Decoding Dyslexia Arizona
Connect with us!
  • Home
  • A national movement
  • Our beginnings
  • Our goals
  • Contact Us
  • Blog
  • Private evaluators
  • Resources

Why my daughter hated Dr. Seuss (and I'm grateful)

2/28/2015

7 Comments

 
Picture
On March 2, 2015, parents, children, educators, and schools around the country will be celebrating the tremendous contributions of Dr. Seuss as they participate in events related to "Read Across America Day."  I'll be celebrating, too.  I love Dr. Seuss, and I love to read.  My daughter? Not so much.

Her big brother was an early and prolific reader who lovingly passed down his collection of Dr. Seuss books once he got too cool for them.  But when she was in preschool, she didn't seem to like the books very much.   As a matter of fact, this is a little hard to admit, but she hated them. She'd take her little hands and try to turn the pages before I could finish reading them so we could just be done, and sometimes she'd just bat the whole book out of my hands altogether and insist we do something else.  "One fish, two fish, red fish blue ---" and we were finished.


But I loved the books, dang it!  Plus we owned almost every single one, and they made me happy, because I remembered reading them when I was little myself, and I had such fond memories of reading them to my son.  So I wasn't going to give up.  I tried to make it fun.  "Hop on...Hey, what rhymes with 'hop'?" I'd ask her.   She'd look at me like I was from Mars.  "Um...Jump?"  No, I'd correct her.  RHYMES.  Not "what's the same thing as hop," but what word SOUNDS like "hop"? Sounds like...You know what I mean? Like, take "HOP," but say it without the "H" sound... put another letter there, like "M".  Get it?  As I began to get exasperated, she looked at me with hurt in her eyes, like she wanted to cry.

That's when I began to realize something wasn't right.  Because it wasn't just the rhyming thing.  She also could not sing the ABC song.  My other kid could do that before he was 3, and she was going on 5.   The clincher was when I noticed she couldn't remember the name of the letter "M," the first letter in her name, which she'd been practicing writing every day in preschool for almost 2 years. This is a kid who, up until this point, regularly did things that prompted several friends and family members to whisper, "Wow, she's really smart."  It was terribly confusing.  So I did what I usually do when I become anxious:  I turned to Google.  "Trouble rhyming," I typed.

The first thing that came up was the website for the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. There was a section about the warning signs for dyslexia in preschoolers.  It said that trouble learning common nursery rhymes, such as “Jack and Jill,” and difficulty recognizing rhyming patterns like "cat, bat, rat," are big red flags.  My heart dropped into my chest, and the next day I decided to raise the issue with her preschool teacher who confessed that she'd started to become concerned as well.  And that's how it all began.  A private evaluation revealed that "M" had dyslexia, and we set down the path of finding the specific type of reading instruction she needed.
 
So I would like to say "thank you" to Dr. Seuss.  Thank you for those wonderful books that turned my son and me into first-time readers.  But most of all, thank you for all the wonderful rhymes that were completely lost on my daughter.  Because of them, she's a reader now.


7 Comments

A Dad's Perspective

2/14/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture
This post comes courtesy of Paul Godwin, one of the administrators for the Facebook group Homeschooling Dyslexic Kids, where the piece was originally posted.

I have been contemplating writing a post for the Dads for quite some time. This will be a long post, but please take the time to read it. I wanted to give my perspective as a Dad who probably did everything wrong before we found out our child was dyslexic. Academics came very easily to me. I did not have a lot of patience with my son when it came to his struggles. I did not understand what the problem was and I thought it was just a lack of effort on his part. As men we are taught that, although not everything may come easily, if you just work hard enough you can accomplish a set goal. I could not fathom why it took my son so long to accomplish basic tasks such as reading a single word on a flash card. I had ZERO patience. Once he finally started getting the flashcards down, we moved on to sentences with the words from the flash cards. This was a disaster. He could not read anything. I was livid. I would berate him for what I deemed was a lack of effort. I did not get my “Compassionate and Understanding Dad” merit badge. There were other things that drove me crazy. He had great difficulty in doing things that I thought should have come easily. Tying shoes, riding a bike, and other fine motor skill functions did not come naturally. I remember becoming so frustrated when trying to teach him how to ride his bike that i picked up the bike and threw it into an empty lot in our neighborhood.

My son had originally been diagnosed PDD-NOS, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified. At that point this was considered part of the autism spectrum which basically meant “we know there is something wrong but we are not quite sure what”. My son did not fit into the a typical autistic category, but there were definitely some issues. My wife started doing some research about his behavior. The more she read, the more she became convinced he was dyslexic. Once we had him tested we found that he had moderate to severe dyslexia. I still did not fully grasp all that this entailed. I obviously felt like a complete and utter jerk for how I treated my son concerning reading and his academics. I still look back and think how much differently I should have done things. That being said, I did not buy into how dyslexia could affect the other areas of his life. What did a reading disorder have to do with tying your shoes?

The reality is that dyslexia affects almost every aspect of a child’s life. Motor skills, memorization, math, remembering sequential steps(both in academics and in daily tasks), and organization skills are all impacted by dyslexia.

As men, we are wired to fix things, no matter what it may be. My best advice to you dads is that you can’t fix your child because your child is not broken. They are different. They think different, act different, and react different, but they are definitely not broken. Don’t try to fix them, try to understand them. Be patient. Do research, this is not just your wife’s job. The better you understand why they are the way the are, the better you can help.


1 Comment

Arizona Senator Kelli Ward, Education Committee Chair, Introduces Bill to Help Struggling Readers/Students with Dyslexia in Public Schools and to Ensure Fiscal Accountability

2/3/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture

We are so excited to announce that on February 2, 2015, Senator Kelli Ward, Chair of the Arizona Senate Education Committee, introduced a bill, SB 1461, to help struggling readers and students with dyslexia in public schools throughout Arizona.  

We hope you can join us at the Capitol when the Senate Education Committee prepares to consider the bill.  As soon as we know the date and time, we'll send out a Campaign Action Alert.  It's extremely important that we show up in numbers to show everyone that this is a bill that people truly will support.   

Register Your Support

When you come to the Capitol, you can officially register your support for the bill by entering your name and other information into a special database at a kiosk in the lobby.  If you cannot make it to the Capitol, but you would like to register your support for the bill, please send us an email and we'll do it for you when we're there.  All we need is your name and email address.  Please send it to:  contact@decodingdyslexia-az.com.

Other ways to TAKE ACTION

Please check out our "Take Action" page to learn about the other ways you can help ensure passage of this important bill.


We hope to see you soon!




1 Comment

    Author

    Jenifer Kasten
    Parent of child with dyslexia
    DDAZ Leader of Advocacy and Public Policy

    DISCLAIMER:
    This Web site and blog are for informational purposes only and do not contain legal advice. Readers should not act upon this information without seeking professional legal advice. 

    Decoding Dyslexia Arizona is committed to protecting the privacy and confidentiality of all our visitors. We do not collect any information from visitors to our Web site or blog. Visitors are invited to submit comments or questions to us via the Contact Page, and we use the information that is provided to us only to respond to the request and to send the visitor information.

    This site may contain hyperlinks to Web sites operated by parties independent from Decoding Dyslexia Arizona. Such hyperlinks are provided for your reference only. Decoding Dyslexia Arizona does not control such Web sites, and is not responsible for their content. Decoding Dyslexia Arizona's inclusion of hyperlinks to such Web sites does not imply any endorsement of the material on such Web sites or any association with their content. Your access and use of such sites, including information, material, products, and services therein, shall be solely at your own risk. Further, because the privacy policy of this Site is applicable only when you are on this Site or blog, once linked to another Web site, you should read that site's privacy policy before disclosing any personal information.

    Categories

    All
    Decoding Dyslexia
    Dyslexia
    PEN Phoenix
    Raising Special Kids
    SLD
    Specific Learning Disability

    Archives

    July 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    September 2015
    July 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    September 2014

    RSS Feed

    SIgn up for email updates
    For Email Marketing you can trust.
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.