence to use those skills in the classroom and in life.

Because being a successful person doesn't depend on whether learning to read came easily to you.

This Is Why I Created Defeating Dyslexia with Darci

I created Defeating Dyslexia with Darci because I know what it's like to be the parent who desperately wants to help a child learn to read but doesn't know what to do.

I've been that mother.

I've spent years learning.

I've watched my own daughter work incredibly hard to become a reader.

I've earned a master's degree in literacy.

I've completed extensive specialized training and become a Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT).

I have continued to learn more and grow in my knoweldge and understanding of the English Language and ability to teach it to others.

And I've worked with students of many different ages and abilities who have taught me, again and again, that struggling readers are not hopeless.

They may simply need someone who understands where they are starting, identifies what they need, and gives them the time and instruction to build from there.

That's what I hope to provide.

A place where students don't have to compare themselves with anyone else.

A place where they can ask questions.

A place where words begin to make sense.

A place where confidence can grow alongside reading skills.

Your Child May Just Need a Different Path.

If you're the parent of a struggling reader, you may not know exactly what is getting in your child's way.

That's okay.

You don't have to have all the answers.

Your child may be struggling with

phonemic awareness,
phonics,
rapid naming,
spelling,
multisyllabic words,
vocabulary,
morphology,
comprehension—or a
combination of several things.

You don't need to know what these things even are.

The important thing to know is that struggling does not mean incapable.

There is a path forward.

And I would love for my Zoom room to be a place where your child can discover that reading can become easier, more interesting, and more understandable.

If you're ready to find out whether 1:1 online reading tutoring might be a good fit for your child, click the link and choose a time to meet with me for a free consultation.

Let's take the next step together.

Your child's reading journey may not look like everyone else's.