Claire Ellen is Interviewed by Mom

Tell me about dyslexia. What is dyslexia, in your understanding?

“It’s an awesome disability!”

First, tell me about the “awesome” part.

Well, it’s awesome because you can imaginate things much more than you can do other things. So about the awesome part of it, you are very good at creative stuff. Me and my brother are really good at Legos, and I suggest when you’re schooling you move your hands with something because it will help you remember and help you do better.

If you just work hard enough on your reading, it will go pretty well. I still love reading even though I’m dyslexic. It’s very fun.

But even just a little bit of dyslexia can make you very creative.

OK. Tell me now about the “disability” part.

Well, it’s not really a disability, once you know how to read real well. Me and my brother are almost on that stage. But when we see new words, we still have to sound them out and take longer. But the only really weird thing about dyslexia is, you know sight words like “and”?

Yeah.

Well, our dyslexia doesn’t just make it hard to read; sight words like “and” or “is” or “are” are hard for us to remember.* But big words like “answered” is easy, for me, to remember. Most people, when they learn sight words, they start with the small ones and easy get those down, but when they get to the big words, it takes them a long time.

But dyslexia has only one other problem. When you guess too much and you really don’t read very well. Even if you do read a few correct words, [it’s] your guess [that really] makes those words sound right.

All kinds of books, like Frindle, to be exact, are good books but they’re really very hard for dyslexics. They have new words that they make up, like “frindle.” So when the books introduce the new word, you try to learn that as sight words, and when you take the time to learn that as sight words, you find that when you start reading again that you wasted time making that a sight word, for it was only in one book.

[note: I read Frindle aloud to them, and she learned the word from seeing the cover as I read.]

You seem to really be happy about the creativity part of dyslexia. Tell me more about that.

Well, the creativity part is a part where you can make your brain do things that most people cannot. You can design things in your head without having to write them out on paper. So like things like well, things like folders and inventions that you make are one-of-a-kind things.

And moms, you know that if your kids are super creative and make things like art that you don’t think you would ever see, it’s probably a good sign that they have dyslexia—and if they struggle with sight words.

Now back to the folders: Well the folders usually are different colors in your head. You make a story, put it in one of the folders, and while it is still lingering in your head, you take a folder out and you can remember all the story. It works really well for me and my brother, especially if we want to have dreams. So what we do is we take or we make a new folder and we spin it around and just keep remembering it, have it open until we fall asleep. Then your brain should play that folder and you should have that dream. I’ve had that happen to me before.

[note: I’m not sure if this image came from the folders we use for homeschooling or from the interface on our Macbooks, but they both talk about putting certain ideas in “folders.”]

But my brother always says, when you are dreaming, all you need to do to make your characters stop doing weird thing is to pretend like you have two hands in your head. And you imagine them [the character] jumping and they’re jumping around in circles and twisting, not really jumping. [So the character is twisting, but you want him to be jumping.] You need to take your two hands and solemnly place them on the character and make the movements with your hands and while you’re holding him, make him jumping. [motions with hands]

So when your hands go out of the picture, you see him jumping, because you’ve fixed your mind on him not just wiggling and jiggling around.

So, dyslexics have another thing: they can make very cool inventions without even knowing what they’re doing. They can take sticks and paper, and other things that other kids would not even think to have fun with and they can make games and fun and other things that anybody can imagine.

[note: Many learning styles can do the same thing, I suppose, but I can’t fault her for her confidence here.]

I have to admit that dyslexia really isn’t a disability. Unless if you’re talking about the disability of being too awesome.

Now, I know that sometimes your dyslexia has caused you some frustration and aggravation. Tell me about one of those times.

Well, the only time when I get frustrated with dyslexia is when its hard for me to read the really good books that my brother can already read. But to introduce my name, which you probably have been wondering this whole time. My name is Claire Ellen. And my brother is Charlie.

Have you ever felt embarrassment because of your dyslexia?

Nope, nope, and nopity nope.

[I consider this last answer a good sign that we’ve done well and had marvelous teachers not only to teach them but to train us as parent-teachers as well.]

*Note: Why this was the case stumped me for a long time, until I read Ronald Davis's The Gift of Dyslexia and better understood the kids' "picture thinking" tendencies. Because these shorter words don't have ready "pictures" to associate with them (how do you "picture" something like to be?), they are harder to store as symbols in the dyslexic's brain.