Alex the Big Time Reader!

Horizons in Hemophilia, August 2009

By Cathy Hulbert, LCSW, HoG Social Worker

Some people take power walks and some people do power yoga. There are people who even take power naps! Alex D., age 11, is a power reader!

He recently broke a reading record for the fifth grade at Oakwood Elementary School in Oakwood, GA. Through the state-sponsored accelerated reading program, which assigns points to books based on level of difficulty, Alex zoomed way past the 165-point record for the fifth grade, ending the year with 303 points! To get the points, he had to take a comprehension test for each book that he read. It didn't count if he read a book and couldn't answer questions about it. He worked hard to average about 100 pages a day. The goal was to read four or five books every six weeks, said his mother, Patti. The more he read, the faster he got, and the more his vocabulary grew. Suddenly he started seeing a big pay off in classes such as math, history and social studies, his mom added. And he loves conversations about trivia because he has been exposed to so many different things through books, Alex said with a smile.

Along the way to beating the class record, he learned about Davy Crockett and the Navaho Indians who were heroic "code talkers" during World War II. Alex finished all of the Harry Potter books that were out at the time and he connected with his maternal grandfather's childhood world in the Ozark Mountains with the help of a classic book called Where the Red Fern Grows.

"What I like about this (accelerated reading) program is that it can be very difficult to measure whether your child is really reading," Patti said. "When there is a test for each book, you get that feedback that yes, he really is reading and taking it in." Sometimes they read together when he needed that extra support, she added.

While reading some of the Harry Potter books with Alex, she realized that this character might have a special message for her son, who has Factor VIII Deficiency. "Harry Potter is an ordinary boy, an orphan living in an unhappy home environment, who realizes that he has special abilities," Patti explained. "He steps up to the plate and uses those abilities. Alex and I talked about how this might apply to him. Harry didn't sit on the sidelines and focus on what wasn't right in his life. And Alex doesn't need to sit on the sidelines and say, 'I have hemophilia, or I wear glasses, so I can't really contribute.' Those books gave us a lot to talk about."

And being one of those "ordinary," yet not-at-all-ordinary boys himself, Alex wasn't always thrilled about reading, said his mother and father, Mark. Some days he just got bored, or he didn't feel like checking out a new genre, such as historical fiction. He is an active boy with other interests in his life and plenty of other homework assignments. To help keep him motivated, his parents set goals and rewarded him with fun things along the way, such as a pizza lunch with a friend or two at school. Another tip: Alex had a special place in his book bag for the book he was reading, and he took time during breaks at school to read a few pages.

Alex tends to be pretty humble about the whole thing. Like Harry, he is just being himself as he reads up a storm!