Thank You for Fantastic Work at Edublox

Dear Monique,

I would like to say a big Thank You to Edublox and all of its teachers, once again, for the awesome work and support towards my son, Matteo.

I knew about Edublox, as my daughter had previously attended more than 2 years ago and she had wonderful results with it and because of this I also decided to send my son, as he is a unique case and needed major help.

Let me give you a bit of his background:

With our son, when he was a baby, we noticed that something was amiss but could not pin-point the problem. As parents, we either blamed our tiredness or his tiredness because we constantly came home late from work and his sister had learnt to ‘read’ him so well, that she would do the talking for him.

Matteo would not talk, he did not even say the baby ‘googoos, gaagaas’ and mumbles. He did not even say the first ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ that all parents look forward to. Doctors told us to be patient and with time he’d talk.

Matteo, at the age of 2 years 7 months, was classified as deaf!

Thankfully, he can hear now, as his deafness was treatable and he had an operation to correct this.

Due to the late diagnosis of Matteo’s condition, he missed the crucial milestones of speech development, language, vocabulary, audio processing and spatial awareness. This also affected his communication, facial/tongue muscle movements and even emotional levels.

Matteo has had various therapies, e.g. speech, occupational and listening therapy. It has been a constant struggle, to make his brain ‘catch-up’ what he missed in the first 2-3 years of his life. It has been and is a long, slow and steady process.

In previous years for English, for various categories, his reports varied from Elementary Achievement to Adequate Achievement, i.e. 30 – 59% at remedial schools, and now he is almost on par with the grade average at his mainstream school.

Due to him being deaf for such a long period of time, his sight sense became his priority sense and he relied on high accuracy through his vision. So, things that we take for granted, like being able to read the multitude variations of fonts, was a huge struggle for him because they did not look the same, they were not the same thing for him and this caused a major problem for him to be able to read. If one can’t read, one is not able to read instructions, do comprehensions, read textbooks and do day to day fundamentals, so his education was affected.

Due to his high accuracy, spelling has also been a challenge. When he learnt to say the phonics alphabet, his vision was telling him that e.g. an ‘i’ could not possibly have the same sound as ‘ee’ or an ‘e’ could not possibly have the same sound as ‘ea’, as they did not look the same. Then, when the naming of the alphabet changed from phonics to what I call ‘normal’ alphabet, he had another set-back and had to climb the up-hill again because now e.g. an ‘i’ was no longer an ‘i’ but an ‘I’.

So, with all of this in consideration, I enrolled Matteo at Edublox.

Well, what a change!……he is reading now and has read at least 6 books at home this year alone, excluding his schoolwork reading. He has read most books from authors like Roald Dahl, David Williams and Sophie Plowden. He has read the whole of ‘The Storey Treehouse’ series and is now reading the ‘Secret Seven’ series from Enid Blyton.

His spelling has improved dramatically, and his concentration has had a major boost.

In previous years for English, for various categories, his reports varied from Elementary Achievement to Adequate Achievement, i.e. 30 – 59% at remedial schools, and now he is almost on par with the grade average at his mainstream school.

Below is his remedial teacher’s comments, at year-end 2017: