Jason can read....

I did not use an exclamation mark in the title, nor did I use a question mark to show my disbelief. Instead, I use ...... Because it's a story yet to be told.
For the longest time, I know Jason can read. By that, I don't mean he can read a book or sentence or read it out. For those who are not familiar with the concept, reading is an input activity, but reading out loud is an output activity, requiring more complex involvement of the brain. We often made the mistake of asking our kids to read out a word as proof that he knows the word. This is often not necessary especially in kids with speech motor impairment. So how do we know if Jason can read or what?

I'd make word cards with big fonts on white background, then showed him two at a time. I would then ask if which one says "book" for example and he would use his hand to reach for it or point at it. One may say then it could be a random event. Well, I am not the kind of mother who would choose to convince myself of some imaginary achievement of my child cuz there is no obvious benefit for doing so. I use what I learned in psychology research and set up an environment where randomness, personal preference, and other distracting conditions are not present to obtain the most objective observation. If indeed those conditions are present, then they won't count.

In recent months, after several exciting improvement that's nothing short of a breakthrough, he showed me again that he can read. Although what he read (recognized)was limited to his inventory of familiar words, he showed us surely that he was looking at the choice of words, then picked the correct one. I retested it by switching the position of the word card to make sure he was not fixating on a particular side, or that it was not a result of hand preference. He scanned the cards once again and picked the correct card for me. Beth was with me and she was in awe.

As I said. He did this a long time ago but he never did it consistently and thus, we were not able to build on this word-reading ability. But there is something in him that makes me believe it is different this time.


I am so grateful to the Lord to see such progress in Jason albeit little. Like Leonid worded it, let's think "inch-pebble" instead of "milestone"....and there will many more to come, and we will be counting them one tiny pebble at a time.