In this episode Hannah shares how she overcame her own internal struggles after her daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia.
Hannah Coles is a mom to 4 amazing children and has been married for over 18 years. She has been homeschooling her kids for over 12 years and absolutely loves it. She’s a voracious reader with an ongoing goal of reading 100 books each year. Hannah loves learning and teaching, and considers herself a teacher at heart, whether that’s at home, at church, with music, and in her career as a life coach. She loves being able to uplift others and help with their suffering.
Hannah says this fun and exciting goal of reading 100 books a year wasn’t hers. She heard an author being interviewed, and the author mentioned that he read 100 books per year to help him get ideas as a writer. Hannah thought that sounded fun, so for the past 8 years she has made that goal. Sometimes in December she has to do a lot of reading to catch up and make her goal. Hannah says reading has been a great blessing in her life. She reads fiction and nonfiction alike, but she does stay away from dark and scary books. She says picking a favorite book is hard, but if she had to pick one it would be Wonder. Wonder a middle grade book that she says touched her heart and made her cry several times. She also loves the movie, but says that of course, the book is always better.
Hannah’s third child has dyslexia. Hannah says that when her oldest daughter was born, she got lots of one-on-one attention since she was the only child. She read very early, and everything was great. Her second child, a son, was reading early as well, finishing Harry Potter by the time he was six. Hannah says she was giving herself a pat on the back, thinking she was a great mother and teacher and homeschooler. Then when her third daughter was started getting close to being school age, Hannah had a little bit of a panic. She realized they were behind on reading. Every year Hannah would notice that she wasn’t improving in her reading. At eight years old she was still struggling to read at a first grade level. Hannah just kept thinking something couldn’t be right and felt like an unsuccessful mother and homeschooler.
Hannah would be helping her daughter read a paragraph, and the same word would come up multiple times in the paragraph. Every time, her daughter would have to stop and really struggle to get the word. Hannah says it was a painstaking process to read. So she went to the school to see if they could help. They told her they couldn’t, and that she’d need to go to a doctor. Well, her doctor told her that she needed to get help from the school. For years Hannah went back and forth between school and doctor. Eventually Hannah and her family moved. Through divine design within the first week of living in their new home they met a family who had a child with dyslexia. The mother told Hannah she needed to go see an ophthalmologist to get her daughter tested.
Hannah’s daughter was tested and diagnosed with several forms of dyslexia, and the knowledge and awareness that Hannah and her daughter both had helped them start to navigate through the journey.
Hannah says that there are a variety of forms of dyslexia and they stem off of a handful of major forms; surface, phonological, visual, primary, and mathematical. Hannah found out that there was dyslexia on both sides of her family that could have contributed to her daughter’s diagnosis.
Hannah’s daughter wasn’t even able to follow the lines on a page and she would constantly lose her...
