Caring Hearts & Hands Quail Creek presenting book sets to C.E. Rose Elementary School’s principal (left to right): Cheryl Anthony (dyslexia specialist), Alma Carmona-Alday (principal), and Yasmin John-Thorpe and Cindy Hogg (Caring Hearts & Hands members)
Connie Jean Vaughan
We all can still remember our first readers with See Spot Run or Jack and Jill. And maybe some of us even had trouble reading due to dyslexia. Dyslexia is a learning disability that affects skills involved in reading, spelling, and writing. More than 300 million children and adults combined are diagnosed each year.
One of our Caring Hearts & Hands Quail Creek (CHHQC) members, Yasmin John-Thorpe, is an author of children’s books and has sold her books at QC Fall Festivals over the years. Yasmin and Cheryl Anthony, a dyslexia specialist from Green Valley, joined forces, developing simple books whose stories are written with a decoded system that is used for dyslexia. Reading Is Fun! books are uploaded to www.rifbooks.com and sold online to teachers, tutors, and parents whose young readers are having problems.
Earlier this year, Yasmin and Cheryl presented this reading program to CHHQC, explaining the need for these books in our local schools. CHHQC agreed to purchase and donate one set, which contained 11 books, as a gift to an area school. Decodable books encourage children to sound out words using decoding strategies rather than guessing from pictures or predicting from other cues.
This first set of books was donated to Anza Trail-Sahuarita second-grade teacher Becky Hill who, herself, is dyslexic. And word spread across the grade schools in Sahuarita and Tucson.
CHHQC has since donated an additional five sets of Reading Is Fun books: one set to Copper View Elementary School-Sahuarita and three sets to C.E. Rose Elementary, Southern Tucson. We still have one set left to donate to a lucky teacher.
If you would like to donate to Caring Hearts & Hands Quail Creek, please contact us at [email protected] (SueAnn Obremski).