Novelpath has launched its first Kickstarter campaign to get our game out and into the hands of readers with dyslexia. There are over $8,000 worth of tutoring and game incentives on offer to backers. Even a $5 backer gets the opportunity to nominate a reader to participate in our testing phase (free game, plus a chance to give feedback to improve the play). Since it is the holiday season, consider backing our project as a gift to someone you know who has dyslexia, or is a parent of a child with dyslexia.
I remember when I first started to notice my younger son’s tendency to avoid reading. It was on a family car trip, where we were playing the alphabet game (you find a word that begins with a, then b, and so on; winner reaches z first). He was little, and his older siblings were naturally better at the game. As his frustration grew, I changed the rules — he just needed to find a letter somewhere in the billboard, sign, or license plate, not at the beginning. He still couldn’t do it.
But I was in denial, so I kept up low level interventions, expecting that he would soon feel the love for books that the rest of the family had. Fifteen years later, I now know that I should have been blaring the alarms and racing to intercept the protective shields he was putting in place between his ego and the written word.
What I’ve learned from my son and my students is that, to someone with dyslexia, a page of text looks like an impossibly steep cliff. Fear kicks in as soon as they seen a block of text. They’d rather do anything else than try to sort all the letters into words and sentences that make sense.
Fear causes a flight or fight response, and in someone with dyslexia, that looks like the following: “Reading is stupid!” (fight) or “I’m stupid.” (flight)
So here’s the next tip for parents: patience. Your child can climb this cliff, given the proper ropes, pitons, and (sometimes) pulleys. But it is going to take more time and encouragement than it does for the readers who pull on a pair of reading wings and fly up to the top of the cliff. A child with dyslexia isn’t going to make the climb with wings, she’s going to go up one scrabbling foot or hand hold at a time. He’s going to fall, and need encouragement to keep climbing.
It is easy to give encouragement and specific advice for physical skills like basketball, football, soccer, t-ball. But reading is a different story. Probably because we can’t see what’s happening to interfere between our child’s relationship with the words on the page (unless we’re a reading tutor using a sequential, multi-sensory instructional lesson plan). It’s easy to see that a soccer playing who is facing away from the ball is likely to need to learn to turn toward it in order to play better. But a child who isn’t focusing on vowels, syllables, and basewords isn’t as obvious to spot. “Try harder,” many parents advise with the best of intentions. But to the reader with dyslexia, who knows that staring harder and longer at the inscrutable block of text isn’t really going to help, that advice only leads to more frustration, more fear, and more flight or fight. Instead, sadly, that advice leads to a cement-hard conviction that reading is not worth the effort (the soccer player isn’t going to ever get better at the game if she doesn’t learn to turn around and actually look at the ball first, no matter how hard she tries to be a better soccer player).
A simple way for a parent to fearbust text is to read aloud (or incorporate audiobooks on car trips, or for a child’s pleasure). It seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? If a child hears a book, they aren’t learning to read. And that’s true enough. What they are learning is that books are interesting, informative, and learning to climb the cliff may just be worth the time and effort.
When reading aloud, a parent can encourage a child to take turns (parent reads very long sentences, child reads very short sentences, for example). To keep fear at bay, if child struggles with a word, parent should supply so that the reading session is not stalled in frustration.
The point of this is not to practice reading, per se, but to encourage a love and respect for the powerfully informative, entertaining and inspiring text that books contain. After all, when the cliff is very high, the motivation to get there needs to be just as high.
How do you encourage your reader to love books?
