Hannah Spelled Backwards Is hannaH

31 Mar 2000 - Hannah Spelled Backwards Is hannaH
It was always obvious that Hannah was very bright. As a baby she started saying a few words at 7 months. She was potty trained by 2. It seemed that I told her she was supposed to pee pee in the potty, so she did. She could draw cute little pictures before she was 3. She could carry on very intelligent conversations with anyone. She could memorize songs and little sayings almost immediately. So I really had no worries at the thought of teaching Hannah.
It came time to teach her all of the letters and numbers. It took longer than I had anticipated. She would get very frustrated, and seemed to hate writing. It didn’t make sense to me, she loved to draw I thought she would enjoy writing. But she basically hated it. When she got the letters memorized we worked on phonics. She could tell me when we were talking about it what sounds letters made, and even verbally spell some words. But when she was asked to “read” it was if none of the letters meant anything to her. She would read the word hat after much sounding out and then on the next line see the word hat and have to start over. I was baffled. I started researching reading methods. And questioned some experts at the homeschool conference. One way that homeschoolers differ from institutionalized learning is that we don’t have to stick to a schedule. One of the reading teachers at the conference that I questioned told me that if Hannah was having trouble reading that I should “drop it like a hot potato”. I read some more research on delayed/student directed learning. I was fearful that I wasn’t making the right decision, but I decided to “drop it”. We focused on what Hannah enjoyed, history, science, social studies. We were judged by a lot of people. We heard lot of negative comments and got lots of advice. As the time passed I continued to study and realized that Hannah was dyslexic. As it turned out most of the Sinclair grandchildren are dyslexic. Hannah is the oldest of a new set of grandchildren the closest one to her age is 10 years older than she. So no one thought to mention the dyslexia to us because they had already dealt with it and had moved on. So I studied dyslexia. I learned that a dyslexic person just doesn’t see things backwards, which is the common notion. They may see things backward one time sideways the next or occasionally they see letters as they are. Another thing that is common, and I believe was Hannah’s main problem, is that the letters tend to shake and move on the page. She would try to focus on a word, read that word, then have to adjust her eyes and start over to read the next word. That made what reading she did very slow and laborious. I found that the contrast between white paper and black letters was harder for her to read and that by placing colored plastic sheets over her books made it easier to a degree. But she was still not reading to grade level. But I held back from pushing. We taught her other things. We talked about dyslexia with her explaining it as best we could. And I also found the names of famous people that had it. For example Thomas Edison was dyslexic. He was thrown out of school. His mother was told he was “addlebrained” meaning he was retarded. His mother homeschooled him. We also told Hannah that dyslexic people seemed to see the world differently. And that difference could be a benefit or a hindrance depending on the way she approached her life. I think she kept confidence in her ability pretty well. She was anxious to read and didn’t want it made too obvious that she was struggling. But over all she understood that reading would come with time. Well, just like the books said if you can keep a child from getting the self image that they are dumb, and if you can keep them from hating reading they will eventually “out grow” dyslexia. It never goes away, but they learn to compensate. Hannah reached that point when she was 10. It was as if she woke up one morning and was reading up to speed. She loves reading. She is proud of her accomplishment. I am so glad that I took that teacher’s advice to “drop it like a hot potato”.