Transcript
Brian Sylvester: The first day I met him he had like all these big, you know, books.
R. Michael Giardina: He’s a kind of a child who will sit and amuse himself, entertain himself with a stack of books.
Diane Giardina: He. Loves. Books.
Narrator: The book lover’s name is Michael Giardina. He’s eight years old and excited about the summer. So what’s the problem? Michael has dyslexia, so while he devours picture books and loves to be read to, reading is actually very, very hard for him. Here’s his dad.
R. Michael: It’s a very strange phenomenon … for a child who’s having a great deal of difficulty reading, he has an enormous passion to read. And maybe that’s the rather obvious paradox.
Narrator: Michael’s just finished a rough second grade year, and summer comes as a relief. Because of his learning disabilities, school has gotten progressively more challenging.
Diane: Which one do you think she’ll pick?
Isabella: That one.
Diane: That one?
Michael: Yeah, me, too.
R. Michael: It was clear as each year sort of unfolded that he was experiencing difficulties that I think he wasn’t sure on how to deal with them and we weren’t sure either exactly how to get at what was going to be best for him.
Narrator: For kids with learning disabilities who don’t get the help they need, school can be filled with daily failure and humiliation. Those kids learn to dread school, to dread reading, and their futures start to look bleak. The Giardinas were not going to let that happen to Michael.
R. Michael: We realized after going through our last evaluations during the school year, Michael really had some serious issues that we needed to deal with. And we knew before even that that he had to be in some sort of summer enrichment program.
Narrator: Michael’s father is exactly right. For kids with learning disabilities, summer is a critical time to address academic challenges — and emotional ones.
Dr. Patricia Quinn: A good summer program can really help your child with learning differences develop a sense of achievement. So often, children with learning differences feel that the glass is half empty. They always focus on what they can’t do as well as other people.
Narrator: Dr. Patricia Quinn has worked with children with learning disabilities for over 30 years.
Quinn: If you can find for them an experience over the summer that allows them to feel like they can do something, that sense of achievement and empowerment will carry over to the school year. There’s nothing more important than having a child believe that he can do it. Because he will.
R. Michael: So hopefully you’ll have a good day today? Huh? Yeah?
Michael: Yeah. Yeah.
Narrator: The Giardinas happened to live very near a well-known school for children with learning disabilities, The Landmark School, based in Beverly, Massachusetts. Their six-week summer program draws students from all over the country. Santo Brillati directs the program.
Santo Brillati: Students that come to Landmark generally have very strong visual and very strong perceptual reasoning … average, above average intelligence. But there’s often enough some gaps in reading, gaps in writing, gaps in the learning process.
Michael: Ow. Oy.
Narrator: For Michael, that gap was in phonemic awareness, which includes the ability to distinguish the different sounds within a spoken word. Without that skill, sounding out a printed word that you’re trying to read is practically impossible.
Michael: Ih. Eh. Ay. Eh.
Sylvester: When he came in at the beginning of the year, he didn’t really — he was so used to sort of guessing at words that he didn’t know. He didn’t really know how to decode or sound out a word.
Sharon Musto: We decided to place Michael within a program working specifically on that phonemic awareness and learning about the sounds and words, helping him to determine how many sounds there were and, really, at a basic level helping to differentiate between consonants and vowels and to be able to accurately and automatically give a sound-symbol relationship. So if he saw the letter “P,” he would know it said ‘puh’. And with that ability it should eventually move towards him being able to decode words more easily and to be able to accurately read connected text.
Narrator: Most preschool and kindergarten classes help kids develop beginning reading skills. Michael’s dyslexia made it difficult for him to process the individual sounds in words, so he needs much more explicit instruction, a slower pace, and lots of repetition in order to master those skills — and to feel successful.
Musto: We want them to feel that, yes, you learn differently, you have a language-based learning disability, but you’re not stupid and you can learn and it’s just a matter of finding the way that works best for you.
Diane: I think one of the things that Michael has struggled with up until this point is really being different. And I noticed that he doesn’t feel different at Landmark because you’re really part of a community. And you don’t have to explain yourself.
Narrator: Landmark has turned out to be the perfect place for Michael to spend his summer. He studies vocabulary and sentence structure with Ms. Arnio…
Michael: A few.
Arnio: Is a?
Michael: Number.
Narrator: He focuses on matching letters to sounds with Ms. Valentine…
Valentine: That one is hard ‘cause it’s a slider.
Narrator: And he reinforces all of that in one-on-one instruction with Mr. Sylvester…
Sylvester: Nice job. Pound it.
Narrator: In the afternoon, kids get out of the classroom to learn in a different way.
Quinn: It’s very important that the summer program for children with learning disabilities not only have an academic component but also an enrichment component.
Waterman: And it’s salt water because it’s got green algae growing in it!
Quinn: It’s really during this enrichment program that I think children are able to explore, to look at themselves and to really find those areas that just light them up, that really turn them on and get them excited about something.
Narrator: For Michael, that’s marine science. And he probably doesn’t have any idea that he’s also improving his social skills, figuring out how to work with his classmates, and learning to take risks.
Kayak Instructor: There you go!
Kid: Bye, Mike!
Narrator: Third grade is not going to be easy for Michael. But this summer has helped him see himself in a new and positive light — as a learner and a reader.
Michael: “He would have to leave soon.”
Diane: This is really the first time that he’s had any measure of academic success. And I think that’s rather profound because, again, for a bright kid who struggled in school, to really have your first taste of a success, that “I can do this. I am going to be successful” is really remarkable.
Narrator: And that’s Michael’s successful summer.
Michael is a seven-year-old whose dyslexia has made school a struggle. Follow him to a six-week intensive summer program at the Landmark School — a well-known school for children with learning disabilities based in Beverly, Massachusetts. The Landmark program features explicit instruction, a slower pace, and lots of repetition to help students like Michael.
From “Adventures in Summer Learning,” an episode of Launching Young Readers, WETA’s award-winning series of innovative half-hour programs about how children learn to read, why so many struggle, and what we can do to help.