Dyslexia champions

by Sarah Switzer, a member of Dyslexia Scotland

This year, we have had two groups of Dyslexia Champions (30 of us in total) meeting at a weekly lunchtime club with our teacher Mrs Switzer. Some of us are dyslexic and some of us are not, but we want to help in as many ways as we can.

This year we have helped with pupil and parent workshops, spoken in assemblies and continued using the brilliant Mission Superheroes Programme. We held a competition to design a school dyslexia mascot and Dave the Dyslexia Dog was our winner. The winning design was then turned into an actual toy by a very talented Granny. Dave has been helping us spread the word that there are many dyslexia friendly books out there.

Dave joined us when we visited our local library to see what they had to offer. We learned about books with dyslexic characters and how different fonts, line spacing, page colour and certain publishers can make a big difference. We also learned about the different apps the library uses so we can access audiobooks for free. At school, we can use the app BorrowBox to listen to audiobooks but some of us did not know that we could get audiobooks from the local library too.

The librarians were keen to ask us questions and get ideas from us too. They are now using bookmarks, showing the Blue Dyslexia Ribbon, to indicate which books are dyslexia friendly on their bookshelves. At school, we have designed our own bookmarks, using Dave our mascot in the designs, to highlight dyslexia friendly texts in our class and area libraries and at our recent book fayre.

Our next visit with Dave will be to Waterstones book shop in Falkirk for a question-and-answer session about what dyslexia friendly texts they have available. We want to get as many people as possible enjoying books, in whatever format, especially those who have not really liked reading in the past.
Issy says, “It is not just dyslexic people who find reading difficult. We want to help people even if they don’t have dyslexia.”

Ellie says, “I like audiobooks and I find the Dog Man books easier to read. The backgrounds are sometimes different so the words stick out more.”
Thinking about helpful font types has led us to introduce the OpenDyslexic font for our P6 and P7 pupil iPads and we hope to encourage teachers and pupils to use this font when creating documents.

Some of us will be heading to high school soon and we know that we can use the Read Aloud or Speak Screen functions on our iPads and access audiobooks to cut down some of the effort in reading long pieces of text.

We are showing Primary 5 pupils how to use these tools so they can be confident to access reading in different ways. We are so proud that our hard work this year has helped our school to achieve a ‘Reading Schools’ core accreditation.

So what is next for our group? We would like to create a set of resources for each class and will need to raise some money for this. Things like coloured overlays, reading rulers/ trackers and word mats in dyslexia-friendly fonts. Watch this space!