Two weeks later, all 441 pages had been read. I was shocked, not only was he understanding what he was reading but he was enjoying it! For the next hour he continued to read, without any prompting, only pausing occasionally to tell us more amusing extracts. What! Hang on! A positive comment from reading a book, this has never happened before! Ten minutes later, “Mum this dentist is so mean to the children, you’ll never believe what she does”. Within a few minutes he started giggling. Thinking I had nothing to lose, I downloaded the Kindle version of David Walliams’ Demon Dentist along with the associated Audiobook to my iPad, gave my son some headphones and asked him to read a chapter as we drove down to the south coast to see family. After some research, I discovered that this referred to a technique called immersion reading where the text in a Kindle eBook is highlighted as the professionally narrated companion Audiobook plays. “explore the Whispersync app … multi-sensory reading experience”. One evening I re-read our Educational Psychologist’s report and came across across a recommendation towards the end which I had skimmed over previously. Although I agreed that teaching spelling rules and strategies for reading comprehension were extremely important, I could also see that technology could play a vital part in giving a struggling learner independence. My teaching placements demonstrated the challenges of teaching older learners who often had low self-esteem and resented being singled out for extra support. It was a busy year, switching context from coding to lesson planning and essay writing but I loved it. Whilst working part-time as a software developer, I studied for a diploma in teaching learners with Dyslexia and Specific Learning Difficulties.
It was a huge relief to know that there was a reason for his difficulties but now the challenge was on to understand how best to help him. Aged 10, we had him assessed by an Educational Psychologist who diagnosed dyslexia, poor working memory and extremely slow processing - his processing speed score of 66 placed him in the lowest 1 percent of his age equivalent peers. He knew his phonic sounds and could recognise high frequency words however when reading books he read slowly, tired easily and was unable to recall any of the stories afterwards. Primary school suggested it was due to him being a summer born boy but, as his friends moved onto Harry Potter whilst we were still reading Horrid Henry, I started to think there was more to it. My son has always struggled with reading.
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