Two of my three kids failed to learn to read in public school. We did all the right things?filled our house with books, read to them as babies, enrolled them in preschool programs and sat with them in the evenings as they muddled through their early readers sent home by kindergarten and grade one teachers. With my eldest, we patiently waited for the click. ?Oh, she?s just young,? her kindergarten teacher told us. Which was true?her birthday is in late December, making her one of the youngest in the class. ?She?s just not interested? was another common teacher assessment. Our daughter was a lively, imaginative kid who seemed to prefer a game of make-believe over sitting down to read.
Fast-forward 10 years and our daughter is entering high school still struggling to read unfamiliar words. We learned in grade two, after doing private testing, that she had a learning disability in reading, but because of poor advice given to us by the psychologist who did the testing as well as her teachers and the school, we started specialized tutoring only in grade four and then moved full-time to a school for kids with dyslexia in grade five. We?ve learned now that she missed a critical window to cement early phonemic awareness and the decoding skills (understanding the relationship between letters and sounds) that she needs to fluently read. In an ideal world, she would have been screened in kindergarten, with intervention starting right away. Now, although her reading has certainly come a...