Today in browsing an article from an education publication, I came across the term intensive support having to do with aniticpating and responding to an expected flood of challenges with autism in the future. Having a daughter with special needs, (down syndrome), in our family, this term rings some bells with me. There are so many different types of situations where intensive support is called for in raising our children, period, whether they have such labels applied to them or not. We just try our best to watch and to respond when those times appear. It was amazingly easy to teach phonics to our daughter when she was six, but I did have to pull her out of the public school system that year in order to do it. Reading was going to be fundamental for her success in learning, I did know that. I also knew she could do it, and I knew it was going to take intensive support for a period of time until she got that foundation in place.
Parents of children with dyslexia call every day saying they know there has to be a reading program that can help, and they are searching diligently to find it. Adults who can’t read call every day to Reading Horizons saying they have reached a point where they can’t go any farther without help, lamenting their pain of not having had some type of successful intervention earlier. Then on the other end of things, because it is always gratifying to hear the result of having used this Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself methodology, it’s clear that there is an intensive need for intensive support in literacy.
