Unlocking the Joy of Reading: Our Journey From Tears to Triumph

I perched on the side of my bed, holding out the beginning-reader book in my hand. “You can do it! We’ve read this one before,” I encouraged. Without a word, my six-year-old son threw his face into the purple comforter and sobbed. 

To me, it was only a handful of words on the page, but to my son, the small, square paper book represented frustration and failure. Everything did: the same sight word list sent home week after week, trying to use the pictures from the tiny book to unlock the mystery of the words, wanting so much to learn but feeling like he never would.  

I gently patted his back as his tears left dark marks on the bed.  At that moment, everything I had done for him, everything I knew how to do, was not enough. How could I be so inadequately prepared? After all, I had been an elementary school teacher for more years than my son had been alive.  Why had the only training I’d had on struggling readers been on how to fill out paperwork to get them sent to specialized classes? I wondered how many of my former students had gone home at night to cry on their beds. My middle son needed help, and my master’s degree in education had nothing to offer. 

So I did the only thing I had been trained to do: I fought to get him into the specialized classes. His first grade teacher objected and told me my son “wasn’t even the worst reader in the class.” Knowing my child was just another statistic of the literacy crisis in America was no comfort. The next year his second grade teacher told me I just needed to make him read more at home. I was the reason he was struggling. “Stupid” and “failure,” the words my son used to describe himself, now felt directed towards me as a mom. I don’t blame her, though. She didn’t know the tears, the hours, we tried to read each day, but more importantly, like me, and like so many other teachers, she didn’t know what to do for my son either. None of us did. 

After so much red tape, back and forth with school leaders, and more than a full school year wasted, my son was finally in the dyslexic program. He didn’t have long, though. In a few short months, it was March of 2020. We all went through it together, so I do not need to describe the scramble that followed, the uncertainty, the lack of services for special needs students, and the realization that nothing was going back to normal soon, even though normal hadn’t really been a success. 

I was all my son had now, so I started to research. I learned terms like systematic phonics, Orton-Gillingham, and phonological awareness, things I had never learned as a teacher. I searched for a curriculum that would sell to an individual, that didn’t require expensive formal training but that could actually help my son. Finally, I stumbled upon Logic of English. After looking at a few sample pages, I was ready to buy.

It took only weeks in Foundations to see the difference. Not only was he learning, but he was enjoying learning. The tears were gone. He could learn to read. When “qu” was introduced as a multi-letter phonogram, I heard, “What! Q and U go together?! Why didn’t anyone ever tell me this!” It had seemed that the secrets to reading and spelling had been kept from all of us. It had been made mysterious to myself as a teacher and for my son unreachable. Yet, here in these pages, the mysteries had been revealed, and the keys had been given. 

Not too long ago, my middle son and I snuggled up next to each other, the purple comforter pulled over our legs. In his hands, he held a Percy Jackson book, silently devouring the pages. “I love reading,” he said, “I could spend all day here.” Thank you, Logic of English. It was a day I never thought I would see.