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A mother's story of dyslexia awareness

Laurie Frydenlund arranged Scrabble like letter tiles into words and fired questions at her student, 13 year old Tommy Fox.

Sky. "How come we didn't spell sky with an "i"?

Ski. "What sound is the "i" making?"

Macaroni. "What sound does that "open a" make?"

Fox is dyslexic. Frydenlund, his tutor, has spent three years teaching him to break down the English language and build it back up, step by step, rule by rule.

In so doing, Frydenlund may be literally rewiring Fox's brain.

A growing body of research shows the brains of dyslexics don't work the same way typical readers' do parts of the left temporal lobe aren't functioning as they should.

Perhaps even more importantly, evidence is mounting that scientifically based remedial programs
actually activate those regions of the brain that control reading erasing biological differences between those who have the disorder and those who don't.

Lee public school classes resume Monday, and if children here follow national averages, thousands might be dyslexic. Exact figures depend on how you define the disorder, but commonly held standards show between 10 percent and 20 percent of the population have reading, spelling and handwriting problems that may fall into the dyslexia spectrum. The biggest challenge for dyslexics is understanding how to hear and identify "phonemes," or units of sound. The word cat, for example, has three sounds.

When Fox first came to The Learning Solution, Frydenlund's Fort Myers practice, he couldn't read the word "the." He was 9 years old.

"I would see letters but I couldn't sound them out or say them right," he said before a tutoring session last week.

Now, scientists have a better idea why.

"We could see a hotter 'hot spot' after the remediation," said Dr. Marcel Just, who runs the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University.

His newly published research showed a 40 percent increase in activity in the word decoding areas of children's brains after they'd received 100 hours of remedial instruction. Just's findings are>based on brain scans known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

When you think about it, Just said, the human brain wasn't wired to process written language the way it instinctively knows to walk and talk.

"(Print) is sort of a technology somebody invented," Just said. "In some sense, it's the terribly bad luck of people with dyslexia that this was the medium developed to store and display knowledge."

Researchers at Children's Hospital Boston found similarly promising results last year in a study of 10 year olds.

The researchers tested children's ability to hear sounds sounds that unfold slowly in words versus sounds that come more rapidly. Half their subjects had dyslexia and half did not. Those with the disorder had difficulty identifying rapidly changing sounds, explained Dr. Nadine Gaab, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. And that made it more difficult for them to decode written language.

With eight weeks of sound based training, the children's reading improved and imaging scans showed the brain light up in areas it hadn't before.

Such studies are only the tip of understanding and treating the disorder, said Dr. Guinevere Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University Medical Center and president elect of the Maryland-based International Dyslexia Association.

"Can we use brain imaging to identify which interventions are most successful?" she said, posing one of the many questions researchers are considering.

Other questions include pinpointing different branches of dyslexia and understanding differences in remediating adults versus children brain scans of adult dyslexics don't show the same degree of normalization that children's do following remediation, Eden said.

How, then, to identify and help children before their dyslexia forces them into years of academic failure?

In Jacksonville, Nemours Children's Clinic started a preschool screening program known as BrightStart! Dyslexia Initiative. Children who are at risk receive 18, 30-minute lessons to help them with skills such as letter and sound recognition.

"We have gotten phenomenal results," said Gayle Cane, the program's director of screening and intervention.

Among the first group of children to go through the program, 69 percent were considered to be on track in relation to their peers by the end of kindergarten, Cane said. Among children not at risk for dyslexia, 72 percent were.

"We know we are really priming those brains to approach reading at a young age," said Cane.

Lee schools are further refining their reading program this year and developing even more strategies to identify and halt reading problems before children lag too far behind their peers.

Frydenlund is hoping to work with local instructors to raise awareness of the disorder. She offered an introduction to dyslexia at one school, Tropic Isles Elementary, and is hoping she can better educate instructors on what to watch for, how to offer accommodations, how to remediate them and when to refer children for testing. She uses a phonicsbased, multisensory approach based on the work of dyslexia pioneers, Anna Gillingham and Samuel Orton.

"Teachers are making all the best efforts," she said. "It's just what they do doesn't always make sense for people with dyslexia."