Sarah Strohmeyer's Blog - Posts Tagged "reading"
God Bless You, Suzanne Collins
Our sixteen-year-old son is dyslexic, a fact we discovered not by school reading tests - which he aced - but by my sister in law, a schoolteacher, who called me up one day and, after taking a deep breath, said there might be something wrong with the way Sam reads.
It was odd because he understood what he was not able to read. Does that make sense? Prose he could not parse aloud in class he could analyze. Poetry, that he loved. And because our elementary school was a small rural one and my husband was on the school board and felt we shouldn't "burden" taxpayers with tutoring, I took him out of class four days a week when he was in third grade to a specialist who, literally, taught him the rules of words, word by word, syllable by syllable. (Thank heavens I was an author by then because that kind of schedule never would have passed in my newspaper job.)
Sam benefitted from a high IQ, a boost that would only get him so far. He's great in math and I have the feeling that his model as far as math geeks go is not that unusual. By the way, he hates video games, possibly because he can't process them as fast as his friends.
And he hates reading. Actually, he loves it. Or he wants to love it. But it still requires such extra effort on his part that what for most of us on Goodreads is a joy and an escape for him is, well, like sitting down with a cup of tea and a set of twenty calculus problems. (I don't mean to stereotype....maybe some of you do that!)
Until The Hunger Games. Sam read the first two over two days, just as he read Harry Potter back to back (his sister and us reading them to him when he was small helped) along with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe series and for reasons that totally escape me, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
But Suzanne's books are the ones that prompted the words that for years and years I've longed to hear: "I think I might like reading."
God Bless You, Suzanne!
It was odd because he understood what he was not able to read. Does that make sense? Prose he could not parse aloud in class he could analyze. Poetry, that he loved. And because our elementary school was a small rural one and my husband was on the school board and felt we shouldn't "burden" taxpayers with tutoring, I took him out of class four days a week when he was in third grade to a specialist who, literally, taught him the rules of words, word by word, syllable by syllable. (Thank heavens I was an author by then because that kind of schedule never would have passed in my newspaper job.)
Sam benefitted from a high IQ, a boost that would only get him so far. He's great in math and I have the feeling that his model as far as math geeks go is not that unusual. By the way, he hates video games, possibly because he can't process them as fast as his friends.
And he hates reading. Actually, he loves it. Or he wants to love it. But it still requires such extra effort on his part that what for most of us on Goodreads is a joy and an escape for him is, well, like sitting down with a cup of tea and a set of twenty calculus problems. (I don't mean to stereotype....maybe some of you do that!)
Until The Hunger Games. Sam read the first two over two days, just as he read Harry Potter back to back (his sister and us reading them to him when he was small helped) along with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe series and for reasons that totally escape me, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
But Suzanne's books are the ones that prompted the words that for years and years I've longed to hear: "I think I might like reading."
God Bless You, Suzanne!
