Guest Blog: Dyslexia - Swimming Through Confusion by Anne-Marie Beggs
Is your child unhappy in school? Are they consistently sick?
For those of us who work with Dyslexic individuals we know that what they complain about most is confusion.
If you’re a Dyslexic child, a single class can give rise to feelings of chronic confusion: making individuals sick to their stomach, migraines, and frustration and isolated.
As they sit in the classroom and look around, they wonder why everyone else is smiling.
Why does everyone else look happy?
They don’t look sick! Or have sore heads!
They feel so isolated, alone, and not intelligent.
What gave rise to the confusion?
Children have no idea why they are confused, or what is causing the confusion.
For them it’s like swimming across a lake and not having learnt to swim.
They don’t realise that all our brains are different, so we all think differently, and we all learn differently.
So, in our classroom we see our 8-year-old Emily with her pal Jack sitting next to her, they are great friends. They’ve been friends for years so they know each other very well. Apart from one important fact, Jack’s brain works differently: he’s a word thinker, he loves words’ he loves reading, so school is the perfect environment for him.
Little Emily doesn’t realise she’s a picture thinker, its’ her fantastic ability to think in 3D that’s causing her confusion. She just thinks she’s not as smart as Jack. Don’t let your child or yourself swim through school and life without the tools to do so.
This explains in very simplistic terms why some children feel uncomfortable in school. But the confusion and frustration grow the longer the child is in school. If you imagine sitting confused all day every day because you can’t access the curriculum. One of my colleagues based in the UK who is dyslexic herself said school for her was awful!! She went everyday she never learnt anything because she felt the teachers were speaking a foreign language!!
That’s because the dyslexic mind functions differently. If you imagine the brain is like a filling cabinet full of files which contain information.
The word thinkers mind has files full of words. When they read their brain matches the words on the page with those in the filing cabinet and then creates a picture to match this in turn creates understanding.
The picture thinker’s brain is made up of pictures their thinking flows in the opposite direction. When they encounter a word, their brain searches in its filing cabinet for a picture to match the word, if there is no picture in the filing cabinet then the result is confusion! The words that cause the most confusion are what we as Davis facilitators call trigger words, because they create a blank space in this persons thinking. These words are sometimes referred to as sight words/or the dolch list.
The system myself and my colleagues use fills in these blanks spaces with images created in clay. The beauty of this system is it allows the picture thinker to flourish, when they read their filing cabinet is now full of pictures created in clay. When they read their brain sees the word, they now have a picture to match that word so their brain says OK I know what that word means. I have a picture and a word that match, this creates a knowledge base to allow the person to understand the content and therefore enjoy reading.
This is a brief over view of Dyslexia with regard to confusion with words, as a Davis Facilitator this is only a single strand of our work, but a very important part of it. If you would like to learn more please get in touch.
If you are interested in purchasing my book, “A Bridge Between Two Me’s” it’s available on amazon kindle for download right now.
Or for the hard copy which is on prelaunch use the code; clever22
Any questions please contact me:
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