Article

Brain Gym^® and Reading -- Three Success Stories

A few months ago a client brought her ten-year-old son "Greg" for a balance to improve his reading. Reading was really a concern for Greg. He'd been slow to learn to read, and had had difficulty with every stage of reading. He was in a special reading class now at his school, and was showing minimal progress, although he is a very intelligent, fun child who is interested in everything around him.

I saw him twice over the next several weeks. At each session we worked on some aspect of reading. We worked on reading fluency and word recognition, and did several repatterning processes, including Dennison Laterality Repatterning, which would allow Greg to have greater use of both brain hemispheres simultaneously during things like reading. It was clear by the end of each session that something had shifted, and I wondered what might be happening at school.

Recently my client had some time off work and went to school with her son for an entire day. She went with him to his special reading class and was so surprised! The teacher had the group reading orally from a somewhat challenging text about wild animals. Greg, the "reluctant reader", was volunteering to read the longest paragraphs with the hardest words--and doing a great job of it!

My client said she was so amazed to see her son read so much better than anyone else in the special class. She said, "He's so delighted with his reading skills! He's really taken off with reading now!"

Another client recently brought her daughter "Laura" for a session to address a different kind of reading problem. Laura is in high school and takes Honors courses; yet she simply could not "decode" new and unfamiliar words. She would recognize a word once someone pronounced it for her, but she simply could not make out new words on her own at all. Her mother was baffled at how her daughter could excel so in school, and yet not have this basic reading skill.

As a pre-check I asked Laura to read orally from a short story by O. Henry, which has fairly adult vocabulary, and words used in unusual contexts. She read smoothly until she came across a word she'd never seen. She tried sounding it out several different ways and was completely unsuccessful. I was especially surprised, as this word followed fairly conventional phonetic rules.

Balancing for the goal "I easily read new words" led us to use Vision Re-education techniques from the In-Depth material. Interestingly, Laura had a history of "eye tracking" difficulties and had done special eye exercises with a developmental optometrist for some time to correct it. It was clear from the pre-checks we did that eye tracking (both eyes teaming to focus on the same point) was still a challenge for her.

Once the Vision Re-education techniques were complete we re-checked her eye tracking, which showed considerable improvement. Then I had her read again. She began at the next paragraph and read the entire (much longer) passage flawlessly, including several unusual words that I strongly suspected were unfamiliar. The only clue I had that at the moment was the slight--almost imperceptible--hesitation before pronouncing some of them.

When she was finished, I asked if she'd known all those words. "No," she said, "there were words there I'd never seen before. But somehow I just knew them."

A client named "Donna" said that she had always battled a certain problem with reading. When she looked at a page of print, her eyes wanted to focus only on the center of each line; it took effort to actually look at the beginning and end of each line.

This woman had been a very successful executive with a media company. Her career had been based on her ability to scan "wire service" printouts for daily news elements to broadcast. I couldn't imagine how much energy it had taken her to do her job!

Donna's session, also, called on Vision Re-education techniques. When we were finished, she looked at a page of print, and the look on her face was amazing. She said, "I can see this entire line of print! I don't have to make myself do it--it just happens!"