Parents often ask me how to build their child’s confidence. Confidence will grow when your child is successful at something that used to be hard . . . as this parent shared:

Both of my kids are dyslexic. But my daughter, who is going into 7th grade, suffered tremendously in school since she is older and was in a traditional school longer. My poor daughter was an undiagnosed dyslexic all the way through 5th grade.

Every year, I spent hours and hours after school and on weekends trying to reteach material she was not understanding at school – and to prepare for all the spelling tests. I did not know anything about dyslexia, so we did what the school recommended and drilled the spelling list every single night, 7 days a week, hoping she would pass the spelling test through constant repetition.

Some Fridays she passed the test, and some Fridays, she did not. But the following Monday, she could no longer remember the sequence of letters. What a colossal waste of our time and effort (hers and mine), and it was so demoralizing to my daughter who began to show signs of clinical depression.

So we began homeschooling this past year, and I found the Barton System. We started it in late fall, and I had to go very slowly in the beginning (mainly because she was so down on herself), but she is now half-way through Level 3.

She took a spelling test from an assessor the other day on the recommendation of a friend. We did not study for the test. It was given to her cold.

There was a time when she would not have gotten a single word right on that list, and what’s more, she would have been utterly terrified at the prospect. But this time, when a word was read to her that she was uncertain of, she would finger spell the sounds, write the word down and study it, sound it out again, then change what she felt might need changing.

She got every single word correct, which was great.

But what was even better was seeing her confidently studying the words when she felt the spelling might be wrong – instead of just giving up in tears. She did not panic going into the test, either. She sat down confidently, and left the test the same way.

When she found out she had not made a single misspelling, she and I looked at each other with huge grins on our faces.

The next morning, she got up early and asked if we could go ahead and start our next Barton lesson before breakfast.

Thank you, Susan. There really aren’t adequate words to express how grateful we are.