Luckily, our daughter was deemed a good fit for a summer literacy camp that the clinic offered that year. Then, in the summer of 2015, an impromptu conversation changed everything: a colleague encouraged me to call the UW Speech & Hearing Clinic to inquire about its services and waitlist status. Each day that passed began to weigh on us like a missed chance. Research has shown that therapeutic intervention has a far greater impact if children receive it when their brains are still sponge-like and plastic. Tears at bedtime were a regular occurrence as she stumbled over the same simple words in paragraph after paragraph. Dyslexia is the most common diagnosis, affecting approximately one in 10 individuals, according to the International Dyslexia Association.ĭespite her new school, our daughter still struggled to read on her own. Struggles in this area from an early age can indicate that an otherwise typically developing child may have a language-based learning disability. My teacher is a lifesaver!”Īlthough we didn’t realize it at the time, our daughter still needed help strengthening her phonological awareness-the ability to decipher sounds within words, a foundational skill for reading. After her first day “air-writing” letters, my daughter told me, “Mom, I understood everything that I heard in class today. Two weeks later, we transferred her to a Catholic school in our Northeast Seattle neighborhood that offers Slingerland instruction-a multisensory teaching method-to all students in lower grades. When her teacher confided during a midyear conference that our daughter wasn’t thriving, my husband and I decided to look beyond the public school system. It wasn’t for lack of trying she yearned to read like her friends yet she struggled to understand how sounds fit together to make symbols of meaning, or words. But she still hadn’t learned how to read. My daughter’s participation as a research subject in this study at the UW Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS) could transform her life as a student impacted by dyslexia.Īlmost 20 years after graduating with an English degree from the UW (my husband, Christian, is an Evans School alum), I could never have guessed that I’d be back on campus again, but this time for the sake of our daughter-a vivacious, socially savvy first-grader who can assemble puzzles faster than her older sister and has a knack for creating the most fantastic worlds out of odds and ends in shoeboxes. Over the next almost-hour, I flipped through magazines in the waiting room and let the magnitude of our daughter’s willingness to be here sink in. A few minutes later-guided by a member of the UW Brain Development and Research team-she was heading across the hall for her brain scan.
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