When Your Dyslexic Daughter Starts Teaching Her Sister to Read
By BuddyBooks by ObjectiveEd · October 18, 2026 · Reading, Special Needs, Tutoring, Curriculum
A mom in Springtown, Texas is a former special education teacher. She spent her career supporting students with learning differences. She knows what the research says, what good intervention looks like, and what it takes to make progress with a child who has significant reading challenges.
Her 9-year-old daughter has diagnosed dyslexia and dysgraphia, two significant learning differences that affect both reading and writing. Getting the right diagnosis wasn't easy; the mom describes pushing back against school systems that missed or minimized what her daughter was experiencing. Once she had the diagnosis and access to the Texas PDSES program, she went looking for the right tools.
A Mom Who Knows What This Looks Like
When a former special education teacher evaluates a reading tool for her own child, she's not guessing. She knows what structured literacy looks like. She knows the difference between a tool that provides genuine reading practice and one that looks educational but doesn't build skill. She's seen students engage with tools that feel fun but produce nothing measurable, and she's seen tools that are less flashy but produce real gains.
Her assessment of BuddyBooks, applied to her own daughter, is filtered through that professional lens. She knows what she's looking at. The tool passed her evaluation.
From Word-by-Word to Reading Continuously
Many children with significant dyslexia read word by word. Each word is a separate decoding event. The text is fragmented rather than flowing. The meaning must be reconstructed from isolated pieces rather than parsed from a sentence that moved at reading speed.
Word-by-word reading is exhausting. It places maximum cognitive load on each individual word and leaves little capacity for comprehension. Children who read this way often feel like they've "read" without actually having followed the story.
After consistent use of BuddyBooks, her daughter's reading shifted. She started reading continuously, with sentences flowing together, the text making sense as she moved through it. The word-by-word bottleneck started to open.
She Asks to Use It
"Mom, can I get on my Chromebook?" she asked daily, after school. This kind of voluntary, self-initiated practice is what reading research consistently identifies as the key variable in sustained progress. A child who chooses to practice reads more than one who has to be reminded, produces more fluency gains, and develops a different relationship with reading.
Since BuddyBooks works on both smartphones and computers, it can be used anywhere - in the car on the way to afterschool events, or at home.
And Then She Brought Her Sister
Something that her mom didn't fully anticipate: the 7-year-old sister started getting involved.
"She gets her sister involved with it too," her mom said.
The older daughter's engagement with BuddyBooks became visible and appealing enough that her younger sister wanted in. Two kids, different ages, different reading levels, using the same tool because one of them found it worth sharing. This isn't a designed feature of any reading program. It's what happens when a child is genuinely engaged rather than merely compliant.
What Gratitude Sounds Like
"I couldn't be more thankful for it," her mom said. Coming from a former special education teacher who spent her career around reading tools and knows exactly what results look like, that sentence is a complete review.