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The Light Barrier: A Color Solution to Your Child's Light-based Reading Difficulties
The Light Barrier: A Color Solution to Your Child's Light-based Reading Difficulties
The Light Barrier: A Color Solution to Your Child's Light-based Reading Difficulties
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The Light Barrier: A Color Solution to Your Child's Light-based Reading Difficulties

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The Light Barrier: One family's journey to understand a barrier to reading that may affect millions of children and adults worldwide.

Countless children with Irlen syndrome, involving sensitivity to aspects of light, have been misunderstood as lazy, slow, inattentive, dyslexic, ADHD, or just plain "troubled," when, in fact, what they suffer from is a correctable problem.

Rhonda Stone's daughter Katie was struggling at school, despite hours of help each night with homework. She also complained of physical discomfort and constant difficulties with seeing and reading, even though she passed repeated vision exams. By chance, while looking for a solution to help her child, this mother encountered a controversial but scientifically proven solution that has already helped thousands. Her personal story shares with readers the latest information gathered from three continents and shows what can be done about this highly prevalent, commonly overlooked, but readily addressed problem.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 13, 2014
ISBN9781466871106
The Light Barrier: A Color Solution to Your Child's Light-based Reading Difficulties
Author

Rhonda Stone

Rhonda Stone is a journalist, education and health writer, public information specialist, and most importantly, a mother whose children were diagnosed with a little-known form of light sensitivity. Respected for her ability to assimilate, organize, and communicate complex information in easy-to-understand terms, Stone has studied the condition extensively, and wrote The Light Barrier. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

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    The Light Barrier - Rhonda Stone

    A HIDDEN PROBLEM

    1

    THE RISE AND FALL OF A CHILD

    Katie is fair and lovely. At age thirteen, she is tall and slender with the kind of cheekbones I always wanted when I was a girl. At that age I remember sucking the insides of my cheeks together and puckering like a fish in an attempt to produce the high, full cheekbones she produces with just a demure smile.

    Katie is a normal American youth through and through—normal in every way but one. Just before her eleventh birthday, Katie was spiraling downward into a pattern of frustration, irritability, and school failure. She struggled to read, rarely smiled, and found it hard to keep friends at school.

    It is hard to watch a child struggle. And puzzling to see a normally developing boy or girl hit a wall in the second or third grade. That is what happened to Katie. She hit a wall that no one could explain—until a chance encounter introduced our family to an invisible barrier to learning.

    TENDER BEGINNINGS

    Katie came into the world on a crisp November morning. She was beautiful, her eyes almond-shaped and her brown hair distinguished by a single shock of gold toward the back. From infancy, Katie was fascinated with the world. On a shopping trip at a week old, she nestled in my arms in a sun-yellow pram and studied the bright lights and black-and-white images around her. The pupils of her eyes were like mysterious little pools of oil that had not yet committed to brown or blue or green.

    As a toddler, Katie loved bold colors. Her favorite book at age two was Moo Moo, Peek-a-Boo, a brightly colored picture book that had us oinking, neighing, and hooting through its pages. Books were not strangers in our home. Katie’s room, from the day we brought her home from the hospital, was full of books.

    In some settings, Katie was a little shy. Her first preschool class was at a local gymnastics center, where the windowless gym was filled with murky fluorescent light. Initially, Katie preferred my knee to the noisy bustle of her classes. After a few weeks, though, she acclimated and joined in enthusiastically.

    Katie’s second year of preschool was spent at a Catholic school. The lighting in the old house where preschool classes were held was more like home—incandescent bulbs and plenty of large, unobstructed windows. She was very comfortable in that setting and adapted quickly. She no longer clung to my knee. There, Katie’s teachers were loving and down-to-business. One afternoon, as the children played on the school’s outdoor gym equipment, Katie’s teacher predicted she would have an interest in science when she grew up. I asked her why. She pointed to Katie sprawled on the sidewalk, studying a column of marching ants. Katie, she said, loved to study and observe.

    Katie’s progress continued to be consistent with that of the other four- and five-year-olds in her preschool class. In fact, quite to our surprise, our non-Catholic daughter recited her Hail Marys so well that she was chosen to recite at the spring all-school program at the end of the year.

    Our daughter did not lack for opportunities to learn and grow. Beginning at three and four, she took swimming and ballet lessons. In swimming, she started out a little fearful of the water, but quickly got over it. In ballet, she seemed a bit uncomfortable with the brightly lit classroom where she danced once a week. In the windowless room, Katie often stood timidly, knees pressed together, elbows bent and held tightly to her body. It was as though she were trying to make herself smaller. I thought it rather unusual, but never troubled her about it.

    Just before the start of kindergarten, Katie knew her letters, shapes, and numbers and could pick out a few words in her picture books. In fact. the first word she could spell from memory was book.

    Her kindergarten teacher inspired in her a love of preparing healthy foods. At age six, Katie appeared at our bedroom door for the first time, a black lacquer tray carefully balanced in her hands. She was treating us to the first of many breakfasts in bed. In a bowl, white liquid sloshed gently over the sides. Her creative masterpiece consisted of a bowl with seven small-sized shredded wheat biscuits in a mixture of half milk and half water. The concoction was sweetened with a sprinkling of sugar. I ate every bite with visible delight and lavished praise on Katie for the delicious meal.

    Other than mild shyness and her unusual behavior in dance class, I cannot think of a single thing that might have suggested possible delays in Katie’s academic development. Through first grade, she appeared to do fine in school. As long as the print was large and there were only a few words per page, her reading appeared to keep up with her classmates’.

    One classroom reading activity, however, caught my attention. In this activity, the teacher worked with first graders all week to familiarize them with photocopied poems and short stories. On Friday, the text-rich pages came home in binders to be read by children to parents over the weekend. Nearly every Friday, Katie and I would snuggle together, usually on the sofa, and read. I would follow the words with my finger while Katie chanted the words. At first it appeared she was reading. Soon, however, it became apparent that Katie was using her memory skills to recite the verses. Her chanted phrases and the small print had little, if any, connection to one another. Even simple words she knew—is, it, the—were lost to her in the paragraphs of text. When I inquired about it, her teacher assured me this was normal and part of the program. The goal was not necessarily to develop reading skills per se, but to develop an understanding of the relationship between printed stories and spoken words. I accepted her explanation and thought little more about it.

    Katie’s classmates began to write letters, numbers, and short words in kindergarten. Inventive spelling was encouraged in the first grade. Katie was a master of inventive spelling and her teacher always seemed to be able to read and understand it. I was not as skilled. Katie’s early print was erratic and difficult for me to read.

    MOMMY, I CAN’T SEE

    Shortly after the start of second grade, Katie complained she couldn’t see to read. As soon as she shared this, I took her to a vision professional to have her vision checked.

    Testing was typical of most vision exams. An assistant led Katie from the waiting room to a room in which she was seated in front of a boxlike device called a stereoscope. She was instructed to look through the dark box at illuminated images in order to measure her depth and color perception, as well as the ability of her eyes to work together. Katie passed all tests with flying colors. Then, in a dimly lit room, she was asked to identify large letters from a softly illuminated Snellen eye chart. She passed all her tests and her vision was pronounced to be fine—with a slight indication she might one day have trouble with distance vision. The optometrist recommended against glasses and asked to see her again in a year.

    Soon after Katie’s eye test, her teacher advised us that she was falling behind her peers in reading. Of greater concern to her teacher, however, was that Katie regularly engaged in daydreaming. Rather than pay attention during reading and instruction time, Katie would be off in her own world, looking out the window, at the ceiling, at the floor. When we asked our eight-year-old about it, she answered in her usual direct fashion: Mom, Dad, school is boring. We gave her a gentle pep talk, put the issue on our ongoing radar screens, and marched her back to school.

    My husband and I, for our parts, were sorely inexperienced in the area of child development as Katie progressed through school. I was the youngest of four children and my husband the second to the youngest of seven. Each of us had the academic achievements of older siblings to chase after as we progressed through school, and both of us found grade school remarkably easy. In retrospect, I realize now that neither of us had a clue as to what to expect our first child to accomplish in the early years of school. When she was a toddler and preschooler, we had a couple of paperback books to help track her progress—and she nailed every milestone. But the birth-to-age-six books ended just about the time Katie started school and, with her apparent normal development, it didn’t seem necessary to track her milestones beyond what classroom teachers would tell us.

    By the third grade, Katie appeared to have little interest in being an A or B student, although she did complain once again at the start of school that she had difficulty seeing in her classroom. This time, besides finding it hard to see the words in her textbooks, she specifically complained that she couldn’t read the words on her classroom’s white board. We took her to the optometrist again, where Katie’s vision was checked once more. Her vision was again pronounced to be near 20/20, with the same caution that she might have a problem with distance vision in the future.

    With her vision declared to be fine, we expected good school performance from her, and at first, she appeared to meet the challenge. But month after month, she slowly and steadily fell further behind. Occasional reports would come from her teacher that Katie struggled to keep her attention on the books and paperwork in front of her. She looked out the window too much or fidgeted in her seat—anything to avoid doing her work. The red flag we all ignored was Katie’s handwriting. In the third grade, it continued to be the large, erratically spaced, and sloping print she began with in the first grade. She hated cursive with a passion and, whenever possible, avoided using it. Her loops and curls were just as erratic in size and configuration and the resulting words were difficult to read. When I asked her third grade teacher about Katie’s difficulties in printing and handwriting, she shrugged it off: We see this all the time. She’ll catch up.

    Another source of concern was Katie’s spelling. After nearly three years of inventive spelling as the accepted standard, I began to wonder when she would understand that just any old set of letters scrawled on a page would not necessarily communicate meaning to the rest of the world. Adding to the confusion was the fact that Katie did fairly well on spelling tests, but couldn’t spell even simple words when asked to write paragraphs. When I tried to encourage her to spell better, she became extremely defensive. "This is how we do it in class, Mom. This is how it is supposed to

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