Twelve-year-old Dallas is one of the brightest children in his class. He has a wonderful vocabulary and knows everything there is to know about baseball — he can even tell you who played in each of the last ten World Series games and who won.
But when it comes to reading about baseball—or anything else—Dallas has a lot of trouble. It takes him a long time to read each word, and even longer to read whole sentences. He often has to guess at how you say a word—and sometimes his guess is wrong. Reading out loud is especially stressful and embarrassing. His teacher recently told Dallas’s parents that she thinks he might have dyslexia.
Most people assume that part of being smart is being able to read well. About 100 years ago, though, doctors figured out that some people, even some very smart people who do really well at many other things, have trouble learning to read. This difficulty with reading is called dyslexia.
No one is born knowing how to read.
We all have to learn how.
Just about every person starts talking without having to learn how. When you were a baby, just being around people who were talking was enough to get you started talking, too. You didn’t have to go to talking school or take talking lessons. Human beings’ brains are just designed to make talking happen almost automatically.
Reading is different, though. No one is born knowing how to read—we all have to learn how. When you read, your brain has to do a lot of things at once. It has to connect letters with sounds and put those sounds together in the right order.
New research on dyslexia shows auditory processing skills are key to a child’s reading ability. MindSpark Learning’s program is an intervention. We combine brain based cognitive reading software with remote professional oversight. The Fast ForWord software targets the processing delays that cause dyslexia.