Diagnosing Reading Problems Before School Begins!

Experiencing frustration early on, kills motivation

 and effects self esteem

According to the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a study at Children’s Hospital in Boston is now able to identify children at risk for dyslexia through MRI scans.  Researchers have been able to identify different brain activity on these scans even before children have learned to read.  The good news is, developmental dyslexia, at an early stage, responds well to intervention.  Diagnosing children during this time (before kindergarten) could change the way a student views school. Rather than begin school experiencing frustration and difficulty,  an intervention can provide a student with the chance to be successful and have a positive academic experience.

Developmental dyslexia (dyslexia not caused by brain trauma) affects 5 to 17 percent of all children.  If the family already has a history of dyslexia, up to 1 in 2 children will struggle with reading themselves.  These students will experience poor spelling and decoding abilities and have difficulty with fluency in recognizing words (which later affects reading comprehension). Children with dyslexia have difficulty identifying and mapping oral sounds in written language since they have problems recognizing and manipulating the underlying sound structures of words (known as phonological processing).

This news is exciting to me, since it confirms what we already do here at DLNH with our Search and Teach© program.  This program helps identify young, “at risk” students and  provides intervention in the areas of phonological processing.  The program was part of my training at The National Institute for Learning Development® (NILD) and is approved by the Joint Dissemination Review Panel (JDRP) of the Interdisciplinary Model for national validation.  If you or someone you know is interested in learning more, check out our website www.discoverylearningnh.org under the “Services” tab and call for a free consult.

Journal Reference:

1.      N. M. Raschle, J. Zuk, N. Gaab. Functional characteristics of developmental dyslexia in left-hemispheric posterior brain regions predate reading onset. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1107721109

Why Title a blog "Changing Minds?"

Changing minds is a blog about education.  It goes with what I do.  I’m an Educational Therapist/Reading and Writing Specialist, that has a part in changing student's minds.  Research tells us that the brain is malleable; it is constantly changing - it is not fixed.  We used to think that whatever we were born with, we were stuck with for the rest of our lives.  What we now know is that as we learn new things – both physically (such as learning to play an instrument or a sport) or mentally (growing in understanding of a specific subject), our brain is changing and creating neural networks connecting new learning with past knowledge.  Therefore, the name “changing minds” is intended to be understood on several levels: I hope to offer some personal thoughts, experiences and research that some will read, consider, and may result in a changed mind.  I also hope to continue teaching children, providing educational therapy to struggling learners, and through modeling, questioning, encouraging and co-learning with my students, see their minds changed into independent, competent and confident learners.