Dyslexia 101

It’s amazing how many times a week I get to talk with people about Dyslexia. I didn’t think much about my reading difficulties when I was growing up. I was classified as a “slow reader” and I became resourceful when I had to work through projects quickly. It wasn’t until all 3 of my kids were diagnosed with dyslexia that I put it altogether. I’ve found that I am not alone. So many parents I talk with either struggled with reading or had a family member that had reading difficulties. Since intelligence often accompanies dyslexia us “slow readers” figured out other ways to get by in school. Now, I understand many of us do NOT like labels but here’s why I think dyslexia is more than a label:

Thanks to scientist we now have brain imagining that shows how a dyslexic brain works. What you will see in these colorful brain images is that a dyslexic brain moves information all over itself to come up with an answer, while a non-dyslexic brain will go directly to the stored answer and retrieve it quickly. With this in mind, you can understand why it takes longer for the dyslexic brain to decipher letters, words, and phrases.

Here’s one way to explain it, it’s like going through every layer of spaghetti junction to get to an answer instead of going directly from point “a” to point “b”.

What’s so intriguing about this is, is that the dyslexic brain picks up textures, sounds, memories, colors, and even feelings as it travels towards an answer. It then packages them all together in a huge bundle. This bundle of an answer is a symphony of information. This maybe why William Butler Yeats was an amazing poet. This also maybe why Einstein came up with ideas that no one else was even able to conceive. The dyslexic brain is dynamic.

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But you can also imagine why dyslexia is incredibly frustrating! Route memorization is a dyslexics nightmare, we’d rather scrub toilets than be forced to memorize long passages of boring information.

Information is not stored in neat little filing cabinets in our brains, it’s scattered around beautiful fields, buried under interesting rocks, and floating on babbling brooks.

Teaching a dyslexic child to read takes a long time and requires specific interventions. Sometimes these resourceful kids can fake-it and learn to get by, that is why a reading assessment is so important. If you take a little time when your child is young, to learn what educational areas are tripping them up, it will save you a world of hurt in middle school and high school. We all know memorization is not the same as experiential learning (learning through doing) and the dyslexic needs to store letters, sounds, and phrases in a deeply meaningful way in order to pull them back up and read fluently.

So the motto at our home is “go slow now, so you can go fast later” I want to avoid “fake-it until you make it” because that is what every non-diagnosed dyslexic is forced to do. I’ve seen it time after time, these non-diagnosed kids finally hit a wall in 5th grade, context clues no longer work and they simply cannot read the materials without proper interventions. Faking-it has emotional and physical implications as well. Part of growing up is trusting your body, advocating for your REAL needs, and building relationships with trustworthy people. If we encourage our children to hide their real needs and struggles we are doing them a grave disservice.

It’s critical to develop a learning plan that fits your child and your family. Life is a beautiful journey but road maps are incredibly helpful at times.

To learn more about the Dyslexia Tool Box click here.

If you have questions about dyslexia and what to understand more, contact me.

Other great resources to check out include Understood.org and The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity.

Often children with Dyslexia also have ADD/ADHD.

Here’s some helpful tips on ADD/ADHD.