Begin Here. Hello!
I want to start by giving you six tips to unlock your child’s genius. The first secret I’m going to start with is giftedness. God has given each and every one of us unique gifts. But the dyslexic child has hidden gifts. They’re either unidentified or hidden as a result of low self-esteem. Dyslexic kids are born to stand out. They shouldn’t be forced to fit in. So no matter what the percent of jobs require literacy skills, we need to teach our kids to read so that we can build their self- esteem and help them graduate from highschool, because it’s life, not only jobs that require critical thinking, oral skills, and comprehension.
I remember a coworker who didn’t understand “this is due tomorrow” is different from “do tomorrow”. It got her in a lot of trouble. And I remember when I taught middle school, kids were getting confused in the same way. What really baffled me was when dyslexic kids wouldn’t turn their work in. Thankfully, there is collaboration between parents and teachers who could check on the student’s progress, “Why did a B drop to an F? Why did a C drop to a D?” Because the kids forgot to turn their work in, and I would have peers stick up for them and say, “I saw them do their work!” So they look in the backpack and they find the papers all crumpled in the bottom of the backpack. The assignment was done, but the student didn’t turn it in. And a couple of times, the student would hide their work in the cupboards and the mother would open up the cupboards and the papers would fall out. And the student didn’t give any explanation and the parent wouldn’t understand why their child didn’t want to turn in their homework.
I want to let you know that dyslexia is neurological in origin, so the brain can be retrained. It’s not so much a learning disability as a learning difference. It is recognized by the student’s inability to read, write, and often speak correctly. A dyslexic child won’t volunteer to raise his hand and when he is called upon to speak. That dyslexic child often experiences anxiety and wants to leave the room and go to the bathroom. I’ve had a child tell me this. When the teacher helps them read in front of the other students, they feel humiliated. That’s why these kids need one-on-one intervention and they need a multi-sensory reading program that is going to use all of their senses. Anton is a fourth-grader we tutor and now he raises his hand to read and his mom says he is not anxious when he is called on. And Anton enjoys reading books.
Another telltale sign of dyslexia is that the kids will glance and guess at the words because they haven’t been taught to sound them out. So, while they will get the first part of the word correct, they won’t get the second part of the word correctly and it really messes up comprehension and you can understand why. They’ll often memorize words which means they are not going to be able to sound out unfamiliar words, or as we call them, “nonsense words”. When kids are memorizing words, instead of going to the language center on the left side, it’s going to the right sight of the brain as a picture. That made a lot of sense to me when I started learning. When they would look at a word like a picture, it’s going to that creative side of the brain, the right side. I see this in middle school and high school where I’ll assess kids for dyslexia, and they’ll be able to write words that they have memorized but their comprehension is so low because their brains aren’t cooperating with comprehension
I know a genius man who was put in the very lowest reading group when he was in third grade. He was in the low reading group and he went to the lower reading group and then he was moved to the even lower reading group. His self-esteem took such a beating until someone had the bright idea to give him a test. He shot up to the top of the list in this other class which was the gifted class. Someone decided to give him that special test, someone who cared. This is one of the steps of unlocking the giftedness, or the genius, of the dyslexic child.