1. Initial Assessment
Before the reading programme, a short assessment will establish your strengths, or those of your child, and any areas that might need addressing and, moreover, will work out if the programme will help. A member of your family or someone close to you can be present (a parent or carer will always be present for a child).
2. A Personalised Programmme
A fully qualified and licensed facilitator will then have one-to-one sessions with the student. Davis facilitators always provide programmes on a one-to-one basis and, moreover, always individually tailor them to personal goals. The ultimate objective of a Davis programme is to put the student in control of their own thinking style and pass the responsibility for their Davis tools to them.
3. Home Follow-up
Once you complete the programme, follow-up work must start. Your facilitator will show someone you are happy to work with how to support you. Through the follow-up work, the newly acquired skills will be fully mastered and embedded into your way of learning. It is the key to a successful programme. The most important thing the support person must understand is that they must not take responsibility away from the student. At all times the facilitator will be available to turn to for help and advice should anything seem unclear.
Photo courtesy of New England Dyslexia Solutions – used with permission
A Davis Reading Programme
A Typical Reading Programme
A Davis facilitator will, typically, deliver a basic reading programme over 30 hours of one-to-one work. This may be over 5 consecutive days, or possibly over more, but shorter, days, depending on age and stamina. The days will always be close together so that the programme is ideally completed without too much of a break.
The programme consists of 3 parts:
1. Receiving your mental tool kit.
2.Learning to control your new tools.
3.Discovering how to control your own learning.
Your Mental Tool Kit
- You will be given a relaxation tool.
- Your facilitator will then use the perceptual and kinaesthetic exercises described in The Gift of Dyslexia to show you how to turn off the disorientation that is at the root of your gift of dyslexia. This disorientation can cause problems when used while trying to read or write or make sense of instructions.
- You will be given a tool to control your own energy levels.
Learning to Control Your New Tools
Once you have your tools you will be shown how to use them and the clay to get rid of the problems that can arise because of your gift of dyslexia. You will then spend the rest of your programme learning how to control those tools.
Koosh Balls
Koosh ball exercises will reinforce your orientation tool and open new neural pathways in the brain, thus making learning easier.
Modelling in Clay
Your facilitator will show you how to use clay to model those things that cause you confusion. Things such as alphabet letters and trigger words, which cause confusion because they do not link directly to meaning. In this way you will and master them. They will then no longer be a problem.
Reading Exercises without phonics
Reading practice based on phonics requires phonetic knowledge and sounding out. The dyslexic reader slows down, which gets in the way of fluency and, therefore, disrupts comprehension. For this reason,the Davis Programme uses reading exercises that do not require any phonetic knowledge or sounding out of words. Davis reading exercises, Spell Reading, Sweep Sweep Spell and Picture at Punctuation, train your tracking ability and develop the relationship between the words on the page and the images they create in your mind.
Support Person Training
Towards the end of your programme your facilitator will train someone to be your support person as you complete the follow-up work required to become a Corrected Dyslexic. The support person may be a parent, guardian, partner, or anyone else who is willing to offer you the support you need without trying to take over. Someone you feel you can work with.
Taking control of your own learning
Over the 30 hour period, your facilitator will work to pass all responsibility for using your tools and correcting your dyslexia to you. Allowing you, finally, to be in total control of your Gift for the first time.
Professional acclaim for the Davis Programme
“Ron Davis is a revolutionary and profound thinker and has discovered what history will record as one of the great insights in the fields of learning and how the mind works.”
– Thom Hartmann, author of Beyond ADD: Hunting for Reasons in the Past and Present, and many other top selling books.
“These [Davis] procedures have an excellent foundation in learning theory. They use each of the senses for learning and provide for concept integration.”
– Joan Smith, Ed.D., author of You Don’t Have to be Dyslexic
“After hearing so much about what kids labeled ‘dyslexic’ can’t do, it’s refreshing to learn from Ron Davis about the gift of dyslexia. Davis helps us reframe the learning abilities of kids who have trouble reading, yet who possess superior visual-spatial understanding, and he provides important clues as to how they can be reached.”
– Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., author of The Myth of the A.D.D. Child
