can you hear me now
by Amy
So you might notice my posting a multitude of things on dyslexia. It is a real adventure in our home and I am CONSTANTLY learning, right along side my daughter, how best to work with the challenges she faces. She loves to write stories but gets upset when others can’t read her pages riddled with spelling errors.
It’s free and awesome and she can sit at the computer, talking to it and weaving her long yarns, only to see it all typed out in front of her face.
Because sometimes learning isn’t just getting the black and white down. Sometimes learning is more about confidence and being reassured that you are able. So when there are so many real tears falling down on real paper and smudging really bad spelling, you don’t want your child to miss out on the real point of education and school.
One of the main reasons we homeschool is to promote the love of learning. But…
It is hard to love learning when you feel stupid.
When your younger brother can read things faster than you or words bigger than you, or when your friend of the same age tells you they are working on 9th grade math or when your mom sighs heavily because you still can’t remember what the letters w-h-o say together or even what order they are supposed to be in…you feel awful and want to quit.
She has written four stories so far. In less than 24 hours. She is smiling and laughing and excited for us to read her tall tales. She wants me to tell her more about Anne Rice and how she handled her dyslexia to become one of the most best selling author of all the universe*. She is excited to try new math and play school with her brothers. She feels confident, so feels better able to handle something new or hard. She feels good about her accomplishments so she feels good about her future in learning.
And I feel like I can hear her. I can read her stories clearly and they are so beautiful. I can see her heart and her giant vocabulary and her experiences all over the papers she prints out, without wanting to feel like I need to point out her accidental mistakes. She will continue to work on spelling and handwriting and putting words to paper but for this moment at the computer, with a robot typing out her voice, she is free to fly.
The white plastic binder is slowly filling with printed adventures of princesses, tigers and cherry blossoms that play a part in the history of Valentines Day. I can only imagine them being complied and bound together between hard covers someday.
There are so many other things I am learning about dyslexia and my daughter and how we can work best together and through it all. But today, Google Docs Voice Recognition for the win. Dyslexics UNTIE!!! I mean…UNITE!!
*This might not be a fact but it sounded good. Anne Rice didn’t pay me…but I won’t turn her down. 😉