October is Dyslexia Awareness Month, and I would like to thank my daughter for allowing me to write about her dyslexia in order to help others.
According to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, dyslexia is “an unexpected difficulty in learning to read. Dyslexia takes away an individual’s ability to read quickly and automatically, and to retrieve spoken words easily, but it does not dampen their creativity and ingenuity.”
As a mom from Snohomish County, here’s how I’d describe it: Dyslexia requires a systematic, multisensory approach to upload phonemes, the building blocks of language, into the brain.
I used to be an elementary school teacher, and I’ve taught a lot of children how to read. With most kids, you show them a word seven or eight times, and they’ve got it. But for a child with dyslexia, that trick doesn’t work. Nor does having them sound out a word on page one of a book, and hoping they’ll remember it on page two. The dyslexic child might sound out the same word over and over again, and still not recognize it on sight by the end of the book.
What does help are programs like Slingerland, Wired for Reading, Lindamood-Bell and curriculums based on the Orton-Gillingham approach.
None of these proven interventions have been offered to my daughter in her public school, so my family pays more than $4,000 a year for private tutoring. Some families in Snohomish County pay more than $20,000 to send their children to the Hamlin Robinson School in Seattle, which specializes in dyslexia.
For many kids, dyslexia is only part of it. My daughter also has dysgraphia (writing) and dyscalculia (math). It’s the dyscalculia that’s causing hardship at the moment. She’s in fourth grade, and memorizing math facts is required. All the children who can pass the timed tests get to go to a fondue party in December, and my daughter really wants to go.
The thing is, with most kids, you can drill and kill them with flashcards and the facts stick — but this doesn’t work with dyscalculia. We’ve tried songs, blocks, arrays, computer programs and the abacus — anything that will help the facts sink in, and she’s still behind her peers, even though she’s working twice as hard.
One thing that is helping is a book called “Times Tables the Fun Way” by Judy Liautaud. It has a story and picture for each fact. For example, 6 X 6 = 36 is about twin sixes who go on a long journey through the desert and become “thirsty sixes.” It’s a systematic, multisensory approach to learning math facts.
When I earned my teaching certificate 20 years ago, my professors didn’t teach me anything about dyslexia. Now that I’m the mother of a child with dyslexia, I’m learning fast. There are many ways to upload information into a child’s brain, and we owe it to all children — no matter their ability level — to find ways to make learning stick.
Jennifer Bardsley publishes books under her own name and the pseudonym Louise Cypress. Find her online on Instagram @the_ya_gal, on Twitter @jennbardsley or on Facebook as The YA Gal.
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