Guest blog: My Journey with Dyslexia

Primary teacher and Early Years Specialist Sarah (@thedyslexicleader) joins us on the blog for Dyslexia Awareness Week to share her personal experiences with dyslexia and how she supports all learners to thrive in the classroom. 

"It’s a superpower, but only when you know how to use it"

Reading is something that every child should be able to access and enjoy. It’s a magical world of excitement and intrigue; the type of magic where you can lose yourself in the story, dreaming of what your life would be like and becoming a person that you never thought you could be.  

However, for some children, the moment that they are asked to read a book, decode text or look at words (instead of pictures), the enjoyable, magical moments of imagination are taken away. They are left feeling defeated, unsure and anxious, repeatedly getting stuck on that one word in a passage of text. Doubt creeps in; thoughts of ‘am I reading this right?’ or ‘why can’t I say the words correctly?’ rear in their mind; or worst of all, ‘why am I stupid?’ They might be articulate, bright and sparky, yet these challenges can leave them scared of reading. 

I first encountered these difficulties when I moved England to begin Year One at the age of six, after a year and a half living in Portugal. It turned out that I wasn’t great at reading. I could ‘read’ familiar words, by sight reading words I had memorised, but hadn’t learnt phonics in Portugal and didn’t understand ways to decode, segment and blend words together. I was on the backfoot from my peers already and slowly started getting further behind. By Year Four, it was noticeable that I couldn’t spell to save my life; put me in a spelling bee and I’d be out on the first round. I couldn’t memorise words and I’d write them how they sounded. Think ‘their’, ‘there’ and ‘they’re’ or ‘which’ and ‘witch’ or ‘where’, ‘we’re’, ‘wear’… It never went well. These are typical traits of dyslexia when put together, but on their own they didn’t mean much.  

I did still enjoy reading books with pictures in. I often chose information books as these had diagrams and illustrations, which cut down the words for reading. Pictures help to reduce the cognitive load on the brain of reading and decoding words (1). They also help to break up the small print of text.  

By Year Six, however, more and more of my friends were moving onto longer chapter books like Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events or Jacqueline Wilson’s The Best Friends, while I was stuck on reading scheme books that I found boring and didn’t enjoy. It was obvious that something was wrong, but no one would say it. I was taken out for interventions which made no sense to me. I understood how to write sentences and I could read longer paragraphs, but if I came across a word that I could not read or that I hadn’t seen before, it threw me off the text and I would get fed up. 

I got all the way to Year Nine, at age 14, before I finally discovered that I might be dyslexic. This was only because my high school thought there was a ‘discrepancy’ between my reading age and spelling age. This was a shock, to get a diagnosis of dyslexia, but made the most sense. Why had no one said this before? I had struggled with spelling and hadn’t enjoyed reading my whole life and only now, ten years into the school system, did someone say something. 

It took 2 more years before I received a formal diagnosis of dyslexia and then some further struggles before finally being allowed a separate room for exams, so that I could talk my answers through, read the questions out loud and have spare paper for notes. I learned more and more about dyslexia; I researched it as I got older and discovered that the strategies I’d made up to try and overcome it and be more like my peers were what had gotten me through life. Nobody had taught me these skills; I just figured out what worked for me. To this day they work, but I wouldn’t be able to identify what is a strategy and what is just me, because I’ve been doing them for so long. 

The power of accessible books 

Dyslexic struggles find their way into your life when you least expect it and it’s something that I’m still trying to figure out how to manage fourteen years after diagnosis. Often strategies you’ve found to help you, tapped into or brought with you for many years can only get you so far.  Being a Primary School Teacher of nine years, specialising in Early Years and SEND, studying phonics as part of my three-year Early Years and Primary Education degree, I’m forever trying to encourage, excite and support children to read. The biggest problem we have in the school system is that as soon as children move from short 3-4 sentences per page books, the text type changes, the line spacing decreases and the words become harder to read. Not because the words are different, although some are, but because the text type is not accessible, the words are not comfortable to read and the reader’s brain starts to work overtime to process small text.   

Growing up, I hated reading due to these exact issues. My brain would become tired and overwhelmed by the small text, hard-to-read fonts and narrow line spacing in many books, meaning that I struggled to process the words on the page. My reading speed was already slow, and these factors made it worse. Sharing Barrington Stoke’s books over the last few years has been refreshing, with their larger print and line spacing that’s easy to follow without the need for finger pointing. Accessible books are needed in everyday life, libraries and classrooms and these books are just that. 

Lightly printed or pale printed colours on a page is another feature that’s more inviting for dyslexic readers, reducing the cognitive load and helping the brain to process. This is partly due to dyslexia giving you an eye for detail; strengths that you don’t realise, and precision where people don’t think it’s warranted. (For example, growing up I often enjoyed using maps on trips out, finding places, matching the names to signs in the park or forests to those on the map. I could remember paths or routes we had been on, and familiar details of walks.) All of Barrington Stoke’s books are printed onto mild to moderately tinted paper, meaning that the high contrast of white is gone, reducing the visual stress. The pages are thick, which means that the reader can’t see words from the other side of the pages and can focus on what they’re reading. This is important for children who struggle to read, as any distraction or problem can become the reason that books become off-putting. 

Barrington Stoke have a great movement happening with their books and I hope more schools, libraries and parents will share their books with their children because this is exactly what we need. In Early Years, the Little Gems collection is perfect for children who are ready to read or have some decodable knowledge for reading and can be read as a shared read or one-to-one. These books are short chapter books with 2-3 sentences per page, pictures and illustrations to help guide the reader and reduce cognitive overload. They also look appealing and inviting, meaning that readers older than 5/6 years old would be able to read them and not feel silly or embarrassed for picking them up.

Having read a selection of Barrington Stoke’s books now, I can safely say that if I’d had these in Primary School, I would have had a better relationship with reading. 

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