Letter and number reversals are a major handicap for a large number of students. Those reversals make reading, writing and math much more difficult. I have devised a simple but invaluable tool – Dot Patterns – that has an amazing effect on correcting these letter and number reversals. Its success is one of the foundational principles that motivated me to create the TeachAllKids website to share this idea with others.

Creating a confident reader who enjoys reading and who feels the excitement that comes with discovering the wonder of reading by oneself, is one of the most rewarding experiences. Unfortunately, this doesn’t just happen without a great deal of effort on your part. It requires digging deep into the stacks of books and reading materials available to find something that a struggling or pre-beginning reader can actually read. For the pre-beginning reader, I create my own little booklets with words in them they can successfully read. Libraries have many books for students who can read a little, look for words like ‘Early I Can Read’ on the covers. These books are too advanced for a non-reader but can be very rewarding for a student with limited reading capabilities.

The secret to teaching students to read fluently is decoding. Decoding is simply looking at words as pieces of sound units stuck together. The trained eye will jump to the small words or sound units that are familiar and by doing this the student will be able to read the word by using these smaller sound units. To emphasis my point, let’s look at the longest word found in a dictionary — pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. If we decode this word, the trained eye will jump to the bold words within this very long word — pneumonoultramicroscopicvolcanoconiosis, now wasn’t that easier to read. A student doesn’t have to worry about long “i” or “o” rules, the student just needs to look for the little words or sound units that they already know.

As stated, I am on a mission, I truly believe that every child in elementary school should do dot patterns. Even for a gifted student, they are excellent as a thinking skills exercise. More importantly, they have now become the only tool I use for dealing with letter reversals. I can’t stress enough how important I think these are for all students but especially for dyslexic and ADHD students.

I often thought that my son had all the characteristics of dyslexia, except he never reversed his letters or numbers.

My mission is to help Teach All Kids by convincing you the parents, guardians, tutors, teachers, principals, and school superintendents to use different teaching methodology especially when teaching struggling students.

The first step, starting when students are preschoolers in their early years of learning and continuing through grade 7, is to use dot patterns. Dot patterns are invaluable and have an amazing effect on students. Success with dot patterns is one of the foundational principles motivating me to start my mission and my website.  This has been so successful with the struggling students that I have taught, that I can't help wondering if all students shouldn't be doing them regularly.

I am on a mission. An educational mission to Teach All Kids. Our schools tend to teach to the students that learns by memorizing math facts and spelling words. As a teacher, I have worked with many students that can’t memorize math facts or spelling words and I have very successfully taught these students how to succeed in school.

Using very simple methods to teach reading, math and writing skills, I simply show students another way to learn what they are struggling with. There is nothing fancy about what I do - it isn’t rocket science, though many of my students can now become rocket scientists.

I started this website to share the special education materials I have developed over the years of teaching struggling students. I began this journey to help my son, who seemed so bright but he just didn't do well in school. I was a teacher by profession and was appalled to discover that the school system was willing to just 'write him off'.