I first started tutoring with Barton around 8 years ago with my daughter.
When she was young she struggled to learn letters and then later with reading also. I remember one time when she was around first grade she was very sad and told me that at school she felt like a baby because she couldn’t read words like the other kids in her class could.
I had always read to her a lot – I love to read, its always been my favorite thing. It was confusing to me why it was so hard for her. I had no idea what was going on. I bought all sorts of fun educational toys to help learn letters, etc. It didn’t help.
Her school didn’t have any answers. Eventually I dug around online trying to find answers and realized she was probably dyslexic. So happy to finally have an answer I made an appointment with her reading specialist at her school.
I couldn’t have been more disappointed that the “reading specialist” didn’t even believe dyslexia was real. So the school was no help at all.
She was eventually put into some reading program at school that was known to actually do more harm than good for kids with dyslexia. And got an IEP. But it didn’t help.
When I would try to read with her it was obvious that she was guessing at words based on pictures. She would read ‘bedtime’ as ‘bathtime’ when a book showed a picture of a bathtub.
She clearly didn’t understand rhyming at all but had memorized that words like cat, hat and mat rhymed, having been taught they did at school. But she still didn’t really rhyming or how to break syllables into phonemes.
I read and learned more and eventually came across the Barton Reading and Spelling System. I was divorced by that time and as a single mom it was a pretty big expense for me, but I had to do it for my daughter.
That’s how I got involved with teaching kids with dyslexia how to read. I hope I can help your kids too so they don’t spend as many years feeling defeated and bad about themselves because they are behind their peers with their reading and spelling skills.
About me
I have a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and M.S. in Biochemistry from Purdue. I worked in science for a while but eventually became a work at home mom and after seeing my daughter struggle with reading and spelling and not getting appropriate help from her school I became interested in tutoring. I’m currently a substitute teacher in Parkway School District and tutor kids with dyslexia.
