Mike McKay is a retired superintendent of the Surrey County schools district in British Columbia, Canada.

He was a public educator for 35 years. The area he supervised has over 160 languages spoken. 

You can imagine it would be difficult to measure the potential problems with language and reading development in such a large and diverse region. 

But back in 2008 he attended a conference hosted by Scientific Learning Corporation, where he saw the research behind the Fast ForWord programs. 

When he came back, he asked his board to trust him, and give him $300,000 to get started. It was bold pitch. Mike tells the story of how things have panned out in this Learning Capacity podcast episode:

Dr Con Kafataris, father of six, describes the changes he saw in his son George, aged nine, as phenomenal” after George completed the Fast ForWord program.

It was a little bit of a journey to find Fast ForWord for George but after trying a few avenues, including speech pathology, Dr Kafataris came across the program through a book titled, “The Brain That Changes Itself” by Dr Norman Doidge.

“The science seemed plausible”, said Dr Kafataris, so he decided to give it a go.

What were these “phenomenal” improvements? Listen to the podcast to find out.

Or read more below for the complete podcast transcript.

“The results have been quite phenomenal. It's just been amazing to watch”

That's how Dr Con Kafataris described the changes he saw in his nine-year-old son George after the Fast ForWord program.

Dr Kafataris was speaking with The Learning Capacity Podcast about George’s language and learning difficulties, the improvements following George’s participation in the program, and why he decided that his six year old daughter, Eleni, should also do the neuroscience based exercises.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST 

George’s parents had known since he was about three years old that his language was delayed.

An article in the Melbourne Age newspaper titled “Children with learning difficulties need programs based on science, not anecdote and neurobabble”, makes some valid points but misses key information about how the neuroscience-based program Fast ForWord helps with Dyslexia.

The author focused on children with reading difficulties, including dyslexia.

A team of academics from Auckland University’s Centre for Brain Research and School of Psychology has produced an objective overview of 15 computer-based and group or whole class behavioural intervention programs that are designed to remediate learning disorders.

They point out that advances in the scientific understanding of disorders such as dyslexia, dyscalculia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have paved the way for the development of programs aimed at helping the  estimated one in five students with these disorders.

“It would really pain me when I used to hear my son read and he’d look at a word and couldn’t for the life of him try and sound it out. He just couldn’t do it”.

That’s how Alice, his mother, told me of her distress when she would try to help her son Ryan, aged 8, practise his reading.  Ryan was falling behind his classmates at school and he started to think he was “dumb”.

Ryan was having tutoring for his reading problems and it was helping but Alice thought it just was “just putting a Band-Aid on the problem, but not fixing his underlying difficulties.”

“It would really pain me when I used to listen to my son read and he’d look at a word and couldn’t for the life of him try and sound it out. He just couldn’t do it”.

This is how *Alice described her 12 year old son’s reading before he did the Fast ForWord program.

Her son *Ryan was able to go from a reluctant struggling reader, to a determined flourishing student using the neuroscience based exercises in the program.

Alice used to watch on helplessly as Ryan would struggle with reading and spelling. But she saw how the program took Ryan from frustration to fluency.

Children today are doing much less handwriting than children did 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Before computers became commonplace, handwriting was much more important for everyone. Back then schools put considerable time and attention on making sure students developed their handwriting. 

I recall entering cursive handwriting competitions when I was a young child (I went to primary school in the 1950s), and the sense of pride for the kids who were judged the neatest writers.

Now, typing on computers and tablets is replacing the act of writing by hand for many students (and adults).

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

Parents of children with dyslexia can be overwhelmed by conflicting advice about how best to help their children.

Often well meaning friends and others professing to have a “cure” for dyslexia can confuse parents anxious about their child’s inability to read as well as other children of the same age.

Fortunately there is a lot of well conducted science now available to inform us about how to improve the learning outcomes for those with dyslexia. The scientific research is clearly indicating that there is a strong link between many children’s poor auditory processing skills and their struggles with reading, including dyslexia.