I provide programs of the Davis Dyslexia Association International (www.dyslexia.com) and the Davis Autism Approach (www.davisautism.com).  In my 30 years experience before learning about Davis, I used the best word thinking approaches to help the learner put-together or take-apart sounds to read and spell words. Before the Davis approach recognized the value of employing our natural picture thinking, all dyslexia approaches relied on relating sounds and symbols.  We know that one size does not fit all, thus one way of doing things will not help everyone. 

With dyslexic thinkers, using word-thinking approaches is like trying to download Apple into Microsoft, both being wonderful systems.  Educators and parents can be fooled when a person gains the skill of recognizing and naming words, yet lacks understanding, remains confused and frustrated, often with the feeling of dislike for the activity, upset stomach, frustration when all their trying results in little success. 
 
With autistic thinkers, the world they live in feels made up of random pieces – and each piece is in the ‘now’.  When stuck in the ‘now’, many experiences surrounding them can be overwhelming or be the opposite and not register in their consciousness. The resulting behaviors look like sensory sensitivities and ADD hyper- or hypo- attentiveness. 

The Davis approach is different from every other approach – A fully certified Davis Provider gives the learner credit for being smart in a picture thinking way and provides them with tools to rely on the certainty that comes with knowing how to make sense of language whether reading, spelling or writing. 

It took me decades to discover and two years for each certification with the Davis Dyslexia and Autism Approaches to offer learners a way to ‘make sense’.  Don’t wait until you’ve tried other approaches only to realize that no matter how you try to get the information into the brain, confusion and anxiousness turn on a stream of uncertain possible outcomes picture-thinkers are capable of creating in their multidimensional way;  this results is uncertainty about what is accurately occurring. 

If you and your child and teacher are not getting expected results, consider the possibility that using the only approach relying on getting to the root of struggles using their creative, picture thinking intelligence will be their way of ‘making sense’.

Q- My son had such a hard time learning to tell time. But the problem didn’t end there – even now, he has such a distorted sense of time and he tends to spend too much time on a minor part of a task, leaving no time for the remainder of the job.

A- When a person struggles to correctly decode while reading aloud, anyone can guess that this person probably has a learning disability. Yet beyond struggles with reading, having a distorted sense of time or losing track of time on a regular basis is another aspect common when using picture thinking which we can resolve by using the learner’s strengths.

Disorientation (not getting the true facts from one’s surroundings) is a mental state that some learners use to solve problems and get different perspectives on real-world puzzles. However, without control of this same skill the learner will experience a distorted sense of time. Sleep is an excellent example of disorientation; it is common to wake up confused by how much time has actually passed.

Hyper focus is another facet of disorientation – when a person tunes out the rest of the environment in order to focus on one thing only. Hyper focus has its place in sports and many other places, but when a person repeatedly fails to complete tasks or assignments because he spends too much time on one step of the job, he needs to learn how to control his focus and better understand time. 
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What to do: Introduce the Davis focus and self-regulation tools of orientation point / alignment, energy dial, and release. These tools increase the learner’s self-awareness.

With the three decades of ‘time’ I’ve worked with Learning Different children and adults, learning about the role of distortion of time that comes with ‘disorientation’ explains how struggling is often part of the profile of smart learners who struggle.  Once we, as learners, realize our problems arise from how smart we are, the entire picture changes from needing to be fixed to being able to manage on our own. 

Contact us to determine options so you or your learner can succeed because of, not despite, your natural way of thinking. 

As Will Rogers once said about wasting time: “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” 

Q -  My children are great workers and players.  They work hard at doing what they’re asked to do, but sometimes getting their attention is difficult.  As a matter of fact, my daughter’s teacher tells me that she daydreams too much.  What can or should I do about this? 

A - Everyone daydreams sometime.  Daydreams don’t just happen; they are most likely prompted by an event  we see, hear, smell, feel, or taste, or memories that bring us back to something.  The triggering event turns our imagination on. 
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Other triggers – curiosity, boredom, confusion, and fear – may bring new or old ideas to mind.  During the time that we are seeing what our imagination shows us, the real world drops away, as our brain receives our imagined scene.  
 
Most of us use our picture thinking daily.  Because picture thinking is subliminal – faster than a person can be aware of – you may not be aware that you think in pictures. You will simply have a rich sense of ideas; call this intuition or nonverbal intelligence. 

Sometimes a person’s tendency for picture thinking is a cause for alarm as with a child whose parent brought her to me because of her ability to ‘see things’ and her poor reading ability. Sure enough, the daughter told me that I was surrounded by a field of pink.  What a relief to both parents and child to understand  her ability to ‘see things’ occurs when her imagination/mind’s eye turns on. Through our work together she realized she controls her mind’s eye on/off switch.

Simply stated, daydreaming is an automatic action for strong creative picture thinkers.  It is a survival solution when trying to solve the confusion accompanying a situation or a new word when reading.  Understanding how it feels when daydreaming occurs, allows her to shut off her imagination so her brain will see only the real letters so she stands a better chance of recognizing the word. 

Embrace your daughter’s daydreaming, provide her the perspective that daydreaming is not BAD, but a good ability of her great brain.  Check to see which of the triggers fits when she daydreams:  Curiosity, Confusion, Boredom, Fear. 

This automatic picture thinking can be interpreted as disability, rather than the ability that picture thinking is. If the help she receives in reading, spelling, writing, or understanding the spoken word is tedious and discouraging for her, consider the possibility that providing her the tools and understanding that come with respecting her picture thinking will give her control and pride about her way of thinking.
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Our perspective creates what we see.   A three year old put his shoes on by himself.  His mother noticed the left shoe was on the right foot.  She said, “Son, your shoes are on the wrong feet.”  He looked up at her with a raised brow and said, “Don’t kid me, Mom.  I know  they’re my feet.”   

Q- It drives me crazy that though my daughter can read at grade level, she substitutes little words; for example: ‘for’ and ‘from’, ‘was’ for ‘saw’, ‘of’ and ‘off’.   Will it help if I have her memorize lists of similar words so she can watch out for them?  

A- In the world of thinking, some of our brains see and hear words when receiving language – think of it as listening to a radio and seeing a stream of letters and words.  When our mind processes thoughts in this way we are using our ‘word thinking’. Likewise, another way the brain receives language is by creating scenarios of images brought to mind – this can happen so quickly that our imagination may not ‘see’ the scenes but have a sense of or intuition about the idea.  This rich world of experiencing ideas sometimes in multisensory ways involving how the scene may feel, smell, sound, taste is what is meant when we are using our ‘picture thinking’.  Most of us utilize a mixture of both ‘word’ and ‘picture’ thinking, though some of us think solely with words and others do not see or hear words but think solely with pictures. 
 
Try this experiment – what comes to mind when you see this set of letters – e l e p h a n t.  Most of us will have some version of a large grey animal. Now see what comes to mind when you see this set of letters – w a s. Most of us will see the letters ‘was’. One of these words – elephant -- generates an association with a picture or experience and the other - was – does not automatically call up an association. Asking our picture thinkers to differentiate words that are similar like was/saw by looking at sets of letter symbols is like you and I trying to differentiate language written in characters from other languages.  Chinese and Arabic characters come to mind, as do advanced statistical and mathematical formulas. To be certain about language, picture thinkers need all three parts of a word: what the word looks like – it’s spelling, what the word sounds like – its pronunciation, and how the word is pictured – its meaning. 
 
A 9 year old girl who struggled with reading at her grade level, often substituted words. Many were words that looked alike as when she said ‘proud’ for ‘poured’. She has a very strong listening vocabulary, (meaning words she understands when hearing them) so she had choices of words she’d heard to match with the mix of letters that made up that word.  When seeing printed words she has a choice/guess about which to say. When she matches the word with the meaning, pronunciation, and spelling, (all 3 parts of the word) the word becomes part of her reading vocabulary.  

The stronger the word thinker, the more apt to respond memorizing the look and sound of spelling words thus using word lists may work for the stronger word thinkers. However, word lists, containing only two parts of the words, sound and look, leave out the meaning/picture which then leaves behind those stronger in picture thinking.  Utilize the meaning of words to provide ALL learners the opportunity for certainty. Without activating the third part of language – meaning – the student may be memorizing only two parts of language – spelling, and pronunciation.   To include all thinkers to participate in the job of language remember to include all three parts to create certainty.