Life has a funny way of surprising us, doesn’t it? I began this blog when I was in the thick of working at a school and developing the concept of a dyslexia center. Every school day brought me fun new challenges and obstacles to overcome on the way to creating a mainstream school that was friendly to dyslexic students. I had lots of stories of student funnies and sweet triumphs to share with you.

Then one day, I looked up and realized my work on building a dyslexia friendly school was successful! I was done. I could move on, knowing I could leave my decade’s long work in good hands and it would continue to thrive and meet the needs of the students and families depending on it.

So I retired. I packed my boxes, loaded my car, and stored those boxes of teaching stuff in the garage at home. I planted a vegetable garden. I finished conversations with my husband. I grew a rainbow of flowers in our yard. I went to lunch with friends. I cleaned corners in my home.

But I missed teaching kids how to read.

I picked up just a few private practice tutoring students. With joy, I used the Orton-Gillingham approach skills I knew so well, and crafted lessons to improve the language skills of my handful of dyslexic students. I loved presenting the lessons, and the students seemed to love receiving them. Their newly sharpened language skills spoke of the benefit of those tutorials.

I thought about all the many things the past decade had taught me. About the many lessons large and small I had gleaned from ten school years helping classroom teachers learn best practices for teaching dyslexic students. About the many conversations held while walking down the classroom hallway when a teacher needed me to quickly clarify some area of classroom life in which the students with dyslexia needed just a small tweak to help their school life run more smoothly. About the conversations from new family interviews where I heard heart wrenching stories of how very wrongly school had gone for their child with dyslexia – wrongs that could have been avoided if the teacher had just understood how to run a dyslexia friendly classroom. I wished I had a thousand decades to give to creating a thousand schools as friendly to students with dyslexia as the one I had just retired from.

The fish quote came to my mind.

“Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime.”

Confucius

That was my next bend in the river. Time to give fishing lessons. Not literal fishing lessons, of course. Lessons for teachers (and interested school administrators) about how to have a Dyslexia Friendly Classroom.

The material for developing the course spent several months in the form of Post-it notes scattered across the wall of the spare bedroom I use as my home office. I added, deleted, rearranged and thought about how to structure the course. Clipboards held ideas for the structure of each day’s lessons.

Eventually it gelled into a one hundred page training manual. A sponsor was secured for the first training cohort, which was in person, and schools registered teachers to attend. The reaction of the teachers from that first week of training let me know this was an idea with legs. I pressed forward to develop a half dozen of the training week modules into an online course, which premiers next week.

The fishers are being taught. Those teachers will learn how to establish their own Dyslexia Friendly Classrooms.

My blog posts will follow this bend in the river. Expect to see posts with recommendations on books to read, ideas for teacher (or parent) created materials that allow a student with dyslexia to process school material in a way conducive to his or her needs. Let me tell you stories of surprises from training sessions, and of successes shared by the teachers who report back on how it went at school as they implemented what was learned during the trainings. I have facts to share about dyslexia. Perhaps a funny student story will sneak its way into an occasional blog post.

Thanks for staying in the canoe with me as we explore what is around this bend in the river.