’Bridge woman highlights dyslexia

The Family Project is a new TV series that follows families working together to overcome educational issues that affect their lives, whether it’s Dad wanting to return to education, the kids finding maths difficult, or simply parents not finding time to help with homework.

Each week, a different family is given the support of educational experts and well-known mentors to find a way to overcome the problem.

In next Monday’s episode, which is broadcast at 7.30pm on RTÉ 1, Sixmilebridge woman Catriona Pearl tries to learn more about dyslexia and how to support her son Kieran’s learning at home. After struggling in primary school, Kieran was only recently diagnosed with dyslexia.

Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty, which makes it hard for some people to learn to read, write and spell correctly.

Catriona and Kieran are paired with well-known comedian Jon Kenny, who has lived with dyslexia throughout his life and shares his experiences with them.

“When I’m writing my head races ahead of my hand completely and I can leave out words in sentences,” says Jon.

“In my very early days in primary school there wasn’t any great awareness of dyslexia but my mother knew there was something wrong, that it was more than I had a problem with spelling and reading. But you were basically put into a category and said ‘well if you can’t spell or you can’t read, you’re probably thick or stupid’,” he adds.

Jon is keen that Kieran doesn’t let his dyslexia affect his confidence and in the programme he gets him involved in a play that they perform together for his classmates and family. 

“I hope on this small journey that we have together he (Kieran) feels good and feels that we have achieved something from it because you’re surrounded by the idea that you’re not capable of doing certain things … but it’s the whole area of just finding something that he feels confident about and enjoys doing and that he feels ‘yeah, I’ve done that and I do it well’.

“I think that it’s more important to dwell on that,” says Jon about his hopes for the project and working with Kieran.

Catriona also meets a specialist from the Limerick Dyslexia Association and gets advice on how to support Kieran’s learning. 

“Before Kieran was diagnosed, he started saying he had headaches and he didn’t want to go to school,” says Catriona.

“He was frustrated, so part of this is for him to learn what dyslexia is. Since starting this, he’s like a different child, he’s much happier, there’s a spring in his step.

“He said to me the other day ‘Mum I love school, I love it. It’s like a switch went on,” outlined Catriona.