My Story

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In late 2nd grade / early 3rd grade, my daughter started struggling with reading.  Like many kids with Dyslexia, in early elementary school, she relied on picture books to give her context for guessing and memorizing words.  Once we moved to books with fewer pictures and more words, we started seeing her substituting words that, in context made sense but were not the words on the page (e.g., “the” and “a” are often interchangeable).  

She started to lose her love for stories as her frustration for reading grew.   

The tipping point for me was the day my daughter said to me, “Mom, if the rule is that when two vowels go walking, and the first one does the talking - then why is “head,” not h“ee”d - like the word “read.”  If it’s a rule, then shouldn’t it always be that way?  This is too hard.”  

Watching my daughter not only start to hate reading but also start to hate math because they were word problems.  

At this point, my daughter was struggling to read, affecting her ability to learn and her self-esteem.

As an engineer, I understood my daughter’s struggle.  I want rules to be absolute.  

We know that any children who struggle with reading do not have a deficit of intelligence but an excess of it.  Many of these children are highly creative and gifted in abstract problem-solving.  Instead of learning to read words by sounding out and blending (e.g., decoding), they often memorize the whole word (sight word approach) or guess based on context.  

In a language where phonics is king but fails to follow its own rules, we needed many different approaches.  My daughter needed a method for learning to decode in a way that her brain would process and retain information.  

During my master’s degree research on visual stimuli effects on memory for pilot training programs, I came to relevant studies that could apply to helping children who have issues decoding.  

Even though the research was geared toward the study of pilots in stressful situations, the science still applied.  The use of color increases the brain's memory retention.  I did some additional research and found several other studies that showed that using color could be an effective tool to improve reading performance in young readers.   

Ultimately the use of color increases the reader's ability to encode, store, and retrieve information.  The studies suggested that color codes should be tailored to specific reading or spelling rules  

The approach taken for Doc Leada and Rusty Dog use color-coding to teach phonics decoding.   Each book starts with a “lesson of the day” that goes over the different vowel combinations that make the sound.  Then the color codes are used throughout the book to help with sound recognition and build decoding pattern retention.