Did you know that dyslexia, autism, and ADHD are not all genetic?
Did you know that dyslexia is not purely genetic? Thinking that dyslexia is all genetic is a cop-out. It's the disease you get from reading by sight-words. Reading should happen on the left side of the brain; sight words put it on the right side, defectively.
Reading is hearing with your eyes! It mentally translates the visual cues into the sounds of speech. If your baby can read by sight-words now, he'll probably struggle with reading later.
Dyslexia is not a visual-confusion problem; it can be a hearing-processing problem in brain neurons. Dyslexia is curable by direct phonics instruction.
Again, sight-words not genetics cause dyslexia. Besides the scientific proof of this, many people have shared their stories, such as my friend, Janet:
When she was a child, Janet's school taught her to read by sight-words. She struggled. She couldn't spell. Then the school said she had dyslexia and learning disabilities.
So the teachers took her out of math class for Special-Ed English. She was good at math, but since she was missing too much math, she got behind. So they took her out of science class for Special-Ed math. Then they took her out of history class for Special Ed science. By 6th grade, Special Ed took up over half her day.
The Janet I know is a very intelligent woman. She decided to home-school her children. Like most good home-schoolers, Janet taught them to read by a phonics method, teaching herself right along with them. The phonics lessons cured her learning disability! She has no symptoms of dyslexia any more, and she can spell just fine, now.
Janet is just one of many stories proving that dyslexia is caused by sight-reading methods like Whole Language, Your Baby Can Read, Dick & Jane, etc. Here is a truism to consider:
No child phonics-reader has ever developed dyslexia. It is not- and never has been- purely genetic. Reverse the educational decline for your child. Prevent dyslexia with The Godfrey Method of early reading the right way.
Dyslexia can share many of the same biological triggers in infants and toddlers as ADHD and autism, caused by early release of chemicals such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which shut down the proper brain functioning too soon. See Dr. Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain that Changes Itself.
Though a child may have a biological precursor for dyslexia, acquiring it is not automatic. Even a genetic predisposition for dyslexia does not cause its development. Perfectly normal children with no family history of dyslexia can gain this disability from sight-reading or environmental cues.
The worst combination is environmental cues in infancy followed by sight-reading in school. A genetic propensity would increase the odds. But guess what?! One-on-one phonics instruction can prevent or cure the problem. Really.
I am not saying this to make parents feel guilty. I am saying it to give them hope! Parents of infants and young children can use preventative measures. Parents of older children with dyslexia can help them overcome it and re-wire their brains to read properly with phonics.
Knowledge is the best weapon. The studies, facts, and data reported here are to help families, not censure them.
The whole reason that I developed The Godfrey Method and wroteA Pretty Girl Was Alpha Bette was because one of my older sons was showing signs of struggling as a preschooler. I’m sure that without my phonics method, he would have dyslexia. But he doesn’t!
Also, one of my grandsons had speech problems and manifested markers of dyslexia, but my phonics cured him, too. The change in him was startling. Phonics even fixed his speech problems!
It helps struggling children come up to speed, but it also helps normal readers learn faster and easier. It is my goal to help every child that I can, and to increase literacy.
The work of Dr. Glenn Doman (see my Vol. 2 of It's Not Rocket Surgery!) also bears out the truth of healing the young brain by re-wiring it with proper teaching techniques. Dr. Michael Merzenich’s work is also discussed in Chapter 2.
Markers of Dyslexia - some are preventable, all are curable:
1) Sensory overload as infants – While babies’ brains are developing, too much TV, radio, or white noise (like freeway traffic) may cause premature shutdown of the brain-mapping before neurons have learned to distinguish and process sounds properly (more-so if they are genetically predisposed).
Sensory overload may be one of the precursors to auditory processing problems, slowed brain development, dyslexia, and even autism and ADHD. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays a crucial role in reinforcing changes made in the brain in the critical period.
If BDNF is released too soon from sensory overload, crucial neuron growth also shuts down too soon. From then on, children's brains may be immature, developing 2 to 4 years behind age level. Some may never catch up without help.
2) Temporal lobe timing – Children’s brains with dyslexia respond abnormally to language stimuli. Their auditory cortex neurons may be firing too slowly, so they can’t distinguish between similar sounds or which sound came first or second. They may not hear the beginnings of syllables or the sound changes within syllables.
Normal children’s neurons are ready to fire again after a 30-millisecond rest between processing. The neurons of language-impaired children take at least three times that long to be ready. They lose large amounts of language information. With slow-firing neuron patterns, the signals are not clear.
With intense remediation training, the brains of dyslexic children can be rewired to understand rapidly-changing sounds that are the building blocks of language and reading.
3) Hearing processing difficulties – Children with language disabilities have brain auditory-processing problems with common consonant-vowel combinations that are spoken quickly (called “the fast parts of speech”).
These children have trouble processing them accurately and then reproducing them accurately. Improper hearing-processing in the brain leads to weaknesses in all the language tasks – vocabulary, comprehension, speech, reading, and writing. This has nothing to do with being deaf - they aren't.
Dyslexic children’s brains can be trained with phonics to help them hear sounds in words and operate more like those of normal readers. Many experts used to think these kids were ‘broken,’ but they can be fixed. Phonics re-wires the brain, as well as speeds up its processing rate.
4) Speech difficulties – Early speech difficulties may predict dyslexia. Young dyslexic children are not as good as their peers at pronouncing multi-syllabic words.
Studies have shown that the brains of children with dyslexia work about 5 times harder than other children’s brains when performing the same language tasks.
Dr. Michael Merzenich and Dr. Paula Tallal found that preschool children with a language disability later have difficulty reading, writing, or even following instructions. This can be misdiagnosed as ADHD.
5) Reading problems – Young children who were not as good as their peers at saying multi-syllabic words such as ‘crocodile,’ had trouble with literacy later.
One excellent remedial program that rewires the brain is called ‘Fast ForWord’ from Scientific Learning. The computer program exercises every basic brain function involved in language, from decoding sounds to comprehension. It’s a cerebral cross-training of neurons.
These brain exercises help dyslexic children improve their ability to distinguish short and long sounds. They also teach children to identify confusing consonant-vowel combinations at increasingly faster speeds.
Another exercise helps them hear faster frequency-glides. Yet another helps them to remember and match sounds.
The fast parts of speech have been slowed down by computer so that language-impaired children can hear them and develop clear brain maps for them. Then gradually they are sped up.
Each time the child is rewarded, his brain secretes dopamine and acetylcholine, which help consolidate the brain map changes he has just made. These exercises can rewire the dyslexic brain in only eight to twelve weeks.
The average child who took this program moved ahead 1.8 years of language development in six weeks. A Stanford group did brain scans of children before and after Fast ForWord.
The first scans showed that dyslexic children use different parts of their brains for reading than normal children do. After the program, their brain scans showed that their brains had begun to normalize and show patterns that were similar to children who have no reading problems, with increased activity in the proper cortex.
But what about parents who can’t afford to send their children away for eight to twelve weeks for this break-through, computer-based remediation? Dr. Merzenich’s Scientific Learning has home-based computer solutions Such as BrainSpark and BrainPro as well.
However, there is something even easier that parents can do to prevent speech and dyslexia problems: turn off the TV and teach phonics early. Teaching phonics the right way, starting before the child is 2 years old, will help the child’s brain hear the individual sounds and then put them together properly.
The brain neurons will learn to distinguish the different sounds and decode the words, mapping them in the proper cortex. Sight reading cannot do this. Phonics can help clear up speech problems as well. The child learns slowly at first, then speeds up with practice over time.
Wouldn’t it be much better to prevent much of dyslexia (and possibly autism, ADHD) by starting phonics early at home than to have to try to fix it later? Wouldn’t it be better to help a savant be well-rounded in all areas of intelligence from the beginning?
Proactive, purposeful parents may never realize how much damage they spared their child. The worst thing possible would be to wait until school age and let the schools do the teaching. The educators in power know better, but don’t care.
http://thegodfreymethod.com/blog/saving-jack-and-jill-5-curable-markers-dyslexia
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