For almost 25 years, Walter and Karen Loewen have been passionate about education for children who are gifted and those who are learning disabled, particularly those with dyslexia.
Often it turns out those children with dyslexia who struggle mightily in school are in fact quite gifted.
For the Loewens, our education system works well for most children most of the time, but its rigidity isn’t good at helping children who think in very different ways.
“Education is doing the same thing it did in the 1950s as today,” Walter told The Progress recently.
Most educators when it comes to reading, for example, focus on phonics but the Loewens say phonics works well for 80 per cent of people.
“But for the 20 per cent, it doesn’t,” Walter says. “Those are the ones we want to focus on.”
READ MORE: Dyslexia, brain-training will be focus of free seminar by Chilliwack educators
Most of our modern education system caters to the left side of the brain, the sequential and memory side. Many children with disabilities are more right-brained and think in pictures or whole words.
One brain-training exercise to help a child learn how to read is for them to use plasticine to mould letters out of.
“What the hand creates in three-dimensions, the brain can remember in two,” Walter said.
Some of the earliest warning signs of dyslexia in young children include confusion over left/right, over/under, before/after; difficulty with making rhyming words; preferring to use capital letters to lower-case letters; and difficulty remembering the names of the letters of the alphabet.
For the past 25 years, Walter has been administering learning abilities assessment tests which tell parents exactly what might be interfering with their child’s learning. The tests are done online and are geared towards students of all ages, from Kindergarten right up to college.
While the test administered to kids can focus on where their cognitive strengths and shortcomings are, when given to adults it does the same thing but is helpful for career training.
Make no mistake, however, the Loewens philosophy is often frowned upon by the mainstream education system. Many educators simply do not accept their way of thinking, and some say they overstate how they can help dyslexic children.
But they are used to that opposition, and they continue to look for those gifted diamonds in the dyslexic rough.
Loewen’s free public meeting entitled “Strategies That Work for Dyslexics and All Who Struggle In School” is Wednesday, April 26 at 7 p.m. at 46004 Fifth Ave. Contact Walter Loewen at 604-798-0575 for more details. You can also email him at whloewen38@gmail.com and visit www.dyslexichelp.ca.
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