Dyslexia Homeschool Program: Build It in Two Parts

Why one program for everything breaks down

The usual approach is to look for a single boxed "dyslexia curriculum" and hope it covers the whole school day. I think that's the wrong frame, and it's the part worth getting ahead of.

The International Dyslexia Association describes dyslexia as a specific learning disability involving difficulty with word reading and spelling, in accuracy, speed or both, that persists even with instruction that works for most other children. Notice what that definition is about: reading words and spelling them. It says nothing about a child's ability to reason about fractions, understand how plants make food, or argue a point out loud.

So when the whole day is delivered through text at the child's reading level, two things go wrong at once. Reading time gets spent on content instead of on the reading instruction itself. And everything else gets taught at the pace of the hardest skill. Splitting the job, early, is what keeps both moving. And if a curriculum you tried before didn't work, that's not your fault or your child's. It was probably being asked to do two jobs at once.

Part one: the reading program

This is the part that does the heavy lifting, and it's the part where I'd spend the most money and the most care.

Get an evaluation first. Not every reading struggle is dyslexia, and a report from a qualified evaluator will usually say what kind of instruction is recommended. Your public school district has a federal "Child Find" duty under IDEA to locate, identify and evaluate children with disabilities, and that includes homeschooled children. A private evaluation from a licensed psychologist is the other route.

Look for Structured Literacy. IDA uses that term for reading instruction that is explicit (the child is taught each skill directly, never left to guess), systematic and cumulative (skills build in a planned order, each one resting on the last) and diagnostic (the teacher keeps checking what the child has mastered and adjusts). It covers phonology, sound-symbol connections, syllables, morphology, sentence structure and meaning. Orton-Gillingham is one well-known approach in this family.

Questions to ask any reading program before you buy:

• Does it teach phonics explicitly and in a fixed sequence, or does it expect the child to pick words up from context?
• Does it require mastery before moving on, with built-in review?
• Is it written for a parent to teach, or does it assume a trained tutor? Both can work. Know which you're buying.
• What does a daily lesson look like, and can your family actually keep that schedule?

If the evaluator recommends a specialist tutor, that recommendation should outrank anything you read on a curriculum website, including this one.

Part two: everything else

Here's where homeschooling a dyslexic child gets genuinely easier than school. You can separate what your child knows from how they get to it.

A few principles that tend to help:

• Read content aloud in subjects where reading isn't the skill being taught. A science lesson is about the science.
• Let your child answer out loud. Scribe for them when the goal is the idea.
• Keep their real level in each subject. A child decoding slowly might still be ready for multi-step math reasoning.
• Watch word problems closely. A wrong answer there can be a reading problem dressed up as a math one.

And be honest with yourself about time. A daily reading block plus three or four other subjects is a lot for any child, so shorter sessions with breaks usually beat one long push.

Where Just Tutor Me fits, and where it doesn't

Plainly: Just Tutor Me isn't a dyslexia program, an Orton-Gillingham program, or a screening tool. It doesn't diagnose dyslexia and it isn't a substitute for the reading instruction in part one.

It does have a Reading subject, and that subject includes phonics question types built on a curated, verified 517-word database running from Kindergarten through grade 8. That's practice inside a general curriculum. For a child with dyslexia, I'd treat it as something to run past your evaluator or reading tutor, not as the intervention itself.

Where it's a reasonable fit is part two:

• Separate levels by subject. The placement assessment starts every student at Kindergarten level, whatever their age, and climbs through the skills in each subject. Three misses in the last 5 questions mark the ceiling; it then checks any skill area it hasn't pinned down yet, up to 60 questions per subject, flags rapid guessing, and lets your child take a break and resume. Math, Reading, Science and Language Arts each get their own grade equivalent, so a reading score doesn't set the math level. History & Social Studies is coming soon.
• Voice in and out. Your child can speak answers instead of typing, hear the tutor's replies read aloud, and math notation is converted into speech.
• Mastery-based pacing. Skills have to be mastered before the program moves on, and spaced repetition brings them back before they fade.
• Reports you can file. Parent reports break each subject into strands labelled mastered, building, needs foundation or not assessed, and they print.

The family plan covers up to 2 students. For a closer look at how the path adjusts to a child, see Personalized Homeschool Program: How It Actually Works. If you're comparing tools more broadly, see Best AI Homeschool Program? Read This First. The special needs homeschool curriculum page has the overview.

One limitation to plan around: any learning program still puts text on a screen. Sit with your child for the first week, notice which activities still lean hard on reading, and adjust. Voice helps with access. It doesn't replace your judgment.

What a week can look like

There's no single right schedule, but the shape that tends to hold up looks like this:

1. The reading block comes first, every school day, while your child is fresh, following whatever dose the program or tutor recommends.
2. Content subjects come after, with voice, read-aloud and spoken answers wherever reading isn't the point.
3. You read aloud for pleasure, separate from instruction, so stories and vocabulary keep growing even while decoding is still catching up.
4. Once a term, gather the records: reading program progress, printed subject reports and a few work samples.

That's the whole idea. Specialist instruction where the difficulty is, and no artificial ceiling anywhere else.

Frequently asked questions