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How I changed my son's life
I had been a primary teacher for many years prior to starting my own family of four children when it became very apparent to me that my second son, Ethan, was struggling at school. Previously happy and fun loving he became anxious and withdrawn when he entered year one. My husband and I had always read books aloud to our children everyday, we sang songs, played language games and talked. My first child had learned to read effortlessly following the ‘whole language’ pathway we had been taught at university. Yet, although he had experienced the same input as my first son, Ethan wasn’t learning to read. I had meetings with his teachers, but everyone said, it would take time, he was a boy, we were doing all the right things, we just had to wait for things to ‘click’… but they never did.
I battled getting Ethan to school each day and went home feeling exhausted and helpless as I left him, tears rolling silently down his cheeks, in the line outside his classroom each morning. The turning point for me happened when my aunty visited us on the summer holidays between year two and year three for Ethan. She was sitting on the couch with the kids reading their favourite books and she asked Ethan to read some of the book they were sharing. He stumbled and tripped over nearly every word. She came to me later and said, “You know he can’t read, don’t you?” and I had to admit she was right. Everything I had been doing to help him up to this point hadn’t worked. Waiting for things to “click” was over.
The start of the year 3 saw us booking him in for an assessment with an educational psychologist. We now had a diagnosis of Dyslexia and were told he needed a systematic, structured phonetic program to teach him reading and spelling and were given a list of tutors. Although we now knew why Ethan wasn’t reading, there was no specific dyslexic intervention for him at school. Teachers would give him more time to complete reading tasks and he went to small group lessons with other children who were struggling with literacy but there wasn’t a specific structured phonics program for him. I had to find a way to teach him to read.
I had started to hear more and more about Dr Lillian Fawcett and her program, Cracking the ABC Code. I discovered Lillian was holding a parent information night at one of the local primary schools and I decided to go. Her presentation blew me away. I had been a primary teacher for many years, but I had never seen such a comprehensive system for teaching reading and spelling before. After buying her books that night I began using them with my son the same week. It worked. Ethan’s knowledge of the sounds and the different ways we write them started to improve and his confidence began to return. He finally learned a process to help him break up and read unfamiliar words. Tears and anxiety around school started to become a thing of the past.
A friend approached me and asked how I was finding the program and whether I would consider taking on more students. Lillian Fawcett was moving overseas and was looking for teachers to start teaching her program while she was away. I was learning so much about phonics and how our language really works as Ethan and I worked out way through the program together. I wanted to learn as much as I could to keep helping him. After completing Lillian’s training I began to specialise in teaching her program. I’ve now been working this way for over ten years. I’ve used it with three of my own children and hundreds of private students and have seen first-hand what a difference it makes. Ethan graduated from Sacred Heart College in 2018 and achieved ATAR entry into UWA to study Geology. Without the Cracking the ABC Code program I think he would have taken a much different path. I am forever grateful I found it.
