Travis Harker shares his family’s frustrating journey that ended in success and improved understanding of their daughter’s learning challenges and of the tools that she can use to keep building reading skills. When their daughter was in third grade her school provided her with a reading tutor and encouraged her parents to drill her on words. The more her school and parents pushed her to do word drills the more she began to resist the process.
The cliche of “try harder.” does not help when a child is facing obstacles.
Diagnosing dyslexia is rarely easy.
In the fourth grade Harker’s daughter underwent testing that revealed she is dyslexic. Now she is benefiting from reading education that emphasizes learning based on evidence rather than on memorization. Harker realizes he had mistakenly viewed her challenge through his own difficulties with math as a youngster, when he benefited from working harder on memorization. Now his daughter works smarter with new and effective methods.
We also found out that kids with dyslexia can learn to read when teachers use evidence-based teaching, like the Orton–Gillingham approach. Just memorizing words wasn’t enough.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Key takeaways
- Travis Harker believed that his child with Dyslexia needed to just try harder, a belief that many parents hold.
- Harker tried word drills with his daughter and attempted to make games out of learning sight words but the slow progress frustrated him.
- Harker learned that working smarter and not frustrating his daughter worked a lot better than trying to make her try harder.
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