The Birth of Reading Warriors: Creating a New Reading Program for Dyslexic Brains

Let me start by telling you one of my earliest teaching memories that has never left me. It was somewhere in my first few years of teaching and I had small group intervention with the same set of students who would visit me each day. We worked on building their reading skills through a highly-effective curriculum that was based in repetition, visual cues, and understanding phonics. Overall, the three students were making progress and we enjoyed our time together in the direct-instruction program. We were up to a part of the book that had a story that would carry on for multiple days with the same characters which involved repetition of many words because they were a key part of the story elements. I had been trained as a special education teacher in college and been to multiple days of professional development to use this specific curriculum. One would think that I was ready to help any student who sat in front of me. 

So there I sat with my three students working through this story which they were all intrigued by. We would stop and comment on ridiculous or funny moments. Everyone was engaged. Everyone wanted to improve their reading and enjoy the story. The students were taking turns reading a section at a time and it was going as expected. It was M’s turn (name omitted for privacy of course). He was reading along and got stuck on a word. Of course, I reminded him of the sounds that hindered him, he blended the word properly and kept on. A few lines later the same word hindered him again and eventually a third time. I stopped and asked him gently why that word was giving him such a hard time. I said that this was a word we had all read many times on different days in the story. I said I have heard you read this word on previous story days and not have any trouble with it. I don’t know why I expected a nine year old boy to have insight to his own reading struggles. Afterall, he kept making the same mistake although he was engaged and doing everything he could to work on his reading skills at that moment. I will NEVER forget his response though.

He looked me in the eye with so much sadness and said, ” I don’t know. I come to school everyday and know there are things that teachers showed me just yesterday and sometimes I can remember them and other times I know that I should know but the information just isn’t in my brain.” It isn’t just what he said that I will never forget. It is the hopeless, empty look in his eye. The look that said he needed to know why from me. He needed to know he was smart. He needed to know that someone else had a way to help him. He needed to know how his brain worked. I will never forget those eyes. He was a dear, sweet boy who was eager to please, eager to learn. He loved his teachers, his classmates, and his family. But he was sitting there feeling hopeless yet again. And I, in all my training, didn’t have an answer for him either. Of course, I told him great things to lift him up and let him know he was not alone. I told him I would keep searching for answers, and I did, but I didn’t find the answers he needed before he left elementary school. He made progress in the reading program and improved his skills but I never felt that I was able to completely answer our question that hung in the air that day. 

It has been over 20 years since that day. I have lost track of him and his family over the years. I have taught hundreds of children in the meantime. But when I close my eyes, I can still see his large, dark eyes staring back at me, hopeless and needing an answer. I never stopped searching for the answer. I trained on different curricula. I went back to college to earn a Master’s in Special Education with courses focused on reading instruction. I did all that I knew to do to keep improving for the sake of my students. I increased in knowledge but never felt that I had found the answer for M and other students like him.

Fast forward to 2011. We had a daughter and she was in a great preschool program by this time. The school was doing early dyslexia screenings for everyone in her class. I knew she wasn’t catching on to letter names and the pre-reading skills the same as others in her group but she was also the youngest in her class so I didn’t think much of it. The screening came back with all the red flags raised. I cried on the way to work after the meeting. We made a plan to help. She was in a great school. She had two educators for parents. Of course, we would be able to provide her the help she needed between her school and what we could do at home. But we couldn’t. I still didn’t have answers for how to help.

By 2013, we chose to homeschool her. All the resources we had tried hadn’t worked so surely me staying home to focus on just her would be the answer. And there was another baby on the way. I tried all the best curriculums that I had seen help my students time after time. She made progress, but never at a rate that would help her catch up to peers. We found a specialist that did have new methods. Her reading improved but never soared. I still didn’t understand dyslexia. I had been educated on learning disabilities and knew interventions and strategies but there was still something I was missing. There is no education that a college or professional development can teach like living it through your child’s eyes. Our second child also showed all the signs of dyslexia and by the end of his first grade year, we knew the best thing we could do was homeschooling him too. This would give him the time to learn at his pace. For us to find what way worked for him. And for him to leave behind the daily judgments he passed on himself as those around him took off as readers while realizing the words on the page made less and less sense to him.

This put me in a new place. A place where I knew I needed something new and better than anything I had every seen published. I searched Pinterest, education blogs, and homeschool materials catalogs but I didn’t see anything that was new and different that would truly help. For the first time, I started crying out to God like I never had before. Something started changing. During worship time, I would have ideas appear to me. At first I thought I was being distracted by what concerned me and I scolded myself for not staying focused in worship. But each idea, I was able to take and implement as a strategy. God was pushing me to take the idea and partner it with what I already knew about good reading instruction. We would try the new thing and another piece of reading would make sense for our son. Every new idea came just as my son needed it and I would develop it at the word, sentence, and story level to build his reading skills. God was truly inspiring me to create a new reading program that would work for thinkers like my children; thinkers like M that needed a different solution.

This has all led me to where I am today. I am now working with other families virtually to share a new approach to teaching reading; one designed specifically for dyslexic young minds. A program for the Reading Warrior, because a dyslexic thinker does not master reading without becoming a master of many tools/weapons and practicing/training in strategies that hone their abilities.

Reading Warriors incorporates Orton-Gillingham Methods but has all the rules of reading leveled and grouped in a natural progression that trains the brain to compartmentalize these rules into a systematic plan organized with shapes and color cues guiding the way.  The Reading Warriors program will provide weekly online sessions to families. Digital downloads of all Reading Warriors materials will be available for purchase through the website as well as implementation instructions.  I plan to provide staff trainings in the future for schools that want to utilize this curriculum as intervention for students in Response to Intervention program (RtI) or Special Education classrooms. 

Reading Warriors is the first phase of See What Love Does, LLC.  There are other plans that God has in store.  I have asked to be a vessel that He uses.  A vessel carries its contents to those that need them.  I do not know who I can help, where this will lead, or how big of an impact it may have.  I leave all of that in His hands.  I know more ideas are bubbling inside of me and they will roll out in future phases as He guides. 

If you have ever sat with a child who looked at you the way M looked at me over 20 years ago, then you are in the right place to find answers.  I have learned so much that I plan to share through this blog, website, and new reading curriculum. And I know who has all the answers. If this has sparked an interest please continue to follow my blog.  I will be posting based on my twenty five years of experience as a special education teacher and eighteen years of experience as mom to neurodivergent children. If you know someone that has a child struggling with reading, please share and point them to help that is different from what others may have already tried.  If you are an educator passionate about helping all students through their education journey with compassion and great instructional technique; please follow the blog. Find me on social media, and direct other educators and families my way.