In this borrowed post from Susan Barton’s website, a mother tells of her experiences in school as an undiagnosed dyslexic student. Watching her son repeat her path broke her heart, as she tells in the letter. It does not have to be that way! Recognizing that your child has signs of dyslexia and getting him or her the help needed will literally change their life. It is the best educational gift a parent of a dyslexic child can give. Susan Barton video
Tag: parenting
Bit of wisdom
“Children are living messages that we send to a time that we will never see.”
Author Unknown, but he or she was clearly a wise person!
How fast or slow?
How long?
“How long will this take?” is one of the first questions parents ask me when we meet to discuss starting their child in a course of study to improve the child’s literacy skills. My honest answer is always the same, I can’t promise a timeline.
A lot of factors go into the speed with which a child’s reading and spelling skills improve. The child’s age when lessons begin is a big one, with the level of confusion the child has about language following a close second. It is completely worth the time it takes to build a firm foundation for literacy, even if little outward progress can be seen while the structure is laid.
Ariel’s story
Ariel was seven years old when she enrolled in our dyslexia center. As with all new students, I evaluated where she was in order to plan lessons and chart progress. A child’s knowledge of the alphabet is important, because letters are the tools we use to code and decode our language. One of the first things I ask students to do is write me an alphabet and tell it to me as they point to each letter.
Ariel loves the white board, and showed me her artistic use of it as she wrote for me her version of the alphabet. Starting strong, she wrote the letters A – F, in a mixture of capital and lower case letters. Following that was a series of little pictures – smiley faces, stars, hearts and birds. She turned proudly and gestured toward her work, telling me these were her ABC’s. Curious, I asked her to read them to me. She confidently read A – F, pointing to each letter as she called it out. Without missing a beat, she moved right to the pictures, repeating A – F as she pointed to her drawings. Having a few pictures left over, she poked at each one and called them each Z. Beaming with pride in her accomplishment, she favored me with a little twirl and curtsey as her performance ended. The beginning point for her lessons was clear.
We started with learning letters and the sounds associated with those letters, dividing them into vowels and consonants. We traced letters on fuzzy boards, on sandpaper, in tubs of sand and mounds of shaving cream. We created flashcards with letters and a picture to represent the sound each letter made. Ariel’s mom faithfully practiced with her daughter each and every night. By Christmas, Ariel could write a correct alphabet and she could name the letters and sounds in order or if they were mixed up. She had mastered the basic tools for reading and spelling – letters.
Pacing makes all the difference
This is where the philosophy behind Orton-Gillingham can collide with common school practices. “Go as fast as you can, but as slow as you must,“ is a mantra taught to me by my first trainer, Angie Wilkins, as a guide for how to pace tutoring lessons. It was purposefully vague, because each student learns at a different pace, and each student is to be our guide in how fast or slow they need to go. This does not fit into how schools operate, and is a lot of the reason dyslexic students who get no extra intervention flounder, getting further and further behind each year.
When a child moves forward without understanding previous lessons, the dyslexic child is trying to build an understanding of reading and spelling on a foundation of Swiss cheese – filled with holes in their knowledge base. Without help to firm up the foundational knowledge by filling the blank areas with firmly grasped concepts, the dyslexic child is highly likely to fail.
Ariel’s success
Ariel continued to need to move at a snail’s pace that first spring as we moved onto reading simple words and to training her ear to hear the individual sounds of language. It was a joy to weave the lessons into games, songs and rhymes because she took pure delight in knowing she was “getting it.”
It has been nearly three years since Ariel and I began our journey of learning together. Her family support has been unparalleled, her attitude sunny, and her progress astounding. Watching her gains this third year has been like seeing a rose bud unfold into full bloom, but it took the two previous years of achingly slow progress to build the root system and nurture the tender leaves of her language knowledge to get to the point of full bloom. Without the gift of that time, I feel certain she would have withered and collapsed under the weight of uncertainly and discouragement. What a pleasure it is to be a gardener in the lives of these treasured children, taking the time they need to flourish.
2019 update: I recently interviewed a group of the original 6 students who started with me when our Dyslexia Center began in 2010. Ariel was among those students. She is now a rising high school junior, and has plans to attend college, majoring in education with a proficiency in teaching dyslexic students.
Henry Winkler Interview
This four minute interview with beloved actor and author Henry Winkler sheds light on how he copes with reading scripts, his childhood experience with feeling less than bright, and how acting was and is his dream job.Henry Winkler interview
Reality of a Ticking Clock
The Heartbreak of “Too Late”
It is a sad reality that sometimes it is too late to help a dyslexic student in the way he needs to be helped because he or she is too old. The chipper quote, “It’s never too late to remediate!” is true in theory but often not in the cold, hard light of practicality. Middle and high school students have a heavy load of reading based homework, and are so burdened to complete assignments that the mental energy required to learn more effective ways to read and spell may be asking too much for a struggling student. Add to that the reality of a brain that has developed past the reading centers, and for some kids, there is such a thing as “too late,” sad as it makes me to say that.
There are exceptional students who will make amazing turn-arounds and improve in reading and spelling despite being past the optimal age for such a change. See my story of Jeremy the Jeep Guy for the story on one of my students who made remarkable improvement as a high school student. But those are the exception rather than the rule.
Optimal age for intervention
Studies show that if a child is not reading on grade level by the time he or she leaves third grade, they are unlikely to ever read on grade level. It is not a great stretch to see that waiting until a child is in 2nd or 3rd grade to begin remediating dyslexia is skating on the edge of “too late.”
I have worked with children as young as 4 years old. There is a lot about language and how words and sounds work that a 4 year old needs to learn to be successful at reading and spelling. Non-dyslexic students naturally take in this knowledge, but a dyslexic child does not without some targeted teaching. Beginning to work with a child at an early age, kindergarten or first grade, helps in several ways.
No Backlog of Unlearned Lessons
A kindergarten aged child is not years behind his or her peers in learning, because that child is at the beginning of the reading journey! Remediation at this age is helping him keep up with what his or her classmates are learning. The learning is reinforced by what is taught in the classroom during normal school lessons. Now that tutoring has clarified what is being taught, the child is able to benefit from the classroom lessons in a way not possible before.
No Bad Habits
Dyslexic students are a very creative group. They will find work arounds that are not efficient or straightforward, but in some convoluted way do allow them to finish their work. Once these habits are formed, a they create the new challenge of teaching a child to unlearn his bad habits and replace them with new, better habits. It is clearly much easier to teach the good habit in the first place!
No Baggage of Past Failures
When a dyslexic child reaches about second grade, he looks around at his classmates, and realizes that everyone else in the room is able to understand what the letters on the page mean, and he cannot. She begins to notice that everyone else can spell the words correctly after a bit of practice and she cannot. That is the truly heartbreaking moment when that dyslexic child begins to feel badly about herself, and does not want to try as hard because it does not appear to matter.
Act Sooner Rather Than Later!
If a reading difference is suspected, don’t wait to investigate! Children as young as four can be screened for tendency toward dyslexia. Start tutoring and interventions then, and the child will not have to fall into the sad category of “too late.” Don’t be one of the heart broken parents who tell me they would give anything to have started getting help for their child sooner. You can’t have the years back.
Rounding out your child
“Well developed talents and interests lead to a well developed child.”
| I like to remind parents and students that school is not the sum total of a child’s life. Hobbies and interests from childhood often lead to career paths, and are always worth nurturing. That is particularly true if a child struggles academically. Find, recognize and develop those gifts and talents which make your child who he or she is. |
Welcome to Holland
This is one of my favorite stories to share with parents who have a child that is just being diagnosed with dyslexia. It seems to help put into perspective how their journey in child rearing will be different from parents of a nondyslexic child.
Welcome to Holland
by Emily Perl Kingsley
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared this unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel, what it’s like.
When you’re going to have a baby, its like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After many months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags, and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”
“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean, Holland?!? I signed up for Italy. I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”
But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland, and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around…and you begin to notice Holland has windmills…Holland has tulips…Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going fro Italy…and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time time they have had there. And the rest of your life you’ll say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever go away…because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.
But…if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things…about Holland.
Guest Blog – From a Parent’s Perspective
Today’s blog is written by a parent of one of my dyslexic students. She shares her heart and the struggles and triumphs her family has seen in their journey with their daughter’s dyslexia.
Overwhelmed and helpless
“A feeling of overwhelming helplessness consumed me as my wonderfully creative and talented second grade daughter continued to get more and more behind in school. Every day was a challenge. Our whole life revolved around how to get through homework and studying for tests. We would spend hours upon hours practicing and memorizing only to have to start from scratch the next day because all of it was forgotten. Hardly a day went by without my daughter crying from frustration, headaches, stomachaches, and frankly exhaustion, which would lead to occasional tant and screaming. It seemed I was constantly saying things like “just focus” and “try harder.”
Could it be dyslexia?
Dyslexia had been in the back of my mind since my daughter’s kindergarten year, but you hear so many times that school struggles are common at that age and children will usually grow out of them, so we waited to see improvement as we continued to work with her.
One day after school Bella cried all the way home because SHE, a normally very outgoing and confident child, suddenly had a very bad case of low self-esteem and was calling herself things like “dumb” and “stupid.” That, as you can imagine, absolutely broke this mother’s heart! I was determined to find the root of her learning problems and scheduled an array of testing.
The result was Dyslexia. Now we move forward.
I actually felt relief at the diagnosis because at least now we knew we could do something about it. We enrolled our daughter at the school where Mrs. Cindy is the director of the Dyslexia Intervention Center. From day one we knew it was the right place. The school staff makes learning so much fun and enjoyable and the kids feel like they are all part of a little family. The entire staff is so warm and caring and passionate about teaching our children. Mrs. Cindy, Mrs. Sally (her school tutor), and Mrs. Z (her regular classroom teacher) work with Bella each week and have made such a difference in the quality of not only Bella’s life but our entire family.
Now Bella is reading at a much higher level than before and there is actually time to stop and enjoy the small things together. The Dyslexia Center staff have even helped me learn how to make homework super fun! My little girl’s confidence is revived, and she is gaining more confidence every day. Sometimes when my daughter reads a long word out correctly, she looks up at me with astonished eyes and smiles as if she’s thinking, “Did I really do that???!!!”
Tales from the Dyslexia Center 