Every weeknight, Jenn and Eric Williams helped their daughter Amanda study her spelling words. Every Friday the third grader came home with the same bad news: She flunked the spelling test.

Amanda’s teachers tried to help by modifying assignments. Amanda was also seeing a reading tutor once a week, too. But evenings at the Williams’ home remained stressful, with homework taking more than two hours, complicated by what Jenn describes as whining, delay tactics and even fits.

Jenn says, “Reading had always been hard for Amanda. She’s just like me in that regard. I was never diagnosed with dyslexia, but my brother was, and I know I struggle with it, too.”

Six months earlier, Jenn had received a postcard from a company called LearningRx with a checklist of 20 symptoms of dyslexia. When Jenn saw that every single symptom described either Amanda or Jenn herself, she kept the postcard to show her husband.

“I knew LearningRx was the answer,” Jenn says. “Maybe because I struggle in the same way, I knew Amanda’s problem wasn’t lack of effort. The problem had something to do with her brain. Things just weren’t sinking in.”

Eric wasn’t as convinced. He thought he and Jenn could still help Amanda by simply working harder. It wasn’t until the following spring—when no amount of working with Amanda could help her correctly spell more than three words out of 15—the couple decided to see if brain training could help their daughter.

Amanda began a 12-week brain training program at the LearningRx Brain Training Center in Maple Grove, MN. She worked one-on-one with a brain coach five to six hours a week, doing mental exercises designed to strengthen the weak brain skills that were making life frustrating.

Amanda was so relieved.

“I thought LearningRx was going to be boring. I thought it was going to be torture,” the animated nine-year-old says today. “But it was actually fun! We got to play games, and I was surprised that those games helped my reading.”

The “games” Amanda loves are actually a very targeted sequence of mental exercises incorporating the five key elements of effective brain training—practice, intensity, sequencing, loading and feedback. LearningRx, a pioneer and leader in the field of brain training, consistently gets dramatic gains for their clients by administering these exercises in a personal coaching environment.

Jenn says the changes for her daughter were huge.

“We went from two stressful hours of homework every night to less than half an hour—and no stress! We used to spend 30 minutes every night studying for spelling tests that Amanda failed every time. By the end of LearningRx, we were waiting until Friday morning, running through the spelling words for 10 minutes, and Amanda was coming home with 100% on every quiz.”

Perhaps even more significant is that, since brain training, Amanda loves to read. She says, “Before LearningRx, I read very skinny chapter books. Now I can read thicker books,” adding, “Reading started to get more fun when I started to understand the books. I thought, ‘Well, this book is kind of interesting, and I want to read it more so I can get onto the next book and read more interesting stuff!’”

She also has more free time now that homework is easier. “I can play with my friends, play on the computer, video chat with my Aunt Linda, watch more TV, ride my bike or roller skate instead of spending so much time on homework. And homework—this is really surprising me to say this—but it’s much more fun!”

Jenn has also seen a big change in her daughter’s confidence. The mother of three says that, before LearningRx, she could see that her daughter’s self-image was being shaped by her struggles. “She no longer has that stigma of thinking, ‘I’m a really bad reader, I’m dumb, I’m not good at anything.’ She’s more confident. And I definitely have more hope for her future. Eric and I used to have a pit in our stomachs when we thought about college and the future for Amanda. We don’t have that now. I feel now that she’ll be able to go to college and do fine.”

Jenn recommends LearningRx to other parents of kids struggling with reading or homework. She says drugs aren’t the answer. She also believes school accommodations, while easing some stress, aren’t the answer either. “I didn’t want that for my daughter. Modifications aren’t realistic for life. I didn’t want a Band-Aid. I wanted a solution.”

Amanda has her own advice for kids struggling like she did. “I would tell other kids that LearningRx is the opposite of what you think. It’s fun, and it’s going to make school easier, better and very nice. I used to say ‘I can’t do this,’ and now I say ‘I can do this! I can do anything if I try!’”

Amanda is the winner of the most recent LearningRx video testimonial contest. To see Amanda tell her story in her own words, watch her video here. 

The beloved Doc died in 1991, six years before the first Read Across America Day, and while he would most likely have been tickled with the event, the state of reading in America may have him rolling over in his grave.

A 2007 report by the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), shows reading literacy has dropped since Seuss was alive. To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence gathered statistics from more than 40 studies on the reading skills and habits of Americans of all ages. The report unveiled trends that Americans are reading less, reading less well, and graduating from school less prepared.

According to the official website of Dr. Seuss, a few weeks before his death, when asked if there was anything he might have left unsaid, Seuss replied, “Any message or slogan? Whenever things go a bit sour in a job I’m doing, I always tell myself, ‘You can do better than this.’ The best slogan I can think of to leave with the kids of the U.S.A. would be ‘We can…and we’ve got to…do better than this.”

Adults need to do better too. This March 2, the National Education Association’s Read Across America Day program calls for every child to be reading in the company of a caring adult.

Any one of the 44 books that Dr. Seuss wrote and illustrated would be a perfect pick for younger kids. Forty of them are written in rhyme. Rhyming forces the dissection of sounds and helps grow phonemic awareness, which is the ability to blend, unglue and manipulate sounds in a word. A 10-year Institute of Health study found that weakness in this area was the cause of 88% of all learning to read problems. Helping tots build that key cognitive skill now can help prevent problems when school starts, and keep them enjoying reading well into adulthood.

That love of reading as adults is another area of decline. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the percentage of adults over the age of 24 who reported having read a play, poem, short story or novel during the past year decreased between 1982 and 2002 – to just 47%. Seriously? Less than half of us are reading for pleasure?

Let Read Across America Day be a challenge to all of us. Read a book. Any book. You can find the right one if you just take a look. As of August 5, 2010 Google Books reports there were 129,864,880 published books to choose from. Surely you can find one to tackle.

Still hesitant? To that, America’s favorite reading doctor would probably say, again:

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” — Dr. Seuss (I Can Read with My Eyes Shut)

Learn to Read: Building Readers, Step by Step

Ms. Gelfond says “You can compare the process of learning to read to building a house. A well-built structure requires a strong foundation or the underlying weakness will cause problems over time. The same is true in “building” a better reader. Without the right foundational skills, learning to read can be very difficult. For some children reading comes easily because underlying skills develop properly, but for the children with weak skills, reading difficulties become evident as early as grades 1-3 and can remain for life. Foundational skills are critical for your child’s reading development.”

She goes on to outline the four steps, which are:

1. Laying the foundation with sound awareness, or phonemic awareness.
2. Raising the structure, by combining sounds, which involves blending and coding / decoding (this is typically referred to as “phonics.”)
3. Finish the house, or allow phonics to become automatic, with practice and refinement.
4. Enjoy the finished home, by developing comprehension skills.

Learn to Read: Foundational Skills

But what if your child did not learn to read because one or more of these steps was too difficult to master? Very often, students who do not learn to read have had trouble laying the foundation with sound awareness and phonics. Many tutoring programs focus on repeating these steps, but with many children who struggle to read, the problem is not a lack of exposure to phonics, or poor teaching methods. Usually, it’s a lack of ability to understand phonemes, or an inability to match sounds to the words on the page. These types of problems cannot be fixed by repetition or re-teaching. The problem must be attacked at its source – the child’s cognitive skills are most likely weak and need to be strengthened before progress can be made.

Auditory processing is the main cognitive skill that affects a person’s ability to learn to read. That skill, along with others that support and supplement reading (like memory, attention, and so forth) can be trained and strengthened with brain training. This is what the LearningRx program does. Once the cognitive skills are strong, the foundation can be built, and the child begins to “get” what they read. In fact, many of our students have enjoyed a book for the first time after going through our program, which is very exciting!

For more about how LearningRx can help you or your child learn to read, please visit us at our LearningRx brain training website.