Reading improvement with Dianne Craft Phonics Program

I’ve written a lot about my 12-year-old daughter’s reading problems. She just wasn’t getting it very easily and was afraid to read in public or to try to write anything.

See some of my past posts:
Teaching Reading
Reading Fluency for Kids
Izzy’s Journey to Reading

In January, we started using the Diane Craft Daily Reading Lessons. Before we started, I tested her with the placement test in the Right Brain Phonics Program and she sadly was at the pre-primer level. This was particularly disheartening for me because we have been working so hard on her reading for over six years now. Today, four months later, she was able to test at the first grade reading level. That was huge progress for her!

Every day Izzy does all of the exercises as prescribed in the Brain Integration Therapy Manual.  As I understand it, this is to get the left and right sides of her brain to work together better and share information. It is all very physical and includes her eyes following her arms in a figure 8 pattern, and crossing her arms in front of her body to the opposite knee. It’s all about the eyes crossing the midline from right to left and back. I was very lucky that Izzy did not give me any trouble about doing these and now they are second nature to her.

Then we start decoding words from the Right Brain Phonics Program, followed by Sight words, dictation and then reading. This all takes a good hour. When it is done, I read to Izzy from a book of her choice, just for fun.

Dianne Craft is speaking at a number of conventions this summer. I saw her last year but I also bought some of her DVDs and those have been very helpful as well.

Right now, I am just marveling at how differently each one of my children has been in learning to read. If you had told me 10 years ago that a child of mine would be crossing her legs and touching her toes as part of her reading lesson, I would have said that was crazy! I’m just amazed that it actually is working.