Mollie King is best known as “the posh, smiley” member of the popular girl band The Saturdays. Since King has been performing with the group, the band has had 12 top ten and 7 top five singles on the UK Singles Chart, and 3 top-ten albums on the UK Albums Chart. She recently was awarded the title of ‘Most Inspirational Dyslexic Celebrity’ by Dyslexia Action in December of 2012.
And King has dyslexia.
As a child, King especially struggled with reading. She found it hard even in her teen years, and was diagnosed relatively late. However, King was a determined student and worked extra hard to finish strong and left sixth-form with 3 As.
She remembers the relief she felt when she finally received the dyslexia diagnosis.
“It meant I was very slow at reading. In class I’d hate it when it was my turn to read out loud. Once I found out I was dyslexic it was a relief because I understood why I found reading so much harder than everyone else did. Now I like to show other people with dyslexia that they can accomplish things.”
She was a talented athlete during her school year, and was skiing for Great Britain until the age of 17 when she decided to throw herself fully into the singing career. She had to call upon the same perseverance she used to get through school despite her reading difficulties; she had several failures before auditioning successfully for The Saturdays.
Now she is on top of the world, and loves every minute of her musical career. The band had their first Number 1 hit recently with ‘What About Us’.
You can hear Molly talking about her dyslexia in this video clip:
—
Sarah Forrest is an Easyread System Coach for Morgan Learning Solutions. Easyread is an online course for children with dyslexia, auditory processing disorder, highly visual learning styles, and other causes of reading problems. It provides reading help and spelling help that is individualized from initial consultation to daily lessons. www.morganlearning.com
