Detailed Description From Parent

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9 Year Old Boy - Detailed description from parent (must read!)

I have a son who just turned 9 who we took to the Reading Research Council in California in March, 2001. Believe me, it is the best money we ever spent, and I would rather give up dinners out for the next five years than to have passed up this chance. Within one hour of his being there I could just see his whole body relax, and it was as if he was saying to me that this is what he was waiting for his whole life. For the first time someone acknowledged what a very bright child this is without paying attention to the things that he was having difficulty with.

We saw some changes happening that week, but the continuous growth that is taking place is the truly rewarding part.

They told us that the first big change we would see was in sports, and we watched in amazement as we saw this unfold. At his first swimming lesson after we came back, I just took a double take when I watched him. After the lesson, his swimming teacher came over and said that she doesn't know quite what happened, but that the way he swam today we definitely had to put him on the swimming team, that he would be one of the best swimmers there. She was amazed how focused he was, and what a quick learner he had become. A few weeks later his summer baseball league started. He is in coach pitch and they get a chance at 7 pitches. Last year if he was lucky he would hit 1 out of the 7. This year he hits about 6 out of the 7. His running was still very slow, so I called out,"Get your orientation point", and you could just see the physical change. He's not a speed demon, but he's making it to the bases.

The areas that we most wanted help with were his writing (this is his weakest area), his reading (this was weak but not nearly as much of a problem as his writing), and although he seems to have a natural talent for math, he finds memorizing his math facts a challenge.

His report card came out about a month after we returned from the course, and the comment on his writing was,"I have seen a dramatic change in his writing in the last couple of weeks." We have a lot of work ahead of us in writing, mainly, I believe, that because of his perception problem, he learned very little in this area in 1st and 2nd grade. But I now am seeing improvements every day, and they are improvements that are permanent, not like before when you would think that he would know how to spell a word, and then it would just seem to disappear from his memory. The improvement in his reading has been a source of endless satisfaction for me. He now reads fluently and with expression. The little words no longer trip him up, and his reading vocabulary just keeps growing.

He's doing pretty good on his math facts. He knows all his multiplication tables now, although he is not as quick at them as most of the other kids. I phoned the center a couple of weeks ago, and talked to them about this. They said that they didn't think that I should try to meet some arbitrary time constraint that the school is trying to put on the children; the important thing is that he knows them. I thought that this was a wonderful attitude. I know that most of the kids in his class that can do 100 problems in 5 minutes could not come close to his vocabulary and other gifts which on the tests we had done at Christmas showed that he is at high school level or higher, so I thought why should I pressure him on a technicality.

I guess what I am trying to tell you is that we went the route of special reading classes at school and I think that he would have never become a decent reader because it was not that he didn't understand all the phonics rules and everything that they were trying to teach him, but it was a perception problem. There were actually words and letters that he was not seeing, and he could have studied phonics until he was 80 years old, and it would not have fixed the basic problem. Also in his writing, he was not seeing straight up and down lines, so all his letters had this funny look to them.

I know that you can try to do the book at home, but I would so totally recommend going for the course. They saw things that I would not have seen. And just the self esteem that my son came out of there with, money could not buy. He was walking 10 feet high. He is so proud now to be a picture thinker, and we talk a lot about Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, and the other famous picture thinkers, and how the world would be so much less advanced if it had not been for them.

He loves doing the clay, and we make it a real fun time. I always do it along with him, and we have fun competing over who can come up with the most interesting concepts.

We have been lucky in that both my son's homeroom teacher and the new reading specialist teacher that we have this year are very supportive. In fact his reading specialist is planning to train as a Davis facilitator this summer. They are very open to working with us and to share any new ideas. His reading specialist even does letters with him in clay sometimes. He is very close to grade level in reading now, and I have no doubt that he will soon pass grade level. His writing continues to improve, but this will take longer. His small motor skills are still weak, but they are also improving.

I met Ron Davis when we were at the center, and I could hardly find a voice to speak to him, I was just so thankful at the gift that his work gave to our family.

Posted By Amy H. on July 8, 2001 on [Davis Dyslexia Discussion Board]