Dyslexia Gold -- my REVIEW

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew

 A recent product that I was given access to in order to share my thoughts in a review is called Dyslexia Gold . No one in my family has been diagnosed with dyslexia, but I was interested to see more about the product and what it contained, and what claims it makes for helping children with dyslexia.

When you look at the website for the Dyslexia Gold product, before you even log in, there is a lot of information for those wishing to find out more about dyslexia. 

Reading through this information, I was very interested to read some things about some of the issues associated with dyslexia. When my son was little, he had a tracking problem, which was attributed to low muscle tone in his eyes. Going along with that, the eye doctor could also not pull his vision in to 20/20 until he was about sixteen. I'll talk more about this below :) I was also interested to read about the issues with binocular vision. For ever, I have not really had binocular vision--one eye is crazy dominant and the other just kind of hangs behind :) This is not usually a problem to me, other than trying to look in a binocular microscope or shooting, or things that use both eyes at once. I guess until I was pretty old I never realized that not everyone sees like I do. I think because of this, I do not like going to 3D movies, because I still look mostly out of one eye and the 3D glasses are made for using both eyes. I'll also refer to this below! So--although we do not have dyslexia (I think!) -- and don't have many of the other issues associated with it, these few segments hit home.

When the user logs in to the program, they can choose between four areas for their child to work in. There is a spelling program which claims to improve spelling greatly; there is a vision tracking program, full of fun games; there is a math (times tables) practice; and there is a fluency (reading) program. There are different activities in each section and they build upon each other as the student progresses and improves. The parent can view the student's progress and activity easily.

There are particular things that you can select, on the parent side. This is a program from England (I think!) and you will notice an accent in the spoken words; the parent can select American, British, or Scottish for the accent of the words. I had American chosen, and will note that there is still a bit of an accent, but it is not really too much of a problem, though for some of the spelling words you might have to make sure your student understands them (see my picture of what afternoon sounded like to me--if I were trying to sound out the word, it was different)

Anyhow, my kids are older now, college and upper high school, so the spelling, times tables, and reading were not really applicable to them (and they did not want to try them). The Vision Training section, on the other hand, was pretty fun :) with games like whack-a-mole and target shooting using 3D glasses. It was very interesting to me to see my child without vision issues use the target shooting game versus me, who had a difficult time using it. I think I could probably benefit from using this part of the program myself!

When my son was 6 years old (he is now 19), he was found to have tracking problems, right around the same time that he got glasses. To accomodate this and to help him strengthen his eye muscles (which were viewed as the cause of his tracking issues), we had these little monster finger puppets and we did eye exercises with them for five minutes a day. This continued on for a year and his tracking seemed to have improved, thankfully. (Another exercise he did was word searches, that was viewed as a helpful exercise for him as well.) I can see how the games and activities in this program within Dyslexia Gold . serve those same purposes and can be done independently. Looking back, I'm not sure that I would have wanted a computer doing this, instead of the time we spent each day together doing the exercises, but I'm sure it would have been a good supplement. 

So this review brought up some very interesting topics to our family :) And some reminiscences. If you have a child with dyslexia or tracking issues, you might want to look into this program. There are many options and it is a year-long subscription. At least check out the information on the home page--it is very helpful and informative!

If you'd like to hear more about Dyslexia Gold and other homeschooling families' thoughts about it, please click on the link below: