What Reading Speed Has to Do With Leadership: Nothing
Many leaders succeed because of their dyslexia, not in spite of it. President Trump stirred up a hornet’s nest when he suggested that Governor...
Storytelling as a Dyslexic Strength
Storytelling is not simply a language skill. It is a form of reasoning. Recognizing these strengths helps shift how we think about writing instruction and creative expression.
Rethinking Auditory-Only Phonemic Awareness Training for Reading in the Early Grades Does Not Work
A new study reported on in Education Week found that a widely-used phonemic awareness program (the oral-only Heggerty curriculum) did not improve gains in word reading or oral reading fluency, although it did significantly improve phonemic awareness skills.
Free Back To School Reading Apps
Some of the most common free apps that dyslexic students use for school.
Beyond Behavior: Attention, Working Memory, or Something Else?
The problem with trying to diagnose with behavioral checklists is that behavior can result from many different sources. If you have a 3rd grader...
Math Difficulties Common with Dyslexia
Although the pace of research into dyslexia beyond reading proceeds very slowly, there is some welcome recent research into some of the...
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HOW THEY DO IT! University Students with Dyslexia [Premium]
Fortunately, there’s been growing interest from educational and scientific researchers for understanding how people can compensate for some of the academic challenges of dyslexia. POSITIVE FACTORS AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS WITH DYSLEXIA A recent study by Drs. Rebecca Wiseheart and Lori Altmann (Int J Lang Comm Dis 2017) had a nice review of compensating factors as well as providing some new research data about oral fluency among college-attending dyslexic students. Background “In recent years, dyslexia has been reconceptualized as the combined sum of risk factors and protective factors. A number of protective factors have been investigated including verbal intelligence, vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, executive functions, and social-emotional resilience…Vocabulary knowledge has been implicated as a protective factor that allows some individuals to achieve good reading comprehension, despite […]
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Non-Linear: The Path to Life Success [PREMIUM]
From our experience, nonlinear development is more often a rule than an exception when it comes to dyslexic kids growing up. As a result, parents, teachers, tutors, and guidance counselors should avoid making predictions about ‘tracks’ that students should be on (or potential) because it’s likely that they’ll be wrong. In Margaret Rawson’s remarkable Dyslexia Over the Lifespan, a Fifty-Five Year Longitudinal Study (alas, the book is now out-of-print and quite expensive), beloved educator Margaret Rawson described the outcome of the children under her tutelage at the Rose Valley School. Margaret had the distinction of living to 102 years old and she kept in touch with many of her students for decades after graduating. In Margaret Rawson’s remarkable Dyslexia Over the Lifespan, a Fifty-Five Year […]
Ways to Keep Math Alive
1. CARD GAMES With a little twist, card games like War and Go Fish can be used to help kids hold onto math facts and math manipulations over the summer. If War (higher card win) is too simple, then Subtraction War (figuring out the difference between two cards) might...
DYSLEXIA AT WORK: New Skills
Q: I’m working full-time and also am a mom. My employer recently told me that I need to learn new skills to earn a higher salary. My reading and writing aren’t the best. A: Sounds like you’re carrying a full load! Without knowing the details of your occupation, a good general resources for the work place is https://askjan.org or the Job Accommodation Network. Their phone number is 1-800-526-7234. Title I of the ADA or Americans for Disabilities Act states that employers with 15 or more employees should consider providing reasonable accommodations for individuals who meet the criteria of having a disability. Here is a link to Ask Jan’s page of job coaches and accommodations. Job coaches can sometimes be paid for by the state’s […]
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MATH: What Errors are Due to Dyslexia? [Premium]
Since Henry Winkler sat for a Geometry exam 8 TIMES before passing, one would hope that more progress has been made in understanding and anticipating what math difficulties arise with math problem solving, but few teachers (and perhaps fewer students!) receive explicit instruction in this area. Some of the math difficulties are due to language, but others are due to calculation errors, reversals, sequence, and direction, place value, as well as errors of verbal labeling and working memory which impact regrouping or carrying numbers. Miles and Miles have pointed out the confusion that results when dyslexic students are introduced to algebra. Math language is different from standard or conversational language. Ambiguous terms and symbols are best taught explicitly. For instance, Miles and Miles recommend explicitly […]
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Motivation: The Batman Effect [Premium]
Researchers recently found that young children were more likely to persevere with tedious jobs that they were given to do if they pretended that they were Batman while doing it. There may be something to it. The researchers were studying self-regulation and perseverance in 180 kids ages 4 to 6 years old. The researchers compared 3 test situations: 1. First-person (“Am I working hard?”), 2. Third-person (“Is Billy working hard?”), and 3. Fictional Person (“Is Batman working hard?”). The effects were quite significant. This motivational effect was named after Batman because out of all the characters that were suggested to the children (Bob the Builder, Dora the Explorer, Rapunzel from Tangled, and Batman), children who chose Batman showed the greatest perseverance with the task! To […]
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[PREMIUM] Forgetting Can Make You Smarter
In a viral video shared on our Facebook feed, Truth Theory shared the gist of a recent research report in the prestigious journal Neuron. There may be good reason why researchers’ new understanding of memory might make sense for many dyslexic people and why it may explain the perplexing memory challenges that many dyslexic students experience in school although their ability to grasp the deeper concepts and patterns may put them way ahead of classmates. From Science Daily, “two University of Toronto researchers propose that the goal of memory is not to transmit the most accurate information over time, but to guide and optimize intelligent decision making by only holding on to valuable information.” “It’s important that the brain forgets irrelevant details and instead focuses […]
GETTING PAST ANGER
If you meet Henry Winkler today, one of the last words to come to mind would be the word "anger." Yet anger is what Henry battled with for years because of his experiences in school before dyslexia was recognized.... Henry wasn't allowed to graduate with his class at...
How to Help With the Social and Emotional Side of Dyslexia
Dr. Michael Ryan is a Michigan Clinical Psychologist who developed one of the first clinical programs for LD students at Colorado State University and he spoke at our first Dyslexic Advantage conference. From his writing at LDOnline and the IDA: How can parents and...
From the Community: Difficulty at Work
Q: I'm trying to help a friend who's having some difficulties at work. What resources are available for adults? A: As you may already know, there are many more resources for children than adults when it comes to dyslexia testing and support. Not all assessment...
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Dyslexic Innovation: GOOGLE (X) CAPTAIN Astro Teller [Premium]
Many of the world’s greatest innovators are dyslexic. These creators with a capital ‘C’, more often than not, arrive at their conclusions through wild leaps of their ideas rather than incremental, step-by-step invention. This pattern, which appears in so many accomplished people in every type of field and discipline, should be telling us what to look for in its raw form in young people, and what the end goal of the educational process should really be. A great case in point in Google’s X Lab Captain of Moonshots, Astro Teller. Astro doesn’t talk a lot about his dyslexia, but he did relate this story about his dyslexia at an educational conference: “As a student in school, I fell into the habit of doing things […]
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[PREMIUM] Realistic Confidence
We know that confidence can make a huge difference in course of people’s lives, but the question is how to avoid the extremes of underconfidence, which might lead to avoidance and underachievement, and overconfidence, which can also result in going off the rails. It was Albert Bandura, a founding father of scientific psychology who found that the best predictor of an individual person’s success is whether or not they believe they will succeed. But there’s an important caution here. There’s a difference between believing you will succeed and believing you will succeed easily…or to put it another way, there’s a difference between an unrealistic optimist and a realistic optimist. A realistic optimistic (or what some call a pessimistic optimist) anticipates that the path to success […]
Screen Children with Reading Problems for Hearing Difficulties
Children with dyslexia should be screened for hearing problems, says a UK researcher, after her research team found that 1 in 4 students had significant hearing problems that were not suspected by parents. Their study also found that 1 in 3 children with a hearing...
Nobel Prize Winner Carol Greider
Dr. Carol Greider was folding laundry at home when she got the call in 2009 that she had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. She decided to wake up her kids and tell them. "Do we have to go to school?". "No you don't," she said, and she took them in to work with her...
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[PREMIUM] Big Picture and Dyspraxia
The good news about dyspraxia is that there are many positive strategies that can significantly improve functioning. #1. SELF-AWARENESS – Self-awareness is the most important tool of children and adults with dyspraxia. There are many everyday classroom and real world tasks that can be extremely difficult or even impossible for a person with dyspraxia. Without being aware that something being asked of you is impossible, it’s easy to slide into negative thinking and self-deprecating behaviors which can pull you away from things that could actually help, like self-advocacy, technology, or training. #2. COORDINATION AND STRENGTH TRAINING – Coordination and motor strength are highly trainable, so it’s important to recognize that there’s a lot one can do to improve symptoms of dyspraxia. A common mistake is […]
HOW TO HELP WITH ALGEBRA: Positive and Negative Numbers
Math Tips for Dyslexia: Some students have difficulty using a number line because of right-left difficulties and the fact that there are some counter-intuitive principles when dealing with positive and negative numbers (the negative of a negative number is a...
RESILIENCE
Resilience is a popular topic among today’s educational leaders, and for good reason. If you grow up with significant academic, social, or socio-economic stress, you’re more likely to still grow up as a happy, successful, and adaptive adult if you are resilient. Many external factors support resilience, like a supportive family or caregiver and stable home life, but individual factors are also important – and importantly there is substantial evidence that these can be learned. Studies of dyslexic children and adults almost universally show the significant degrees of stress that dyslexia can have in the school setting. In general, the period leading up to a formal ‘diagnosis’ or identification is especially stressful as individuals don’t know why school tasks are difficult or they are underperforming. […]
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Never Give Up [PREMIUM]
“Throw your soldiers into positions whence there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight. If they will face death, there is nothing they may not achieve. Officers and men alike will put forth their uttermost strength.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War Ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu recognized that extraordinary feats of courage and bravery can happen when it seems as if there is no escape. Battles are not all of the military kind, of course. Recently, real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran shared her experience when she first got contacted for starring on Shark Tank: After she had shared the news with everyone she knew, she got a call that said they had changed their mind and invited another […]
Karina Eide Memorial College Scholarship Winners 2018
To Read with ReciteMe: https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Scholarship-2018.compressed.pdf
Singer Songwriter Actress Jewel
Jewel is a multi-platinum singer-songwriter, poet, and actress who found success playing in coffeehouses in San Diego where she was discovered by a music manager and signed with Atlantic Records in 1994. It was 1996 when her first album took off, climbing to #11 on...
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