After just one week Alex said his reading is better, he can stay focused and he can use his new tools to stop him from going off into his imaginary world. Alex has an incredible imagination, this is often the case with dyslexic minds. Their vivid imaginations make their thought world much more interesting than the physical world. For Alex, he wasn’t able to stay in the physical world at school, he was busy flying off into outer space, exploring new worlds and meeting aliens.
For many children with dyslexia, traditional learning methods can feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Alex described how his mind would “leave the brain” during reading, floating off to imaginary places like “Kokomo.” It wasn’t because Alex didn’t want to learn, he just didn’t have the right tools to bring his mind back when it was required.
Dyslexic brains are powerful and creative. They think in 3D images. When reading, you can picture the word “elephant” or “cat”table,” so the dyslexic brain has a mental image of these words, but how do you picture words like “the” or “and.” This is where the dyslexic brain trips up and gets disorientated. For Alex, this meant heading off into space because reading was impossible.
One of the early steps of the Davis Mastery for Dyslexia program is teaching the individual to to prepare their brain for reading, it’s called Davis Orientation Counseling®. Through a simple mental technique, Alex learnt to turn off the disorientation as soon as it occured. Then we found and mastered the stimuli that triggered his disorientation, allowing him the room to focus and stay on planet earth.
While Alex participated in the Davis Mastery for Dyslexia program, families dealing with attention difficulties can also access the Davis Mastery for Attention program, which uses similar hands-on, but more in-depth, experiential methods to help children gain control over their focus.
Alex’s imagination is part of his essence, but he needed to harness it so that he could focus at school. The use of clay in the Davis Mastery for Dyslexia allowed Alex to use his imagination, while sculpting site words, for example his clay model on “in” was an alien in a spacecraft. Plus, when modelling the actual word, Alex was able to see and feel words and letters “all the way around” rather than just staring at flat text on a page.
“Clay is amazing,” Alex explains with genuine enthusiasm. “You could sculpt clay models of the words… you could use your imagination.”
This fun approach transforms learning from a struggle into something exciting, something Alex actually looked forward to.
The changes in Alex go far beyond better test scores. His handwriting improved dramatically. His spelling became more accurate. But perhaps most importantly, his confidence soared. “Everything’s getting better. Pretty much everything,” he shares with a smile.
Alex learned to control his wandering attention, keeping his “mind focusing with his brain” during reading. His imagination, once a source of distraction, became a powerful learning tool.
Alex’s transformation offers hope for families searching for effective help for dyslexia. His story demonstrates that with the right approach, children with dyslexia can not only overcome their challenges but actually leverage their unique strengths.
As Alex enthusiastically tells other struggling students:
“When you’re done with this program, you’ll become smarter, maybe smarter than your mother or father… You may think this is going to be a boring, boring thing, but when you actually do it, it actually turns out amazing.”
For visual, creative learners like Alex, the Davis Mastery for Dyslexia program is so much more than reading and writing. It teaches children how to transform their greatest challenges into their most powerful assets.
Ready to discover your child’s learning superpowers? Reach out to one of our Facilitators, they offer complimentary discovery calls to see if Davis is the right fit for you.