Category Archives: Dyslexia

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Decoding Dyslexia – Decoding the Mind

When most people consider dyslexia, they think it is just about struggling to read. What is often missed is that there is also a speech processing component involved.

If parents and teachers are aware of initial warning signs of dyslexia, early intervention with research-based remediation can be used to help these children.

It is easy for observers to label children who confuse letters like b and d as dyslexic while missing those who struggle to link letters with sounds.

When I worked in a public school district as a speech-language pathologist, many teachers complained that some of their students were unable to recognize, much less manipulate, the sounds in words – a process (phonological decoding) that is unconscious and automatic, but still an integral part of reading.

Knowing that I advocated for screening and helping dyslexic students, they were quick to tell me about the students who confused letters, not realizing that letter reversals are common to all students up to grade one, but although perplexed and frustrated with the students who were unable to hear and process sounds, they never linked their difficulty with dyslexia.

Whereas speaking is a natural outgrowth of listening and associating with speaking adults and older children, reading must be taught. However, it requires some prerequisite skills. The child must somehow recognize that spoken words are made up of sounds, or else the work that letters do becomes mysterious.

The reading brain network uses mechanisms from the speech and language brain network. Because of that, atypical speech in young children is a red flag for atypical reading and also dyslexia.

So, parents, when you read Dr. Seuss’s books and nursery rhymes to your children and they have trouble with the rhymes and wordplay, take that as warning signs and have your child screened for dyslexia. You can read more about the connectedness in the phenomenal human brain here.

Did you know that children who demonstrate difficulty with speech, like mispronouncing long words, or transposing phrases, words, and syllables when speaking could be dyslexic?

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3 Weaknesses of Dyslexics and How to Compensate for Them

Have you ever experienced frustrating moments while helping your dyslexic child with homework and wished there was a quick fix?

When my daughter was in kindergarten, her teacher would send home vocabulary and spelling words to learn. We would spend hours going through those cards until she appeared to know the words. To my horror, when she brought home the results of her end-of-week quizzes, most of those words were incorrectly spelled on her paper.

As the school year progressed, my exasperation mounted. KC would verbally spell the words correctly to me at home but write them inaccurately at school. Looking back, with the knowledge I have today, I should have asked her teacher to give her oral spelling tests.

Here are 3 weaknesses I identified in my daughter, and what I did about them.

  1. Reading – She confused words that were visually similar e.g. saw and was, most likely because she had difficulty telling left from right, and in the English language reading always goes from left to right.
    • First, we talked about the meaning of the words then used pictures to activate the visual word form area in her brain.
    • So, we looked at the picture of a saw and talk about it.
    • Since there is no picture for was, she would use modeling clay to spell the word, then create a clay sculpture to represent the definition. That way, she produced her own image, which I directed her to take a picture of with her mind’s eye.
  2. Spelling – She seemed to memorize words based on their shapes. KC was unable to hear individual alphabet sounds, then match them to the letters and combinations of letters in words.
    • I found or generated creative ways of spelling words that incorporated the meaning of the word. Jennifer’s video here helped me, as she demonstrated this visual conceptual method.
    • For multi-syllabic words, I told little stories, for example, I told her that separate has a rat in it. She never spelled it wrong after that.
    • When I discovered music listening therapy, I enrolled her, to wake up the auditory pathways in her brain.
  3. Time-keeping – KC seemed to frequently get stuck in the moment, generating one idea after another and a series of What-ifs? Needless to say, time ran away leaving her way behind in her chores or whatever activities she was supposed to engage in during a particular period of time.
    • After talking about the importance of timeliness, we sat down and agreed on a solution to her tendency.
    • We placed a check-off list for chores on the refrigerator with completion times included.
    • I taught her a 3-step strategy:
      • Write her desired goal on paper. (Meaning and intention were the objectives here, not spelling)
      • Generate an action plan
      • Make a schedule that included all the steps of her plan, and follow it.
    • She still creates and uses schedules, today.

Thinking back to the quick fix I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I’ll tell you this – quick fixes serve a purpose, but they don’t bring lasting solutions. Addressing the problem head-on and brainstorming with your child, will bring workable results.

What has been your most frustrating moments while helping your dyslexic child with homework?

Or, what stories have your friends told you about their children’s academic challenges in elementary school?

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5 Strengths of Dyslexics and How You Can Effectively Use Them

In my letter to my second-grade dyslexic daughter, I highlighted ways she excelled, in an effort to offset her teacher’s list of her weaknesses. She is not the only one with gifts that, if built on, can propel the dyslexic to success in life.  

Did you know that 35% of entrepreneurs, 25% of CEOs, and over 50% of NASA employees are dyslexic? This is not by accident.

Here is a shortlist of 5 advantages someone identified with dyslexia has over the person who is not. These strengths combine to make them extraordinary in their chosen field of work.

  1. Strategic Thinking
    • They think outside the box and can look past the details to the big picture.
    • They are innovative and original in their thinking.
    • They offer unorthodox, fresh ideas that result in solving problems.
  2. Analytic and Intuitive
    • They are able to understand the deep meanings of stories that are read or told to them.
    • They are able to read between the lines.
    • They are able to take apart complex ideas or concepts and simplify them, thus strengthening their problem-solving ability.
  3. Creativity
    • Their keen sense of curiosity and strong interest in life feed their very active imagination.
    • They use their imagination to create an extraordinary view of the world, which often results in them →
    • Birthing lucrative ideas.
  4. Exceptional Spatial Processing and Knowledge
    • Their outstanding picture-thinking ability allows them to move around and fit things perfectly into spaces.
    • They are able to process 3D objects in their mind, making them good in areas like graphic design, architecture, and photography.
    • They have excellent visual memory for details in print and the environment.
  5. Increased Level of Empathy
    • Their ability to perceive the feelings of others, coupled with a genuine desire to alleviate pain and suffering gives them a deep level of understanding of another person’s plight.
    • Perhaps this heightened degree of empathy is an outgrowth of their experience as one who thinks and learns differently.

Children with dyslexia tend to be consumed with what they cannot do and totally miss the areas in which they outshine their reading peers. If you have or know a parent with a dyslexic child, make it your duty to build their self-esteem by consistently emphasizing the areas where they excel. Show them that you believe in them.

In your association with dyslexic children and adults, what exceptional skills have you noticed?

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5 Myths About Dyslexia and Reasons to Discard Them

If you’ve ever asked a dyslexic child what’s the most common thing he has been called; what is the most frequent scolding received, he’d probably tell you, “Lazy – you need to work harder.”

Like any other thing that is not understood, there are some commonly held myths about dyslexia, many of which are untrue. The people who believe these myths range from store clerks to school principals.

Let’s look at 5 common myths:

1. Parents are told, “Your child can be fixed.” Inherent in this statement is the belief that dyslexia is a medical condition that can be cured. We even find some dyslexics who believe this myth, say, “I used to be dyslexic.” There is nothing to be fixed and once a dyslexic… always a dyslexic.

Although with time, for some dyslexics, their reading ability, as well as some of their other challenges improve, their way of thinking will always be characteristically different from their non-dyslexic peers, giving them an advantage in reasoning, problem-solving, comprehension, concept formation, critical thinking, general knowledge, and vocabulary.

2. If one is dyslexic, he should hide it from others. There are so many children who go through their school life feeling ashamed that they are not like the others. As a consequence, they seek to find unusual, and sometimes dangerous, ways of drawing attention away from their weaknesses to something they believe others see as a strength.

Instead of bending over backward to keep your child’s dyslexia a secret, it would serve you and him better to tell people about his challenges and enlist a crowd of supporters, at the same time, help him find ways to build and rely on his strengths.

3. Dyslexic children are lazy, retarded, or stupid. In spite of the legal change in educational terminology from “mental retardation” to “intellectual disabilities,” most teachers associate the dyslexic’s reading difficulties with retardation of his mental faculties. Their comments and labels of the child filter down to the normal students, who wait for their time on the playground to call their classmate stupid or a retard.

I once worked with a teacher who thought and let all the staff members know, that it was unfair to the normal students to let the slow children have more time to complete their assignments or give any other accommodation, for that matter. They needed to stop being lazy and work up to their potential.

Instead of adopting the teachers’ perspectives, seek to have the appropriate accommodations and supports provided in school, so your child can have the motivation and energy to participate like the other children. Often times, the child who is dyslexic works two to three times harder just to keep up with his peers.

4. Using non-text ways of learning is a crutch. Many times, teachers and some parents believe that if a child uses a different method of acquiring the needed information, it will interfere with his learning to read and, over time, become a crutch.  

When you think of it, there are three ways of accessing information:

  • Eye reading (text-based)
  • Ear reading (audiobooks)
  • Finger reading (braille)

Being dyslexic is not a flaw, in the same way being blind is not considered one. Similarly, receiving accommodations to support his strengths and help him build on them is not a crutch.

5. It is best for the child that he not know he’s dyslexic. Regularly, parents and teachers decide not to tell the child he’s dyslexic. When he eventually finds out, he assumes it is something to be ashamed of or embarrassed about and concludes that he is stupid.

For many children, finding out that they are dyslexic will be relieving. Like Steven Spielberg, it will be, “the missing puzzle piece.” Knowing that their struggle is not restricted to them and there’s actually a name for it, makes them happy.

When left unchecked, not only will these myths be false, but sometimes they could be harmful to the child. Full disclosure of your child’s dyslexia opens the door to learning and success.

What myths have you heard or held about dyslexia?

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Perspective: Teacher vs Dyslexic Student

Do you know anyone who is the parent of a dyslexic child? If you do, you’ve probably heard about the tears and heartache they have to deal with at home. Every. Day.

Little Suzie comes home, dejected, discouraged, and disheartened, with yet another heart-break story. At the end of which the tears flow, with outbursts of, “I don’t want to go back to school,’ punctuating the sobs.

Unless you have witnessed a scene like this, you won’t understand the palpable fear and abject horror that engulfs some of the most brilliant children, because their teacher didn’t see things the way they did, and ridiculed their answers in class.

As I write this, a TikTok video comes to mind. Perhaps you saw it too. And maybe, it was created for humor, but it immediately brought the plight of our dyslexic children to the top of my mind.

A father was working through a mathematics problem with his daughter. He starts by saying, “I’m explaining to you. Why are you not understanding?”

Then he proceeds to state the math problem, “I have 5 apples. I take away 2. How many apples do I have left?”

The little girl repeats while counting on her fingers, “So you have 5 apples. You take away 2. So you have 2 apples.”

Raising his voice, he repeats, with his hands in the air and fingers spread out, “I take away 2. Five… I take away 2 (curling down the thumb and index fingers). Count my fingers.”

Crying, the girl says, “I don’t know, then. You say you took 2 apples, so you have 2 apples, Papa.”

In exasperation, the father raises his arm and exclaims, “Where are you finding these numbers? Five…I take 2. What’s left?” Then rubs his forehead.

He proceeds to count out 5 apples (3 red and 2 green) while placing them on the table. One, two, three, four, five apples. Grabbing one green apple with each hand, he says, “I take 2 apples. How many do I have?”

“You took 2, so you have 2 apples, Papa.” The tears are flowing now.

Thus the scene ends with the father frustrated and upset, and the child crushed and crying.

Although this may seem humorous to some, it is a lived experience for many dyslexic children. Non-dyslexic parents, ignorantly, explain concepts to their children over and overusing the same words and illustrations, not understanding that the abstract language they are using is causing confusion and disorientation in the child’s mind. The more confused and disoriented the child becomes, the less likely she is to process and comprehend what you’re trying to teach her.

When teachers are unaware of possible differences in perspective from that of their students, and hammer away to get their point through, they may instead birth a hatred for school.

After all is said and done, the main goal of teaching must be to instill a love of learning, rather than to require that concepts be grasped in exactly the same way as the teacher.

Has your child suffered, similarly, in school?

Did you have any unpleasant learning experiences as a child?

To view the TikTok video, click here: https://bit.ly/33yGEtN

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Perspective: A Letter to My Dyslexic Daughter

Looking back…

My dearest K,

You have come to the end of the second grade, and today, we were both surprised that your teacher wants to retain you.

She said:

  • Your handwriting is poor.
  • Your spelling is terrible and you cannot sound out words.
  • You can’t read simple “sight” words and come up with distractions to get away from reading when your turn comes around.
  • You don’t know your times tables.

I say:

  • You see things in a different way from your classmates and that helps you use your imagination in special ways to figure out problems.
  • You find patterns quickly and can arrange things so they fit into any space.
  • You tell stories in such a creative way, using simple things around that, both children and adults are amazed.
  • You won the science fair because you were the only child who could explain your project in detail.

It’s almost time to go back to school. After working with Ms. Lynn this summer, we now know why you have been having trouble with some things at school.

I want you to know that you are not stupid.

You are dyslexic.

Dyslexia is not a disease.

It is not a curse.

It is your superpower.

I will help you be the best that you can be.

Oh the places you will go because of your dyslexic brain!

Love,

Mom

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Dyslexic: The One in Five

When a baby is about two months old, visual coordination begins to take place and her eyes are able to follow an object or person as they move, but they do not work together very well. By the time she turns three months, however, your baby’s eyes synchronize well enough to focus and track objects.  

Around this same time, not only will your baby smile when you appear in her line of vision, but she will also begin to make cooing then gurgling and babbling noises that graduate to imitating the sounds she hears when you speak.

Although every child develops at his or her own pace, most children will be saying about 10 words by the time they are 18 months old.

How did this marvelous thing happen? By imitation.

Children are keen listeners. Like sponges, they suck up the sounds around them, and without structured teaching, by 24 months, most of them understand simple commands and questions, as well as speak good enough to be understood.

Listening and speaking are innate.

Reading and writing are not.

Although reading is “speak on paper”, to become good readers, children must figure out that the sounds in the words they say are represented by different letters and combinations of letters.

According to Nancy Young’s Ladder of Reading, only 5 percent of children learn to read seemingly effortlessly. The others require varying levels of a structured literacy approach.

At the extreme end of this continuum are the “one in five”…the children with dyslexia.

Did you know that the most common learning disability is displayed by dyslexic children?

Most people consider dyslexia to be a learning disability. However, from my experience with my daughter and other dyslexic children, I’d say it is not.

I like how Ben Foss, a prominent dyslexic entrepreneur, and activist, describes it. An identity. A genetic, brain-based characteristic that results in difficulties in some areas, like reading, writing, and spelling, and strengths in other areas, such as visual, spatial, or kinesthetic skills.

Have you ever considered that whenever you are in a crowd, there’s at least one dyslexic person present?

Do you know anyone who is dyslexic?

What are their unique strengths?

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From Struggling Student to Business Magnate – A Dyslexia Success Story

Today we know him as one of the “Sharks” on the ABC hit television show, “Shark Tank.” Life wasn’t always so rosy for Daymond John, but an insightful mother made a huge difference.

Although he excelled in mathematics and science, he struggled with selling and anything requiring extensive reading and writing. When his parents took him to a professional for evaluation, they were told he had a behavioral issue. Fortunately, his mother did not believe that to be true.

He admitted that his father would often angrily yell at him to stop slacking. Getting tired of the struggle, Daymond signed up for the co-op program at his high school. This program allowed him to work full-time for one week in a business field and attend school full-time the next. He knew that he couldn’t rely on his report card, so he focused on showcasing his strengths in the co-op program.

Today, he’s on a mission to bring awareness to people that there’s nothing to be ashamed of if you are dyslexic. Listen to him and his mother discuss dyslexia as a strength.

He always thought he was a genius, and his drive and determination to channel his insights into entrepreneurial, marketing and branding success, have led him to become an in-demand motivational speaker, and the Ernst & Young’s New York Entrepreneur of the Year as well as Crain’s Business of New York Under Forty Award.

In this video as he continues chatting with his mom, he discusses the beginnings of his business venture.

If you take the time to chat with them, most dyslexics will tell you about their strengths, be it entrepreneurial, artsy, or athletic. They know where their strengths lie.

What entrepreneurial interests have you seen in your child?

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Dyslexia Awareness Month

October is Dyslexia Awareness Month. Unlike what some people think, dyslexia is not a disease, therefore, it cannot be cured. The brains of dyslexic people function differently from non-dyslexics, and that difference becomes most noticeable during the years of schooling. About twenty percent of the population is estimated to be dyslexic.

This month is a time to increase knowledge and understanding about the one in five among us.

  • Time to acknowledge and affirm those brilliant boys and girls, men and women who excel in big-picture thinking, problem-solving, creativity, and resilience, yet struggle to read, spell and write, among other difficulties.
  • Time to admit that, if we believe everyone is unique, then every brain has to be different, and by extension, cookie-cutter methods of instruction are ineffective ways of teaching. After all, fish don’t climb trees.

Today, also, marks the beginning of the final quarter of the year. This is a good time for reflection on what has worked in the previous quarters, what needs tweaking, and what needs to be discarded.

If you have a child who has been identified as dyslexic, the last three quarters were, most likely, challenging. Having to be your child’s teacher in the virtual, at-home classroom forced upon us by the pandemic, didn’t make things better.

As the mother of a dyslexic daughter, I know the frustration, overwhelm, and helplessness that engulfs parents when there seems to be nothing you can do to ease your child’s struggle as he pushes through the mountain of school assignments and strives to meet expectations.

Anxious brains don’t learn. So, your first step in helping your child navigate this unusual phase of his life is to alleviate his anxiety. Set aside some time when you can forget about academic work and focus on your child’s special gifts that can turn his challenge into a blessing.

Let him know that some of the world’s greatest thinkers, entrepreneurs, and celebrities were or are dyslexic. Here’s a video to get you started. After watching it, help him create his own dyslexic success story.

Remember to take time for your personal reflection. What are some things you have done in the past three quarters that are working for you?