7-year old Dyslexic Boy Explains what Reading is Like for Him

I am currently in Austria on a holiday and in Zuers, where all the locals celebrated the last day of skiing in the beautiful Arlberg region, I happened to sit next to a lovely lady from England, who married a local man. Her 7-year old son kept coming up to her with the Guinness Book of Records to ask her to read to him. She then told me about his troubles with his reading, his obvious intelligence and his frustration. At school the teachers don’t believe that he is dyslexic and ‘only’ has problems to concentrate long enough to learn to read. This didn’t make sense to his mum, who knew that he could concentrate for two hours, lying in a tree and watching how the bees transport the pollen.

I gave her two book titles to source and read (Ron’s book, ‘the Gift of Dyslexia’ and mine, ‘the Right Brain for the Right Time’) and she read both within days. Her emails since were filled with gratitude to have finally found her son on every page and finally understanding how he learns. She commented that the hardest sentence to hear from her son had been the ‘crowds of noises’ in his brain. We both agree that meeting each other was more than a mere coincidence and I am sure she will contact  the Davis facilitator in her area and have her son’s dyslexia corrected.

Her gift to me was the video clip she had sent me (in English). I have never heard a young boy verbalize his level of disorientation, what is going on in his head while he is reading, why he found a solution to read cross-eyed to get some of the words out correctly and how he finds the small words extremely hard to read. He even draws how fast words fly by or how they are arranged like petals of a flower, instead of the linear way. Some of the petals are bigger and he can get them, others disappear.