Antonia maintains her focus

by Alison Brown alison.brown@dailypost.co.nz
Catherine van Sitter is a battler but tears well in her eyes when she stops to think about how having a child with dyslexia has changed her family's life.

"As a mother, it just breaks your heart to see your child struggle on a daily basis. It's not just with reading, it's with everyday things too, like getting her ready for school and trying to get her to be organised and co-ordinated."

Her 8-year-old daughter, Antonia, has chronic dyslexia. She finds it hard to read two and three-letter words, having only mastered the alphabet just over a year ago.

Her family has spent hundreds - if not thousands - of dollars on specialists and remedial programmes to help Antonia learn but her reading ability is still well below that of her Year 4 peers at Whangamarino School.

"I just wish as a mother that the light will be switched on one day or we could wave a magic wand to fix things," she said. "But we accept now that with Antonia, things are going to take time."

It wasn't long after Antonia started school that her family suspected things weren't right. She had trouble identifying letters but her teacher the family that eventually, "the penny would drop" - an assurance Mrs van Sitter wasn't willing to accept.

"You could call it a mother's instinct but I knew something was wrong. I think it also helped that Antonia had an older brother so I knew where she should be at for her age."

Antonia's hearing and eyesight was tested and it was then that an optometrist first detected problems with her vision. However, it wasn't until she was 7 that specialists confirmed she had Irlen syndrome, a visual perception disability alleviated by coloured lenses.

The glasses have helped her focus better on words when she reads but her chronic dyslexia, confirmed by specialist assessments, keeps holding her back.

For a year, Antonia received support from Specific Learning Disabilities Federation's (SPELD) local branch, an organisation that provides one-on-one remedial tutoring for children with learning difficulties. But her daughter's progress was slow.

Mrs van Sitter said Whangamarino School was doing all it could for Antonia but a lack of funding meant she had to "go the extra mile" to get the educational support her daughter needed.

She pleaded with Ministry of Education officials to fund a reading recovery programme for Antonia. Eventually, she was successful and for more than 40 weeks, Antonia spent half-an-hour every day with a school tutor.

The school is trying other initiatives to help Antonia learn, including a type of buddy reading system.

She has also started attending private classes with Rotorua's Robyn Currie, a tutor specialising in helping children with dyslexia.

Her programme is designed to make learning fun and she teaches "tricks" to help Antonia remember words.

Despite her learning disability, Antonia doesn't qualify for any special allowance to help pay for the extra tutoring. But Mrs van Sitter said her family would do whatever it could to find the necessary money.



* A free information evening for parents interested learning more about dyslexia, as well as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and ADD, will be at Rotorua Boys' High School's Colman Theatre on September 16 at 7.30pm.