Literacy expert Lois Letchford shows how a parent's breaking point can spark real learning. She used poetry about Captain Cook and Google maps to help her son Nicholas decode words through his strength in spatial awareness, building a learning nest where reading skills grow from curiosity and imagination, not isolation.
Chapters
Hello, I am Lois Letchford, author of the book Reversed: A Memoir and literacy problem solver, talking about why pain and purpose are the secret ingredients. Once we reach the pain point and we say we can no longer go on with this, that causes us as mothers and teachers to say, what else do I have to do? And that's when the learning starts, not only for the child but also for us. What else do I have to do? allows us to open unopened boxes and go into areas of our brain that haven't been used before. It has us as mothers questioning, what are we doing with this child? And the second question, the more important, what else do I have to do to have this child successful in school And when we get to that point, that's when we say, what am I going to do? As I said before, poetry was the first thing I used. And believe it or not, it was through the use of poetry that did 2 things. It tapped into Nicholas, my son Nicholas's imagination and his curiosity. That was the most significant thing and transformative in his life and in my life. And my life. How did I do that? The poetry started very simple, and then as the poetry got on and Nicholas got better with not only reading but recalling the poetry, I started to look at the double O's, as in Captain Cook. Cook rhymes with look, rhymes with book. That's the words that we started with. And I wrote about the last of the great explorers, Captain James Cook. What unbeknownst to me, I'm actually tapping into Nicholas's strengths because Captain Cook is about mapping. It's about world history of mapping. And where's Nicholas's strength? In spatial awareness. So we're tapping into the language. I'm always working with language. Of Captain Cook using a book to take a look at the, the world map. And that was really significant. But we— our learning didn't stop there. It didn't stop with the poem on the book. We went and found maps of Captain Cook. Today you don't even have to leave your home. To find all these things. Type into Google maps of Captain Cook and see what comes up. And that's when learning starts to expand and you're teaching our children, our most vulnerable children, like they have an incredible brain. And that was a significant component, teaching my child what he could do rather than what he couldn't do and what he struggled with. Which was the decoding component. I see decoding needing a nest. I can't do it in isolation. It's gotta have a nest. And the nest for my son was language and curiosity and imagination. All of those things. We can use it with our most vulnerable children. to transform their reading instruction. Lois Letchford. Hit like, hit subscribe, and share this with others whose children are still struggling with reading today.
