Dyslexia and Ways to Address It, with Daniela Feldhausen

You have questions? We have answers. We're two Southern moms on the back side of raising kids. And we have some things to say. We've lived life, made mistakes, and learned some lessons. Join us for answers to the questions. You just want to ask your mom. Hey, welcome to another Just Ask Your Mom podcast. I'm Renee Sprold, and I'm Bonnie Blaylock. Well, when you have one or two kiddos at home, and it's your first rodeo, or maybe you're a newbie in the rodeo biz, it's sometimes hard to recognize signs, but something may be off. You just know what you know. So unless you're a teacher, you've likely never been exposed to early readers before and have never helped a child learn to read. I experienced this very thing when we decided to homeschool our children, and I was teaching my kids to read. And so I'm very excited to talk to today's guest, Daniela Feldhausen. Welcome, Daniela. Thank you. Thank you for having me here. I'm looking forward to it. Well, Daniela is the founder of Kids Up Reading Tutors, and she's built a team of specialists who help students all across the country overcome reading challenges, including dyslexia and dysgraphia. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Where are you from? Absolutely. So I guess it's about 20 plus years in D.C., Washington D.C., as a lawyer, and then decided that that wasn't really where I wanted to be or what I wanted to be doing. And about seven or eight years ago, we moved out to Tucson, Arizona. So we're now located in Tucson. I have since then gotten a master's degree in special ed. I've done a bunch of specialized trainings for teaching kids with dyslexia to read and spell. And then started tutoring kids individually, got so many families asking for help that I eventually started bringing on more people and training them and how to do this. And so we're now a team of 20 people working with kids all across the country, helping them learn to read and spell or become better readers and spellers. Kids from basically grade one through 12 with the occasional kindergartener and the occasional college student. But most of our kids are in elementary middle or high school. So did you experience this with your own children? Is that why you had an interest in it or how did you do how? So you know, it's interesting. It actually started out before any of my kids were reading age. So I have three kids. But I actually started doing this when my oldest was like three or four years old. And the local neighborhood elementary school was looking for help from the community in working with their kids. So they just wanted people to come in and, you know, sit with the kids and listen to them read. And I did that and I loved it. And then it turned out later that one of my kids had reading trouble and then it turned out and it turned out. But, you know, the original start to this was just volunteering in a local neighborhood school. And as my time as a lawyer was winding down, I was spending more and more time in a local school volunteering with kids. And volunteering to help kids learn to read. And then when I was like, okay, so what am I going to do now in this next phase of my life? You know, I was thinking, well, I could do this and I could do this and I had all these great ideas. And one morning I woke up and said, well, wait a minute. Every time I have more time, I go to the local school and say, give me some more kids. I want to work with more kids. This is what I should be doing. And so that's when I then went and got my master's degree and got all the training for teaching dyslexic kids to read. So it's kind of a kind of a winding path, but, you know, hopefully not that unusual. Yeah, that's awesome. That's a great way to discover a passion just as a little side note. Like when you're at rest, where does your mind go? Yeah, when you have a minute and so that was a great clue. And how beautiful you followed that. Yeah. Yeah, it's been absolutely wonderful. I absolutely love what I do. And I, by the way, I get the most amazing emails from families. And that is just so heartwarming. Like when we get those emails, like, you know, maybe a couple weeks in, parents will email me and say, this is starting to work. I can actually notice a difference. Or, you know, at some point the mom or somebody will will email me and say, I just caught Susie reading under her covers for the first time last night ever. Or my fifth grader just asked me to buy him a book. He has never asked me to buy him a book before. Or, you know, my other son, yeah, his reading is great. But what really amazed me is that his grades in math are going up. I didn't realize how much the reading was affecting the math. So I just get absolutely wonderful, wonderful emails and hear wonderful stories from parents. And it's, yeah, it's heartwarming. I love what I do. Absolutely love it. It's so magical to me. I remember I remember learning to read and how it opened just it opened the world. And you're just wanting to read and zoom everything. And I've always thought literacy was super, super important. That's all my historical fiction. The first book I wrote was about light to the hills, bringing literacy to the hills. So I just love that magical first. Yes. Here's the discovery of words and letters and what they mean and language and all of that stuff. So yeah, we're both really, really into the power of words and what they do to our culture and society. Absolutely. And as long as we've been doing this podcast, we've never talked about this topic. I cannot believe it's were this late to the conversation, but I'm so excited to go deeper on this because it's super important. I wish I would have known some of this stuff when I was a young mom. So if you're defining dyslexia and dysgraphia, can you just in a simple ways for our listeners? Sure. Yeah. If the official or one of the good definitions out there is on the website of the International Dislexia Association, but I'll paraphrase here. It basically says unexpected trouble learning to read, comma, usually a result or usually associated with a problem with phonological processing. And I'll explain that in a second. But basically the kids brains are literally wired differently than the brains of kids who don't have dyslexia. Like you can do, they've done brain imaging of kids who are four years old. You can tell if you do the imaging, you can tell with their four year old is going to be dyslexic later when someone tries to teach him to read. But you know, most of us don't have access to brain imaging and most of us can't really tell that when our kids are three and four years old. So there's some other kind of more practical ways that parents generally notice that hold on. There's something going on here. And some of those are things like kids reversing letters. It's not that there's a problem with their vision. It's not that they're literally seeing the bees differently from the people. It's not that like their brains somehow inverting the bees and the bees and the bees and the cues or anything like that. It's just that they're resisting reading. They're not wanting to read. They're staying away from it because it's so hard. And as a result, they're not getting as much practice when actually they probably need even more practice than some other kids in distinguishing between the bee and the bee. So that that would be one sign. Another sign might be if your child is writing a word and you notice that they're writing it backwards. So for example, recently I heard or saw that a child had written tree, E-E-R-T. Wow. Yeah. And so then you, you know, you talk to the child and say, "Hey, you know, that's not quite right." And as you're starting to get into the explanation, they're just looking at you like, "What do you want?" I knew how many letters they were. I knew what the letters were. I wrote them all down. I put them down in the wrong order, but who cares? Why does that matter? So they literally don't understand, and that's this phonological piece. They literally don't understand how our reading and writing system works. And that's the phonological piece that the International Dislexia Association's definition was getting at. And that's about how your brain is wired. And do you really understand, like truly and deeply, that words are made up of individual sounds and you can string sounds together in different combinations to get different words? And to somebody who's a fluent reader in a good spelling, well, yeah, of course words are sounds and sounds are words. But if that's not obvious to you, if that does not make any sense, then you're going to have a really hard time with reading and spelling. You're going to have a hard time, for example, and this is another one of those red flags to watch out for. You might have a hard time with rhyming. Like if I ask you, give me some words that rhyme with bat. In order to come up with, you know, hat, mat, sap, cat, and so on and so forth, you need to be able to separate out that first sound in the word. We call that the onset. Separate that from the vowel and everything that comes after it, that's called the rhyme. And then you keep the onset. So you keep that, I'm sorry, you keep the rhyme. And then you swap out that initial part. And for a kid whose brain is wire, typically, yeah, okay, they can tell it. But if you're working with a child and they're telling you, you know, you ask them what rhymes with bat. And they just either give you big, brown eyes, or maybe they say ball, or they say, you know, something else. Then that would be something to be on the lookout for. Grafia and dyslexia usually go hand in hand. So that is an excellent question. So there, so dyslexia is trouble with reading, usually associated with this phonological problem. Dislexia, the kind of dyslexia that we work on, is the flip side of that. So it's like two sides of the same coin. So if you don't have those phonological skills to be able to take a word apart and put it back together again. And if you don't know your phonics patterns, you know, this letter corresponds with this sound, it's going to be really hard to read, and it's also going to be really hard to spell. So we work on that aspect of dyslexia. But dyslexia actually has multiple meanings in different people, use it in different ways. So when someone comes to me and says, my child's been diagnosed with dyslexia, I'll ask them, so tell me more, like, what does that mean for your child in particular? Because some people like dyslexia more generally is thought of trouble with writing. Some kids have trouble with writing, maybe because they're holding the pencil wrong, or the pen, or whatever, and then they don't have the hand grip as wrong, they don't have the hand strength, their hand gets tired, and therefore they don't want to write. That might be considered dysgraphia, but that's not the kind of dysgraphia that's associated with dyslexia, and with this problem with phonological skills and phonics. So depending on what kind of dysgraphia you have, you might need to get help from someone else, or you might need to look for help in a different place. So if you have the problem with your hands, for example, in the pencil grip, and all that, you might want to talk to an occupational therapist about how to work on that. But if the problem is that your child doesn't want to write, and a big part of it is that they really don't want to spell those words. Like, if your child is writing really short words and really short sentences, and trying desperately to write as little as possible, no matter what the teacher prompt might be, that might be a sign of dysgraphia, right? So they might be thinking, "Oh gosh, I have to spell those words. I don't want to spell those words." So rather than really writing down those wonderful thoughts that are going through their mind, they're just thinking, "Okay, I need the shortest possible sentence." The fewest number of sentences, the shortest possible sentences, and the shortest possible words within those sentences. And so those are the kids whose output, whose written output, is way below what you know their cognitive abilities are. You know that they're thinking really good, important thoughts about whatever the topic is, but they're not able to write them down because this spelling is just getting in the way. So that's the kind of dyslexia that we write on. Work on, rather. So I mean, the English language is pretty ridiculous. So I think it's not uncommon to have reading and spelling struggles, especially even if you're a native speaker. Oh, absolutely. Now you can think about those words, cough, rough, though, through. They're all -- Yes, I thought you G.H., but they're all going to set -- So anybody might struggle with that. Or why is it that writers write and painters paint, but fingers don't thing. And right now, it's like that. So our language is so bizarre that it's a wonder, truly, that any of us speak, read, and write it at all. How do you -- the things that your examples are you're giving -- are school related to me. Like I don't think if I had a little kid at home where we're looking through an ABC book or whatever, then I would necessarily pick up on any of that. So is it typically not until school that parents are becoming aware or being told, "Hey, you know, this is not quite where it should be?" That's usually, I think, when parents figure it out. Sometimes if they have an older child who's struggled with reading, then they might recognize the signs in the younger child. Like if your four-year-old has no ability to rhyme and you've tried explaining it to them, and it's not making any sense, you know, again, that's something to watch out for. So those are simple things like that that you can watch out for. I also don't think our language is crazy. So I'm going to just push back a little bit right there. Most of English does a lot of people think it's crazy and I used to think it was crazy, too. Once you get deeper into this, they say that about 80, I think, was 85 percent. The spelling actually makes sense if you know the most common spelling patterns in English. Now, boy, it would be nice if it were 100 percent, absolutely. It would be so much easier if there were a nice, clean, one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the sounds. You're absolutely right, we don't have that. We have what's called a deeper orthography, right? So we have a much more complicated system. A lot of it has to do with the wonderful history of our language. We pull these words in from other languages. You know, it comes from German, it comes from English. It comes from all of these other languages. And then many times over the years, over history, we've incorporated those words. We've changed how they're pronounced. And yet, they still have their original meaning and their original spelling. And so that's where a lot of it comes from. A lot of, you know, what can be difficult to spell. And there are ways to help kids with that as well. So, for example, if you're, you know, thinking about the word heart. If you think about the sounds R, T. Normally, we would spell R with an AR. So if I was working with a child and, you know, helping them understand, well, why is heart? Or how am I supposed to remember that heart is spelled H-E-A-R-T? I mean, it sounds like it should be an H-A-R-T. What's that E doing in there? So what I would do in that case is have them really focus on the sounds. So, heart is spelled the way you would expect. That at the end is spelled the way you would expect. It's only that piece in the middle that has an unexpected spelling. And so what we might do is, for example, depending on the age of the child and what you're doing, but you might like draw three lines, one line for each sound, put that H on that first sound, the E-A-R, the R on the second line, and then on that third line. And then because the E-A-R is an unexpected spelling, you might circle that in red, or you might put a heart around it, or stars, or something. Just to draw the child's attention to the fact that, okay, this is heart. The R in heart is spelled in an unusual way. That R in heart is spelled within E-A-R. That lets them focus on the part that's different, the part that's complicated, while still noticing and realizing that the beginning and the end are spelled just as expected. It's only that middle part that's different. So I don't have to memorize H-E-A-R-T. I just have to memorize that a little bit in the middle that R in this case is spelled within E-A-R. So there are things like that that you can do. So you can like analyze words, like pull them apart, think about the base word, think about related words. And you can do things like that to help children understand why this word is spelled this way, or maybe why that word is pronounced that way. So did you -- you said before, Renee, that you're one of your kids struggled with spelling. Yeah, did you encounter any of these things? So yes, so we did four spelling curricula. Is that curricula? How do you say it? It's four years. And at that point, I said, maybe we should just go get an assessment and evaluation done. And so it was thorough, it was two days long. It was very expensive, but our insurance covered it. And at the end of it, the proctor and the doctor said, you know, they're very, very bright. And they're actually just in the 50th percentile in spelling. It's not like an actual real problem. You only have two students. So I didn't have a very big -- It's a fly spring. Yeah, to go like, hey, where are we here? And they said, you know, that this child's brain just actually worked a little bit differently to your brain scan thing. And we actually found even more out about that when we traveled to Asia because this child was picking up and being able to read the Chinese pictogram language. Oh, great. It's not phonological self-contained. And they were able to turn shapes all around in their head, you know? It's like in 3D, and I can barely work a puzzle. So it's like not how my brain works at all. And so I'm like, that's so, so interesting. And they were able to tell me not at the time when they were little. I would know to ask this now. But numbers and letters were actually doing things in their brain. Like number nine marched down the stairwell of an airplane with a suitcase in its hand. And number eight would be always doing this thing. And so I thought, wow, this is not a problem necessarily. This is a child who just has a brain that's working in amazing ways that I didn't know what to do with because I was just doing a traditional kind of learning method. And so we just backed off on this spelling. I kind of wish I knew this, the H and the T, and the line, and the star. I'm actually going to work with the stars and the heart. Probably already a shape in there associated with it to help because it was a struggle. And I think it, I wish it wasn't a struggle. We got on the other side of it and they felt good about themselves and knew all their gifts and whatnot. But it was hard. And so I love the, the advice you're giving to young moms to like rhyme played like rhyming hands. That's, that's so great. That would have been a great hint. And I'm going to do that with my grandkids. But I'm wondering, is, do Asian kids have dyslexia? Yeah. Is that because the nature of our language is sequential like that? So my understanding is that if you're dyslexic in one language, then you are dyslexic in all languages. Because it is just a different wiring of the brain. But I'm guessing it would express itself very differently in somebody who is writing with a language that uses pictograms as opposed to a language in which you more or less have to sound words out in order to be able to spell them than one particular sound at a time. To, to connect back to something else that you said, with you've got a young child at home. Yeah. If you can do a lot of rhyming stuff with them. And you don't even initially necessarily want to push them to produce rhymes because that might be really, really hard. But reading Dr. Sus books or reading mother goose nursery rhymes. That would be super, super, super helpful. And then there are actually studies that show that if you do that, your child is likely to have or many children will have an easier time with reading. If they have a really strong history of not just being read to, but being read to with the particular emphasis on the sounds of our language and the way the words can be pulled apart. So things things to do with rhyming or their books out there, or you could play a game with your child and maybe as you're driving somewhere. Tell me all the words you can think of that start with mmm. Maybe, you know, as you're driving everything that you see as we're driving by that starts with mmm or that starts with or that starts with. And you're getting them to pull apart the word and notice, okay, wait a minute, there's a sound here at the beginning. It's not that this is a word, like, there's a word here and there's a word here and there's a word here. But the words are actually made up of individual sounds. So anything you can do to draw your child's attention to the fact that words have individual sounds. You can pull those words apart into those individual sounds. Like, to go back to the bat. So bat would be boop, at those are three different sounds. Can your child pull those three different sounds apart and tell you what all those sounds are? Can they tell you what the first sound is in a word? Can they tell you what the last sound is in a word? And then there are other wonderful games you can play. Like, you can, if you have post-its in different colors, you could, for example, if you had, you know, you could put a few consonants that they already know on the yellow post-its. And I'm looking here in my drawer for pink post-its, but I guess it doesn't really matter right now. But you could put a couple consonants, pink post-its, and then they, you know, so they have a couple post-its with consonants and a couple post-its with vowels. And then you ask them to start writing words. And you can do this even before they're able to form the letters themselves, although forming the letters is another way of reinforcing that. So that is absolutely a good thing to do. I'm not saying don't do it. This is just an additional thing that you can do with a young child to help them realize this is how our writing system works. So if you have a bunch of, you know, the letters on the refrigerator are great for you. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So have them write sit, assuming they know the S and the I and the T, those generally come fairly early. And then you're like, okay, so sit now instead of sit, I want you to write lit. What do we have to change? How does this word change when we're going from sit to lit? And you're probably going to have to talk them through it kind of step by step. We'll sit, sit, sort of pull it apart, say it really slowly, really stretch it out, and have them watch your mouth. And they can see that your mouth is making different, you're doing different things with your mouth to produce those different sounds. And so then when you're going from sit to lit, you can talk about well, where's your tongue, where your teeth, where your lips, how are you forming those sounds? And that will help kids learn that words or sounds and sounds can be joined together in different combinations to make different words. So those are really, really important pre-reading skills that you want your child to have before they're heading off into kindergarten, preferably. So if your child is not interested in reading and maybe if you have or haven't gotten a diagnosis of dyslexia, are you a fan of audiobooks or reading aloud? What's your take on that? Oh yeah, audiobooks are wonderful, absolutely wonderful. I mean, there's so much to reading. Yes, there's one aspect of it is learning to decode is what we call it to, you know, get those words off the page. But there's so many other wonderful aspects of reading that you'll get if you're listening to an audiobook. I mean, you'll learn about sentence structure, syntax, grammar, vocabulary, the world around you. You'll have things that you can talk to your friends about. I mean, there's so many wonderful things associated with a book in addition to that practice, you know, sounding words out. So they won't get the practice sounding words out, but they get all of those other benefits of reading. So absolutely, audiobooks are a wonderful, wonderful thing. So that doesn't discourage that I can just do, I can just listen to it that way. I don't have to read it. Yeah, so what we do often with the students that we're working with and we're working with about 70 kids right now across the country and a lot of parents will ask about that and we'll be like, you know what audiobooks are great, absolutely. Maybe if you can even get them hooked on a series, something that they're interested in. And so they already kind of know the rhythm and the flow and the general sense of the type of vocabulary that's used. And then when you give them a print book from that series, they might be a little bit less intimidated and they might be a little bit more willing to pick it up. So you can use it also as a bridge to I reading if you really want that. So it's called I reading versus that you're reading. So you can kind of use the audiobooks as a bridge to the print books to encouraging your child to do more with with the eyes. Is this a really long process? I mean, you find out from diagnosis or discovery that there's maybe some of these issues to a kid who actually likes reading and is able to read him right fluently. Is that like, is that like life long ongoing or no, no, no, no, no, for the vast majority of kids, this is not life long. This is not ongoing. No, they're missing skills and you need to teach them those skills. Their brain is wired a little bit differently. You need to teach them these phonological skills, which by the way, if you're doing it well, will literally rewire their brain. But I also want to take a step back for a moment and just say this isn't just about dyslexia. Estimates are that somewhere between 10 and 20% of the population has dyslexia. But if you look at the nation's report card, the NAEP, those test scores that came out not that long ago, only about 30% of our kids are reading on grade level. It's about 70% who are a year or more behind grade level. Like if you look at the, you know, if you go and read the articles, it talks about lower the numbers that are less than that, but they're talking about kids there who are more than a year behind. If you also include kids who aren't at grade level, it's 70 but 69 or 70%. The problem is much more long standing. So, if 20% of kids have this, it's actually a disorder, it's just a different brain. It's a different brain. Okay, that's absolutely. I feel like I've always thought of it as a disorder, but it sounds to me like these kids just learn differently. Well, they learn different. I guess that, you know, disorder or not disorder, I think kids' lives are going to be easier if they can read. No, that's what I mean. This should be mainstream implementation to me because-- Oh, absolutely. It's just a set of kids who, like, hey, our brain works this way. And let's learn this way. And then our brain works this way. And it's a traditional reading, you know, techniques. Okay, fine. But to me, this just seems like you should be laying this out. Yeah. And the kind of instruction, the kind of instruction that we do, which is what dyslexic kids need, works very-- you know, it's excellent for kids who aren't dyslexic. It's not that you do this with kids who have dyslexia and you do something completely different with kids who don't have dyslexia. No, you can take these good teaching techniques and use them with all kids. And all kids will make faster progress. Having said that, a kid with dyslexia is going to need really good instruction and they're probably going to need a fair amount more of it than the kids who don't have dyslexia. So some of this 70% could be solved if you got really good instruction. But some portion of it is not going to be solved just with really good instruction. You also need lots of additional time. And that's one of the ways in which it's really difficult for schools to teach all these skills to kids. I mean, obviously you send your child to school, you expect the school to teach your child to read. Having said that, I mean, we see we're working with kids three and four, sometimes even five times a week, mostly over the summer, to get them caught up, to get them caught up to their peers and reading. It generally takes some number of months, not some number of years, to get the kids caught up. But it's really--a parent's always asked, "Well, how long is this going to take?" It's really hard to know because first question is, "What skills do they already know? What fontological skills do they have? What are they missing? What funic skills do they have? What funic skills are they missing?" And so on and so forth. So first you have to get sort of an idea of the size of the problem. And then the next question is, "Okay, well, how quickly do you want them caught up? How many sessions per week do you want to do? Are you going to do 45 minute sessions or full hour sessions?" And then all those other supporting skills that are going to help your student as they're learning all the material they need to learn, how's their working memory, how's their processing speed, how's their vocabulary, you know, all these other things. But most of the kids we work with, parents notice a difference within a few weeks. And most of the kids are caught up within some number of months. So on the website I think we say four to nine months. But it really depends on how much your child needs to learn, how quickly they pick it up, how many times per week you're doing these sessions. But these kids can vast, vast, vast majority of kids can absolutely become fluent readers, absolutely. So I would imagine you can't just rely on the school, obviously, you can't just rely on even sessions with you, parents are going to have to be following up and doing all kinds of additional reading at home, right? I mean, not really. Parents often ask us, "Oh, should we be doing things outside? Are you going to give us homework? How is that going to work?" And I'm like, "No, actually hold off. It's better." So one of the reasons kids don't want to read with their parents, and this tends to be a really stressful situation, so they don't want to read, they don't want to read out loud, because they don't have the skills yet. If you're asking them to read, you know, particular thing, particular, you know, phonics patterns that they haven't learned yet, you're basically asking them to guess, right? So that's actually not very helpful for my point of view. So I'd rather parents didn't work with their kids on reading until they've got those phonics patterns, those basic phonics patterns under their belts. At that point, then, yes, absolutely. But early on, you don't want to be encouraging them to guess. And if you're working with older students, like sometimes, you know, many of our kids are first grade, second grade, third grade, but we also have middle schoolers, we also have high schoolers. And they've gotten as far as they've gotten, they've gotten to fifth grade, or they've gotten to 11th grade, with a lot of guessing. And so one of the things that we need to do is say, hey, you know, we don't want you guessing, we want you looking at the letters on the page and learning this letter or this letter combination, it might be pronounced this way or it might be pronounced that way, and this letter or combination might be pronounced this way or this way, and stringing it all together. Instead of looking at C-O-N and saying contest or connect or just something, which is what a lot of kids who are struggling with this will do. They'll look at the first couple letters, you know, start the word off right and then just throw in something to finish that word off. So that's one of the typical signs that kids don't have the skills that they need in order to be able to properly sound a word out, you know, from left to right. And this is why a lot of kids will, you know, especially kids with good memories will actually kind of slide through the system until they get older because in the younger years, like in first grade, if you've got a really good memory, you can memorize a whole lot of words and you can make it look like you're able to read. But once you then start heating those multicellabic words, if you don't know those phonics patterns, it is going to be really hard to memorize all those words that you're expected to know by say 5th grade or by 10th grade. Wow, this is such an interesting conversation and so much of it is not intuitive to me, which is surprising. I'm kind of frustrated by that. I should have known that already, but that's so interesting. I want to echo what you said just now, when I called the curriculum company that we were using sunlight, because we were having problems. We were not just spelling, but we're having like resistance to reading, very, very slow reading, and they told me that 80% of what my child reads should be below should be super easy. I was panicked, because you know, you're all wrapped up in your child's success, which I healed him bad. I was like, "Oh no, I can't have a kid who doesn't love to read, because I'm like you, I love to read, we love to write." That was a really helpful piece of information, so I want to highlight that, because you said you don't let them guessing, it should not be hard. So pull out the easy books and give them lots of wins. And in no time, in no time, they took off reading and caught up, and then we were discussing the spelling later on. And you can read aloud way beyond grade level, like you were saying with that. And audiobooks and just reading aloud to your child, two to three to four grade levels, they can still track the story in a problem. One of the things you can do if you're reading with them, or if they're reading out loud to you, and they get stuck on a particular word, a good thing to do is notice which piece of it they're stuck on. So let's say they're stuck on the word head, which would be a really common one to get stuck on, because EA is usually pronounced E, like Eat. But if they're stuck on that word head, you might point to that and say, "We'll look at the EA and that word is pronounced E." Now you plug that E sound into the word, you already know that H is, and the D is D, so you've got E-D. So give them the phonics pattern that they're missing and let them plug it in, because that way their brain goes through a process called orthographic mapping. And basically the idea is you need to be able to associate the letters in the word with the sounds in the word, and with the meaning of the word, in order for that word to then stick in your brain. But if you just point out the word and say that's head, you're going to be, in many cases, for many kids, you're going to be pointing at that word head over and over and over again, and it's not really going to stick. Because they haven't gone through that process of these are the sounds, these are the letters, this is the meaning, and their brain tying that all up together. So give them a particular phonics pattern, don't tell them the word. Give them the phonics pattern and let them plug it in, and that's going to be a whole lot more helpful for them. So, such good information, because as an early and good reader myself, I just know the way that I know to do it, and I know the way my brain works. So that's the way I'm going to teach it to my kid, and if they're not getting it, you can see where there would be a lot of disconnection or mislabeling or all kinds of conflict that would go along there. And it's hard because, like you said before, our language is complicated. So you have to actually, if you've got a child who needs this kind of explicit instruction, and about 70% of the population does, you're going to need to teach them, well, EA is usually E, but sometimes try the E first. If that doesn't work, then try F, because in some words, like head or threat or dead or whatever, that EA is F, and if that doesn't work either, then try A, because every once in a while in English that EA is pronounced A, like great or break. And if you're one of those kids, if you were one of those kids who just kind of picked up reading, nobody had to teach you anything, and that's about a third of the population, you don't necessarily know those phonics patterns. Would you be able to right now, like before our conversation, would you have known that EA could be E F or A, and in that order is the order in which you should try it out? Probably not. Yeah, so if you haven't learned all of this stuff yourself, it's very hard to teach it to someone else. So if you've got a degree in linguistics, and it turns out you've got a child who's struggling with reading, you've got all that linguistics knowledge that you can then teach your child to help them become a good reader. But if you don't know all of those phonics patterns, for example, yourself, it's going to be a fair amount of work because you're going to have, if you're trying to homeschool, you're going to have to learn it yourself in order to then be able to teach it to your student. I remember the stack of phonics, flashcards, and it gave me that, like the A was at AR, you know, B, but it had the sounds back and you would just go through them, go through them. All the things that it could be. And then all the blends and all of that. Yeah. And yeah, I learned plenty of stuff. I didn't know that. Yeah. Which would be, okay, so the services that you offer, Daniela, are for parents to come and do this through you online. Yeah, that's right. We work with kids around the country. We even have a few outside of the country and a few who are on vacation temporarily outside of the country and, you know, work with us while they're on vacation from wherever they're at. But yeah, most of our kids are in the United States. What a fantastic resource. Like don't struggle through this yourself, parents, where you're, you know, be finding maybe after listening to this podcast that you, oh, I really didn't know this. I didn't know all the resources that were available. Well, here's one right here, so Daniela's website, which we're going to have on our show notes for sure. And just avail yourself of that. I mean, it's a win-win for you and your kid and everybody involved, I would say. Yeah, do you want to stay your website for our listeners? Sure. It's kidsupreadingtooters.com. So we're kids up reading tutors. You might see some information about kids up reading coaches. That's our old name. But the new name is kids up reading tutors and there are buttons on there to schedule a call with me or to contact us, which sends me an email. And I'll give right back to you. And yeah, we'll help you out. We will help you solve this problem in your family. And for most families, it is a real problem. I mean, it really increases the stress level. It really increases, you know, family life becomes much calmer when kids can read. When you don't have that added stress, if I don't want to do my homework, I can't do my homework and so on and so forth. Sure. Would insurance cover this in some cases? No, unfortunately not. Unfortunately not. What you can do is if you have a diagnosis or if you can get your pediatrician to write you what's called a letter of medical necessity, then you might be able to use flexible spending account funds in order to pay for the tutors. So that will help, but it's not insurance covering the cost I wish, I wish. For flexible spending account, that's a, that's the savings a little bit. Re-tax dollars. Yeah, hopefully, hopefully it'll help some parents. It'll help some parents. Even if they don't reach out to me, if they just realize that there's a problem earlier, this is so much easier to address when kids are in first grade or even when they're in kindergarten. Much easier to address than when they're in second grade or in third grade, just because the volume of stuff, the volume of phonics patterns that kids have to learn in second grade is enormous. So if you can straighten this all out and like get their brain wired properly so that they understand this all before they hit second grade, then you're not going to also need a tutor to teach them all of the second grade material. And so on and so forth. So it's a whole lot quicker, cheaper, easier if you're doing this in first grade or even in kindergarten than if you're doing it in second grade or in third grade. All right. Well, we're going to have Daniela's, like I said, her website is on her show notes. So check that out and you can also find this information on our website at justaskyourmom.com. Take five seconds to rate and review us, please, on whatever platform you listen and share us with your friends and family. And send us those topic suggestions to [email protected]. And we'll see you next time on. Justask your mom.