The Backstory

I used to set a certain length of text from a ‘young reading’ series (500 to 600 characters at a time) for Máté to read aloud each day. He did have some good spells where he would read rather fluently and others where he would struggle from the first moment. When he had difficulties with a word, I would simply tell him what it was. But very often he just couldn’t remember words I read out for him only seconds before.

At other times, he would read a word on his own easily and when he met it a few lines later, he would struggle to decode it.

This was something that I just couldn’t wrap my mind around. Of course the more tired he was, the more difficult it was for him to work through those 500 characters, and we would very often just give up. It seemed that there can be no fun in reading even when it goes well (even though I did not spare the praises on those occasions), while the difficult times were of course always very memorable and left a negative mark on all this exercise.

So, after a while, he simply hated to sit down to do his reading assignment, and I hated forcing him to do it.

We didn’t use any reading/spelling support at first; since he also seemed to have a general problem of getting easily distracted at school and most of the time would just chat with his friends while he should have been working, I turned to a neuropsychologist at first, to see if he had some kind of attention deficit problem that could be remedied through clinical treatment.

But I was deeply disappointed by the attitude of the specialist that we were referred to: the tests he made Máté do and the way he talked to him were actually so humiliating that I decided never to go back to him: he seemed to look at his little patients as if they were simply lazy and dumb, and I just couldn’t fathom how that attitude could do anything else than even more harm.

The Easyread Experience

It was a huge relief, first of all, to actually find a method that seemed to offer a pain-free solution, not only to his reading difficulties but very likely also to his general learning problems. And of course, Máté was so happy to hear that from the moment we start the program, all he will have to do is play, and that, too, only for 15 minutes a day :-).

It’s great that the program actually starts by a first phase where children are taught the trainertext characters and aren’t immediately thrown into the same environment that they are so much fed up with (fighting their way through a jungle of letters).

That was a perfect way of first taking away all the pain that children had before, and just letting them relax into this new environment that is designed, from top to bottom, to make reading fun.

And of course, this was a great relief for me as well, as I was really tired of trying to coerce him into doing something that I knew should be a pleasure.

Also, I very much appreciated the fact that the Easyread team does everything to make sure to properly teach the method and cross-check if helpers (parents) understand it fully and apply it correctly. We received immediate replies to all our questions and had many opportunities to correct also mistakes that we weren’t initially aware of, thanks to the regular feedback questions asked by the team and to the personal interviews.

We are both hugely grateful for all the help received!