Murray Sebastien

This is the wonderful Mrs Pease. She walks on water, she really does. She took Sebas for reading recovery for about 3 years. She worked him LIKE A DOG and only had limited success (turns out he is dyslexic) at the time, but she is awesome and we love her. She is also his teeball coach, so when I got a frantic call from Seb about needing a Mother Helper to drive them to the park and then sit there in the rain and count points, how could I turn him/her down? **I sacrificed my daily nap for this** what does this tell you about how much I owe this woman?

Anyway here is my sporty little dude... on another school Rep team. He is sooooo excited to play. He would not stand still to have a picture taken with the team, or with a bat or anything. I almost had to get out of my camp chair to take the photo.... but luckily he zoomed past me a few times....

And this is my 3 home runs in a row boy! Check out that grin!

Then for even better, amazing, fantastic news - I talked to one of his teachers today and she said she did a running reading record with him yesterday and he was reading like a 9-10yr old! I nearly died! (So did she, she said she told him she wanted to jump up and down yelling "woohoo" and he totally recoiled in horror like she might hug him LOL)
Apparently all the extra support he now gets at school and home (desk set up, brain gym, coping strategies, teaching techniques etc etc etc) are finally paying off. He no longer has to spend all his time and energy decoding the words, so he can actually pick up content from text for the first time ever. This of course helps with the decoding of words (as if you read something that makes no sense you can now be aware of it, whereas if you are just reading word-by-word you don't know if the string of words is nonsense) which makes it faster and easier, and then you get more content and fluency. It does not mean he is "cured" but it does mean he can now progress at a faster rate with his learning (especially when he overcomes the dysgraphia by learning to touch type) and school work will have more meaning for him. Imagine how annoying it would be for the spoken word to actually have meaning but anything on paper was total jibberish to you. BUT everyone else was acting like the paper was all great, and helpful and useful... The poor boy once said to me he is so sick of having to remember everything he writes so he can recite it back. I told him to just READ it and stop trying to remember it and he then explained to me that once you write something it is no longer there. Nothing is there. Just marks, so you have to memorize your writing or what is the point in writing it. !!!!!! What a nightmare.

Anyway, I am doing a happy dance for him - do it with me :)