Reading Disabilities – Exposure To Books and Self-Esteem

Transcript

“So one of the difficulties about children with reading impairments is, as Stanovich said and related that to Matthew in the Bible, is the rich gets richer and the poor get poorer. So good readers read more and they get to be better readers and poor readers read less than so they’re poor readers. They don’t read as much. So what’s important is the more you can expose your learner, your child, your adolescent to good literature, even if they can’t read that for themselves, have them be exposed to that, read it to them, have them listen to it electronically so that they can be exposed to that literature at their grade level or age level so that they’re not losing, or getting behind their peers. Often, accommodations are the best gift that we can make. The negative side of that is often students are sort of isolated from their peers because they have to go to another room for testing or things.

So they feel isolated. They don’t want to, they would rather have poor grades and just be with their peers than to show that they need help and go in another room. So teaching them about the learning disability, teaching them that a reading disability has nothing to do with their intelligence, that often it’s very, very intelligent people who just, their brain works differently. And so, while they’re very good thinkers, accessing the written word is just more difficult for them because their brain is wired differently and having them be able to self-advocate so that they can keep that self-esteem, that they need to get through, to use those accommodations, to access the curriculum. As they’re going through school, school is a major life activity. And so the more accommodations we can give them, the more self-advocacy information we can give them, the more empowered they’re going to be to get to the point to where they need to be, to do whatever they want in life. Once they get past school, they can pick whatever they want to do. It may have nothing to do with reading at all. Although we all have to access information to find things out, but on a much lower level once we get out of the school system. So if we can get them through that, then we’ve done a good job.”