See Jane Read

Jane Komperda is overcoming dyslexia one letter at a time. But the St. Vrain School District still thinks she's too smart for special ed.

A A A Comments By Julie Jargon Thursday, Aug 28 2003

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To do that, she uses games and study cards with drawings of lips in different positions representing the letter sounds we make with our mouths. "You need to get the language into their body so they can feel it," Ingels explains.

She starts out playing a game called "What could this be?" and attaches some of the mouth cards to a large dry-erase board in her basement. Jane must sound out the word it spells. "Ssss," Jane says, looking at the first card. "Um." She stares at the last card a while before saying "er." S-um-er. Summer. It's Cindy's turn to create a word for Jane. This one's a bit harder, but Jane makes the sounds shown on the lip cards and figures it out. Th-r-ah-t-le. Throttle.

Tifenn Python

Anthony Camera

Jane Komperda reads at only a fifth-grade level.

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Next, it's time to review suffixes, and there's another game that helps Jane remember them. Only this one requires her to race someone. They choose a visitor to be the contender. Ingels says the anxiety of being put on the spot and forced to think about something that comes automatically to most people is what dyslexics feel every time they read.

Jane goes up to the board and makes two columns: one for the nine consonant suffixes and one for the eight vowel suffixes. She and her competitor have sixty seconds to write down as many as they can.

Jane wins.