Adolescents are at a stage of development when they need to be in an environment where they can experience independence, growth, cooperation, and creativity; however, the typical middle school provides an environment that stresses competition, grades, relative ability, and rote memorization.” – From The Middle School Experience: Effects on the Math and Science Achievements of Adolescents with LD Perhaps because of dyslexic strengths in direct observation, causal reasoning, and analytical problem solving, the subject of science in middle school present opportunities for talent and possibly future career development. The potential obstacles facing students with dyslexia with interests in science are several: extensive technical vocabulary, similar sounding but distinct terms, writing demands for essays and lab notebooks, however teaching strategies based on students’ relative strengths and learning preferences […]
Children’s Books Featuring Positive Characters with Dyslexia
CLOSE TO FAMOUS Newbery Honor winner. When twelve-year-old Foster and her mother land in the tiny town of Culpepper, they don't know what to expect. But folks quickly warm to the woman with the great voice and the girl who can bake like nobody's business. Soon Foster...
Dyslexia, Storyboarding, and Film Director Martin Scorsese [Premium]
“That’s the way it is with art. It’s not that you want to do it, it’s that you have to do it. You have no choice.” – Martin Scorsese Martin Scorsese is an Academy award winning American director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and film historian with over 50 years in the movie industry, and he is dyslexic. He grew up in a New York tenement, an asthmatic child of a presser and seamstress in the Lower East Side. He recalls spending lots of time in front of a TV set watching good and bad films and going to a local movie theatre with his father and brother. As he watched, he often drew his own scenes, frame by frame in a notebook, flicking pages back and forth […]
Karina Eide Memorial Scholarship 2016 Winners – Meet Brian and Charles
Here are two more winners of Dyslexic Advantage's Karina Eide Memorial Scholarship 2016. Brian is an undergraduate at Cornell University who unbeknownst to us, we had been acquainted with because of his excellent assistive technology blog,...
Discoverer of the Titanic – Dyslexic Ocean Explorer Robert Ballard [Premium]
“When I was a child, I wrote a letter to an oceanographic institution in California called Scripps (Scripps Institution of Oceanography UC San Diego). It was a Dear Santa Claus letter. “Dear Scripps, I want to be an oceanographer.” I’m sure I misspelled it, because I’m dyslexic. They gave me a scholarship.” – Robert Ballard When I was seventeen, 56 years ago, I went on my first expedition. We got caught in a storm, hit by a rogue wave, and I thought that was so cool. I was too young to be afraid. I just fell in love with adventure with a purpose, where you go out there and overcome the obstacles that you’re always faced with, and then you find this secret, whether it’s a shipwreck […]
Gwen Stefani The Voice and Dyslexia
"It was such a turning point to find that I had a talent and I had something to contribute, somewhere." - Gwen Stefani, singer, songwriter, fashion designer, actress As a child, Gwen was very creative, performing puppet shows for friends and neighbors with her...
Higher Creativity of Dyslexic Children and Adolescents – New Research [Premium]
“…dyslexic children around the age of 10 years old were found to be particularly creative in our study…” – Kapoula et al. University Paris PLOS One 2016: 11(3). From creativity researchers in Europe, some striking new information about how well dyslexic students and adolescents performed on the Torrance Test of Creativity Thinking compared to non-dyslexic peers. Particularly large differences were noted in the areas of originality and elaboration. Figure 1 shows A, the test prompt, B, the drawing from an art student, C, a drawing from a non-dyslexic student, and D, a drawing from a dyslexic student. “When comparing the most creative group of students (i.e., from ENSAD) and the most creative group of dyslexic children and teenagers (i.e., from BRUXELLES) (Fig 2F, Table 9), the only […]
High School Students View Their Dyslexia as an Advantage
Things are changing. From ABC: "Fortunately for Christa Hills, her dyslexia diagnosis came when she was in primary school. She was able to access appropriate help from a young age. Now studying for her Year 12 exams, she regards dyslexia as a gift. 'It's really great....
Dyslexia Cybersecurity CEO Lior Div – Hacking the Hackers
"Dyslexic people process visual information differently than most people, so instead of starting with letters or sounds, I looked at sentences or even paragraphs as a whole, and then broke them down into parts. That process – starting with the big picture and breaking...
