Dyslexia and following the passions of your child: Nicole Bateman chats with Anne-Marie Beggs

In the final episode of Season 1 of "Conversations with a SEND Mum," host Nicole Bateman engages in a conversation with Anne-Marie Beggs, delving into the empowering world of dyslexia and the importance of nurturing and supporting the passions of children with special educational needs and disabilities.

Episode Highlights:

• Understanding Dyslexia: Anne-Marie shares her expertise and insights into dyslexia, shedding light on the challenges and strengths associated. They explore the importance of recognising dyslexia as a unique learning difference and the transformative power of embracing neurodiversity.
• Nurturing Passions: Anne-Marie then discusses the significance of identifying and nurturing the passions of children with special educational needs and disabilities. Nicole and Anne-Marie delve into the role of passions in fostering self-esteem, confidence, and resilience in children, despite any challenges they may face.
• Supporting Neurodivergent Learners: They discuss practical strategies and approaches for supporting neurodivergent learners in pursuing their passions and interests. From advocating for inclusive education to providing accommodations and fostering a strengths-based approach, they highlight the importance of creating environments that celebrate diversity and individuality.

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Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Conversations with a SEND Mum, with me, your host, Nicole Bateman. Today I'm here with Anne Marie Beggs, and she is the owner of the Paragraph Challenge and a Dyslexia Specialist. So Anne Marie, so much for coming on. You're welcome. I'm very excited to be here and it's great to be with you and I know I'm collaborating with a few of your other colleagues as well, so I'm really excited about the future. Yeah. Thanks for having me. That's all right. So first of all, can you tell us a little bit about your connection to the SEND community, please? Sure. So I have three children. They are now all adults and one of them is 31. My son is 30 and my youngest daughter is nearly 21. And I got involved in the dyslexic community when my son was diagnosed with dyslexia when he was 8. And now I knew from the time he was 5 he was dyslexic because I had an older daughter. And I could see the difference in their learning experience from the very outset. You know, she just flew along effortlessly. Prior to school, I thought, wow, he is a genius. He can make 2000 piece jigsaws. He's going to be amazing when he gets to school. Confused when he got there is going, what is what's happening now? He's in a different school and it was a slightly different way of teaching. They were very focused on phonics, which just, just didn't work for him. He had all these songs like he had, I don't know. There was Fe Fe Fe goes fireman Fred, but he'd be gone Fe Fe Fe and Dippy Duck and like the songs are mixed up with the sounds and I was going. Wow, this is so complicated for, for, for a four year old to remember a sound. You have to remember the song that goes with the sound. And then each letter, because it was letter land, each letter also had a character inside it. So even if you weren't dyslexic, to me, it was confusing for a small child. Anyway, after a couple of months, he was so frustrated, pulling his hair out. And so I did a lot of research. I had him assessed at five and they said, wow, his math skills are off the chart. His English skills are a little bit low, but we don't give a diagnosis at five. And I remember thinking, well, why not? That's ridiculous. I am not. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a teacher. I can tell my child was dyslexic from all the research I've done. So, I got advice from a teacher in my daughter's school and she said, Oh, you know, check his eyes and ears. And we'd already done all that. And so I switched school because the school he was in was like, his report in the summer actually, Nicole said, Christian has now developed into a flourishing reader. Now, very few kids are flourishing readers at five anyway, but I was going, she's clearly just made this up because he's not. And so I sent him to a private school. He did a lot better there. One of his teachers, I think, when he was six, used to draw little pictures of both the words. Yeah. Makes sense because dyslexia is, I mean, a lot of people view it as a disability. It's not, it's just a different way of learning. So it's much more picture thinking way of learning. And so the teacher, even though he didn't know a lot about dyslexia, had figured out that if he drew pictures that Christian would understand the content and it would make more sense to him. And so at age eight, I found someone who did the Davis program. And that's when my journey changed from being a financial controller. Being a dyslexic facilitator, and I've been doing that for 18 years, and I love it. Yeah, amazing. It is amazing, and it's so much more rewarding than looking at lots of figures. Ha, ha, ha, ha. It's more money than financial control. Yeah, yeah, but you know, passion over, over money. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So, so can you, you shared a little bit about it, but can you share a few common misconceptions that you hear about dyslexia? Yeah, so, I mean, a lot of people think it's just not being, you can't read and you can't spell. It's a whole lot more than that, in advantages and disadvantages, if you're not in the right teaching system. So, when I was training, one of my colleagues is dyslexic, and, and she practiced and practiced before she came to the training, even though the training was going to be all hands on 3D. Yeah. That anxiety. And so she could do everything back and forwards. And she said to me, her school experience was like going into a classroom and everyone was speaking a foreign language, so she couldn't access the content at all. Because she didn't understand the words, so it's not just the written word, it can be, for some people, it can be the spoken word. It can be if the word, if the teacher moves around the class a lot, it can be the sound moving so that like they don't think with the sounds of words, therefore focusing on sounds of words does not help a dyslexic person. So, if you do phonics once and this is what school systems do, they'll go, okay, you didn't get it that time, right, we'll do it all again. And they'll just keep doing it and then pretty much by the time the child is ten, they'll They're so ingrained in phonics that trying to get them to spell anything is like, it's like to say there's something like cats that go ah, chuh, kuh, huh. And then like, it makes no sense for them, but they, it's very hard to break that cycle. That's what, what they're kind of attached to. And other ways, like some children find very, a lot of difficulty with timetabling, reading timetables, maths difficulties. Learning how to spell. And people think, oh we teach them all the rules for spelling. Well, they don't remember rules, so that doesn't help. Yeah. The main thing that I found with my son and my younger daughter to some extent is the anxiety that is attached to any way, anything, if you learn differently than the education is teaching. I mean, in my first book, I did a diary entry, and of a week, what each week represented a day in the year of a life of a child going to school. And the longer in school they're in school, the bigger the anxiety climbs. So by the time they're like at the end of primary school, they're so overwhelmed and a lot of them suffer from migraines, stomach issues. Now on the plus side, there's loads of pluses to dyslexia. They're just not developed in the present education system in Ireland and England. Because they're too focused on, on the one way of learning rather than, like, there's lots of different ways of learning. Experiential learning works for everybody, so why don't we use it? You know, it doesn't just work for the dyslexic or the autistic kids or the ADHD kids. All, they all flourish in a more experiential environment. So, but so do the other children. So, you know, if it works for them, it will work for everybody. Yeah. Trying to convince Yeah. It's not even the teachers, it's the system. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's not that, like, in the beginning when I trained I used to get very angry at teachers. Like after 18 years experience, you realize, well, there is good people in the system to follow the way they're trained and they have, especially in the UK, they have a lot of reporting. They're expected to get kids to certain levels, but yes, I know from my daughter's been in college. There's a lot of the kids over there are way behind the left. Like they're coming out of school. So not. But they don't have good life skills. And, you know, that's what we should be teaching kids, the basics. Rather than focusing on, I don't know. Yeah. There's some very goal that, you know, that everybody has to achieve. Yeah, definitely. I, yeah, I totally agree that the kind of looking at different ways of learning, I think is very beneficial. Like when I was in the classroom, some of the best lessons that the kids remember and learn from the best is when we like did something different, we did something different. And you know, it's. Actually, they've got more visual clues, they've got more kind of, you know like actual mapping, mapping out movement you know, movement, visual, all of using the, the whole different senses rather than just kind of listening and writing. Absolutely. I mean, I've written another book called healthy mind, healthy body, and like your sensory You know, using all the senses and the importance of like, each sense is not isolated. They all work together to create, you know, a stable human being. I know when my eldest daughter, who was like extremely good at school, very academic, but she was one of those kids who was good at everything. So she was good at sport, good at dance. The more she danced, the easier it was for her to retain information. And like, this child had very little time for studying because she was doing so much. And yet, she was very focused on, okay, I have 40 minutes now, I'll do my stuff in the car on the way. And, you know, she did very well at school. And my youngest daughter is the same. I think sometimes the more time you have to procrastinate, where everything is, I'm always telling the siblings and their kids, you need to keep your. Kids didn't mind work much better than mum because some people think okay, they need to study for five hours and then No, they won't. No, that would stress them out more Well and socialize because I think Socializing is one of the most important things for all learners is to learn how to communicate with people And a lot of dyslexic kids, one of their strengths, they're very empathetic, they're good at socializing, you know, they're very good at reading people, and they're not interested in people who are going to be bullshitting and talking, you know, they can see through people straight away. Yeah. And they're very good at, I mean, my son built a three level pond during lockdown for some time. But he taught himself all about marine biology. And he wouldn't have got into brain biology if he'd done it, but now that's what he works in. You know, there is lots of different ways of learning. And I think people who are more creative are good at teaching themselves. They know what works for them. Yeah, so if you kind of just listened a bit more. Yeah, I mean I learned so much from my students Sometimes I've little little guys who come here at five one of them was telling me all about the Incas and he knew all the names of all the different things. I was going, no I never knew that and then another little guy told me all about the You know, the history of the dinosaurs and how it progressed up to the, and I was going, yeah, well, I did study science in college, but I didn't retain any of it. Well, can you explain that? So, you know, kids follow their interests and I think it's a great way to educate them, you know, find what they're interested in. Yeah. And go with that. Absolutely. I agree. So if someone's listening right now and they think they're studying science, Daughter, son may be dyslexic, what kind of, some of the steps that you would say to approach school, to approach whatever, what steps would they take? Well, I suppose, initially, to make sure it is, like, if you feel it's dyslexia I would still go and make sure that their eyesight is fine because sometimes, you know, kids have all diagnosed check their hearing. In Ireland, I don't know about in the UK, you have to go to a psychologist. To get a dyslexia assessment, which is expensive. And, or you have to go on a waiting list, which I don't know about over there. Over here, they're two and a half years long. Oh wow. Yeah, schools, schools have a certain amount. They, in the schools here now, the principal and the teachers, if they think a child is struggling, can allocate them hours. And now, like I said, it doesn't always work because a lot of the time they're going to repeat what the teacher's doing in the classroom, they're going to use the same method. So, I mean, I'm biased. I'm not, I'm not going to say that I'm a Davis Design System Facilitator and that's how I trained and it's an American system, but I learned in the UK. And there's lots of them all over England and they're all very nice, they're all very welcoming. They will talk to you on the phone for 20 minutes, half an hour free of charge, it won't cost you anything to see that, if that is what you want. Or you can buy the book The Gift of Dyslexia that before I even trained I read that when my son was five and it was how I knew, the minute I read the very first page I went, Yeah, I, that's him. This is, you know, he's dyslexic. It took me three more years for a professional to agree with me, but I think parents know, I, you know, regardless of what anyone else tells you, I would just go with my gut. If you think that your child's not flourishing, there's a reason they're not flourishing. They might be in the wrong school. I do think that smaller schools put dyslexic children much better. Yeah, a lot of them don't like the chaos of that. I mean, I was fortunate enough that, you know, at the time we had a good income, so I could send my son to a private small school. Yep. And when it came to my younger daughter, then I was gonna, I am not sending her to a big school. Yeah. The Montessori Primary School, she was 10, and if you have a Montessori Primary School or anything like that within the area, they are the perfect setting for it. Yeah. Everything for all kids. Because everything is that experiential. And if the child is doing a piece of work, you finish it, you don't, after 40 minutes have to move to a different subject. Yeah, it's often just a piece of maths for three hours or the two. Now, when my daughter went then to, Like traditional school when she was 10, but I've already done cursive writing. Why do I have to do it? I'm like the teacher was like you have to do the book the whole class is doing it Eventually they did say okay, she can read the novel or something if she already knows how to do it. Well, you know, yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it's being outside that box in having that opportunity to pursue interests and, you know, not, not have to stop. Yeah. I, I would say as well, you know, have them in an activity that they really enjoy. So find something that the child really enjoys because school is stressful. I mean, you know, as a parent itself. It's stressful for the parents too, and you being a teacher, so you know it's stressful. But so having, all my kids had something they were passionate about outside of school, I think that makes a big difference because ultimately that's probably what school is They're going to follow as a career in the future, not what they're going to do, you know, and that's where they learn how to communicate better with people, work as a team, you know, because in schools you really, people say, Oh, if they're homeschooled, they're not going to be good socially. My youngest daughter, I homeschooled her for four years and, and she's very sociable. Yeah. Excellent life skills because she did 25 hours of gymnastics and it's, it's very disciplined. So. There's so much to learn from activities that people don't realize, you know. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That would be my advice, find what your child is passionate about. It doesn't have to be an activity, it could be a chess club, you know, it could be football, it can be anything. Sometimes people are a bit snooty, I find, about these shows, I mean it's much better to be reading a book or playing chess than it is running around with a book, well it's not, it depends on the child to do what they like. I mean obviously you have to have, you know, Limits. Yeah, yeah. It's a thing, but you will have a much happier child if they are using their creative skills. And you know, it's not just dyslexic kids that have creative skills. Everybody has a creative part of their brain, just not always. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely good advice there. So you mentioned, so you've written a few books, can you, yeah, share what, what people would get from them if they read them, what they're called? Well, so my first book is called A Bridge Between Two Me's and I got the title from, I did a bootcamp with one of my colleagues in America and it was all about like self empowerment and growing yourself and beliefs and all that, and we did it all pre play. Yeah. That's great. Because Davis work is all done through play. And at the end of it, I wrote it in a blog called A Brief History of Two Me's. And then I was thinking about a title for my book, and I was like, it made sense. Because before I found Davis, I was one person, and now I'm a different version of myself. And similarly, like 18 years ago, I was completely different, but all of my students are different after they've done the work, because it gives them a feeling, I suppose, of empowerment, a feeling of like, you know, okay, I am smart, I just learned it, and if I use these tools, I can achieve what I want to achieve. So the book is a collection of. Blogs that I've written over the 18 years that I put into a book, but it also has information on dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, ADHD, ADHD, all that sort of stuff. So it's easy for parents to access, whereas some books, you know, you're a teacher so it's easy for you to read any type of book. But it's not always easy for parents. Especially if your child is dyslexic, there's a good chance that maybe you are too. Yeah, written in very plain English with lots of spacing and there's pictures and yeah And it's broken into sections with it. So you can just read whatever you're interested in. Yeah, my Then I wrote a book called seven and steps easy steps to learn addition or something And so that's part of a series that I'm gonna write and it's a very skinny book to help parents Teach kids how to add so like when you're shopping just use the word add like we're going to add this to the trolley. Yes reinforcing Specific words so that when kids encounter them in school Because some kids will understand what the word add will some kids have no clue so they can't do the math So it might be just add two to three, but once it's written in a word, they're like, oh Oh, I wonder what that is. I don't know. Yeah, but they don't understand that it's the word that they don't understand, if you know what I mean. So, yeah, when they're very small, like two and three, you can introduce all these words like ads, subtract, so that when they go to school, they already have an idea in their mind of what the meaning and the understanding of those words is. And the last book that I've written is called Healthy Mind, Healthy Body. And it explores through a set of different colours related to each part of your mind and body and your life force, that all three, mind, body and life force, need to work together to create a healthy mind. And a healthy mind and a healthy body work together. So it doesn't matter if you go to the gym 50 hours a week, if your mind isn't healthy. Likewise, mind can't be healthy if you don't exercise, eat, sleep. Yeah, it's a whole whole self. Yeah, look at the whole self. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So if people want to connect with you where's the best place to find you? So I am on all social media platforms LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. LinkedIn and Facebook are probably just more efficient. Yeah. I mean, I do have posts going automatically too, but yeah, so you can connect to me as Anne Marie Beggs or the Paragraph Challenge and my website is theparagraphchallenge. com. Excellent. Lots of places to find me. Yeah, good. Excellent. Cause you're, you know, what you offer is very helpful. So lots of families you know, and kids benefit from it. So that's good. I mean, I absolutely love it. And if I'm doing it 18 years, it works because otherwise like you wouldn't do it. It doesn't work for them. And I wouldn't have done it if it didn't work for my own child. It was a, it was a big investment of time, energy and finance because my youngest daughter was only two at the time and I had to be home in the UK for weeks at a time. She asked me while I was in the airport, we were going on holidays to Austria when she was three. And she said, Oh, we're on the plane in 12 months. First we were in England. And now we're going to Austria, and that's the first time we were in England, because she'd bring me to the airport with my husband, see me going through, and she talked through those doors, and then, even then I was thinking, yeah, wow, so how did they expect a two year old to understand the concept that England is a different country? Like, it's amazing the assumptions you make. Yeah, that is true. With the simplest words, people think they know them, and like, They don't know that they don't know, like, I opened the door and there was England. Yeah. If only it was that simple, hey? Just open the door to a different country. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. And thank you. Thank you for listening. Remember each Wednesday a new episode is dropped and you can follow conversations with the Send Mum on Instagram and do follow this podcast on Spotify too. Thank you very much and have a great week.