Daily Archive for January 8th, 2006

Sandy L. Cook hosts a Web site aimed at helping parents understand and “circumvent” their children’s disabilities. She has a lot about home schooling, dyslexia, and such. In addition to her professional qualifications (mostly in technology), she has waded into education for students with Learning Disabilities, having been led there by her children.

Sandy’s children collectively have severe dyslexia, dysgraphia, executive function deficits, and ADHD. After battling the public schools for five years, and filing a successful due process lawsuit, the Cooks found the services offered by the school were inadequate. Reluctantly, Sandy began homeschooling her children and has found the experience rewarding and more successful than she ever imagined. Sandy was able to bring her child with severe dyslexia from a 1.9 grade reading level to a 10.0 grade equivalent within two years of beginning homeschooling, and each child is on grade-level in every subject except spelling!

The Web site is extensive and (for those who are squeamish about such) features advertisements. I’ve not explored the entire site, but I noted that Ms. Cook has some sensible recommendations (e.g., Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons) and a lot about Orton-Gillingham methods. There are, sadly, perpetuations of some misunderstandings; in particular, I spotted recommendations about identifying learners’ preferred modality for learning, the reversals myth, and scotopic sensitivity (see “Dyslexia Symptoms” and “Remediation 1″).

It’s too bad that there is bad material mixed into the good material on this site. I hope that people discriminate between the wheat and the chaff here, and that Ms. Cook does the research and revision that is needed to make her site more useful and less misleading to parents who want to understand their children’s disabilities.

Link to Ms. Cook’s site.