Skip 'Sounding It Out' | This Mom Skipped 53 Reading Percentiles in 90 Minutes a Week

We are constantly told that parenting is just about surviving the next phase, but what happens when the chaos becomes the permanent baseline of your house? If you are exhausted by nightly reading and writing battles, standard methods like "sounding it out" might be completely useless for your child's brain.

Welcome back to The Parent Tap. Today, host Ryan McDonough sits down with Russell Van Brocklen, a New York State Senate-funded dyslexia researcher. He isn't here to offer feel-good theory; he is delivering an operational blueprint to fix your kitchen table battles. Russell breaks down his core philosophy: "If you can write, you can read," and proves it with staggering data.

In this episode, we extract the blueprint on:

The Brain Deficit: Why the front part of a dyslexic brain is 2.5 times overactive, and exactly how to harness it using word analysis.

The Extreme Interest Hack: Why you must abandon standard school books and strictly use your child's "specialty" (from Disney to Sports).

The 1.5 Hour Miracle: How a homeschooling mom helped her son jump from the 11th to the 64th percentile in reading by working just an hour and a half a week.

The NASA Protocol: How a 10-year-old student is using the "Craft of Research" to write advanced paragraphs and prepare for academic publication.

Connect with Russell Van Brocklen
NYS Senate-funded dyslexia researcher
DyslexiaClasses.com • 518-892-2202 • dyslexiaclasses1@gmail.com
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Transcript

The Introduction & The 8-Grade Level Miracle

SPEAKER_01 0:05

I'm writing a book called Writing to Read. If you can write, you can read. And in that, I met Kimberly in December 27th of 2024. We worked with Kimberly for eight and a half months. She worked with her son. His name was Reed. He was reading at the 11th percentile, writing at the fourth percentile. After eight and a half months with her, he was in a public school, retested. He jumped up to the 64th percentile in reading, fifth percentile in writing, 97th percentile in grammar. He is now getting A's and B's in most of his subjects. A homeschooling mom did this in an hour and a half a week.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

We are constantly told that parenting is just about surviving the next phase. But what happens when the phase doesn't end and the chaos becomes the permanent baseline of your house? Welcome back to the Parent Hub. My name is Ryan McDonough, and today's guest is Russell Van Brocklin. As a dyslexia expert and professor, he doesn't deal in fluffy feel-good theory. He deals in operational blueprints. Today we are stripping away the emotion, killing the excuses, and building a tactical framework to get your household back under control.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

So let's look at what dyslexia is. Okay? Do you see how the back part of your brain you have all this massive neuroactivity? But the

The Neuroscience of a Dyslexic Brain

SPEAKER_01 1:21

back part of mine has next to nothing? I do, yes. The front part of my brain is about two and a half times overactive. Wow. Okay. You see that? So now, just so you understand what this is, so I can act your audience can actually leave here with something to do tonight. I want you to think about the biggest problem that I face, the parents contact me all the time with. Their kids in elementary and middle school are writing a bunch of randomly placed misspelled words, and they don't even know where to start. Nobody can help them. So what I want to do is just quickly show you how to do that. Do you know any dyslectic kids that are writing randomly placed misspelled words in elementary or middle school at any point in your life?

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Yes, sir. I used to be an elementary teacher.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Okay. So I want you to pick out a specific student and change their name to protect their identity. What's the student's name? Aiden. Aiden. And what is Aiden's speciality? What's his area of extreme interest and ability?

SPEAKER_00 2:18

He likes PE.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Okay, he likes it.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

A lot of kids in elementary didn't, yeah, they didn't really have a subject. It was like sports.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

So he okay, so he likes sports. Okay. So I'm going to show you how to fix this now in just the next couple of minutes. Are you ready? Okay. So what's going to happen is I'm going to, at one point, I'm going to ask you a very specific question. The most simplest questions you've ever been asked. If you follow it exactly, this will work. If not, you're going to get tremendously confused,

Fixing Randomly Misspelled Words: The "Aiden" Exercise

SPEAKER_01 2:44

and then you're going to have an epiphany on what dyslexia really is. You ready to go? Yeah, yeah, ready. First thing you're going to do when you're teaching Aiden is you're going to pull out a laptop computer with a real keyboard, not an iPad, not an iPhone, and certainly not handwriting. And you're going to type out hero plus sign. What are we talking about? And he's going to copy it until it's correct. Then we're going to swap out hero for Aiden. So we got Aiden plus sign, what are we talking about? Then we're going to go to a list of 10 things that Aiden really, really likes, and then 10 things he really, really dislikes. And we're the first thing on the list that really, really likes is sports. And we're going to swap that out for what are we talking about. So it's Aiden plus sign, what are we talking about? We're going to swap out what are we talking about for sports. It's Aiden plus sign sports. See how we got there?

SPEAKER_00 3:33

I do. Yeah. That is a neat trick. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Now I'm going to try to fool you with two of the simplest questions you've ever been asked. Do you think I can do it? Probably. Okay, so here we have we got Aiden plus sign, what are we? Sorry, we got Aiden plus sign sports. We gotta swap out the plus sign for a word. Here's my question. Does Aiden like or dislike sports? He likes sports. But that's not what I asked. Let's try it again. Remember, we have to be exact here. Does Aiden like we gotta we have Aiden plus sign sports? We gotta swap out the plus sign for a word. Does Aiden like or dislike sports? Like. Exactly. Now what's the what's the sentence? Aiden like sports. You got it. Very few people get that. So what happened first time is let's just show everybody what's going on. This in this part of the brain where you have this massive neuroactivity, you all what you did is what almost every educated person educated person does. You automatically added the ass to make it a proper sentence. Aiden is back here, he's got nothing going on. So you so when you corrected yourself, I asked like, and then you you got that right, and then you said Aiden like sports. That's exactly what Aiden would do. Now, how do we fix that? We need to take it and move it to the front part of the brain where he has two and a half times the neural activity, and to do that,

Word Analysis & Articulation

SPEAKER_01 5:00

according to Yale, that is word analysis followed by articulation. Okay, so what we do is we'll ask Aiden, Aiden, read your wrote out loud. Aiden likes sports. Aiden, read it out loud again, and does it sound generally correct? He'll read it and say, no. I'll say, Aiden, fix it. Aiden likes sports, and then we'll try that for the other nine likes and ten dislikes. Do you see how doing that, do you see how that's a simple form of word analysis? I do. Okay. Then we'll go because reason one. Give me a simple reason why Aiden likes sports. He's good at it. Aiden likes sports because he's good at it. Now, do you see how now we have to fix the grammar here? So what I'd do is say, Aiden, read what you wrote out loud. It doesn't sound generally correct. Keep doing it until it sounds generally correct. Okay? Now, do you see how the reasons are a simple form of articulation? Yes. So now we've moved things from the back part of the brain where nothing's going on to the front part where it's two and a half times overactive. So then to get the spelling correct, I'm sure you had a lot of problems like that as a teacher. Yes, sir. What if I told you it's really simple to fix spelling?

SPEAKER_00 6:10

I I I wish I I met you 15 years ago when I was in the middle of this.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Here's how we do it. We tell the student to drop a period, and then we say you have to read if you make one misspelled word, you have to retype everything. So so it'd be eight. So he's gonna keep keep retyping it for about three to thirteen times. They're gonna keep making errors after errors after errors until they eventually get it c get it correct. All right. And then we'd read we do it for the other nine likes and ten dislikes, and then the 20 likes and 10 dislikes for reason one and reason two, and for re and then for reason one, reason two, reason three, another 20 sentences. At the end, they're gonna be like grammat grammatically decent questions. So as long as they're decent, I found teachers can take care of the little ones and the meaty ones, and then there'll be correct spelling, and then also the reading would improve because if they can write it, they can read it. If they can write it, they can read it. And that's how you do the basics, but that's part three of the model. Part one is you have to focus on the kid's speciality. I was the most motivated kid I ever worked with, her name was Casey, 10 years old, and I gave her this book, Rise of Theater Roosevelt, which is for 10th graders. She was reading at the second grade level. Her choice, three hours a night for six months. She read, she knew every word in that book. She jumped eight grade levels in six months. I worked with her for 15 minutes a week. Okay. But when we went

The Extreme Interest Hack: Casey's Story

SPEAKER_01 7:37

to a book she hated, her motivation dropped for 50%. Most kids, 75 to 90. And this is a hard thing as a public school teacher, but there's no way around it. During the intervention period, you have to focus on the kids' speciality, their area of extreme interest and ability. Work with the homework the parents to do the homework at night so you can work with them in the daytime. For teachers, what you might want to do instead of every kid doing the same book, divide the class into two or three and pick the book that that group likes at least a little bit. You step outside that speciality, though, you're done. The last thing is when you're dealing with dyslectics. Do you remember how most of the stuff you taught was big picture? Moved on to then you eventually went down to the details? Yes, sir. Okay. Well, for dyslectics, that's the worst thing in the world. If you ask a dyslectic, what effect did up did the mo uh did Martin Luther King's famous speech have on the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s? We don't even know where to start. Nothing. No idea. It's like grabbing fog, but if we ask a specific to a general question,

Why "Big Picture" Teaching Fails Dyslexic Students

SPEAKER_01 8:44

what personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech? We know exactly what to do. We look it up. That answer gives us a question, which gives us an answer, which gives us a question. That forces the dyslectic brain to organize itself to the dyslectic brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. Okay? An example of just a quick example of how successful this is. I'm writing a book called Writing to Read. If you can write, you can read. And in that, I met Kimberly in December 27th of 2024. We worked with Kimberly for I worked with her for eight and a half months. She worked with her son. His name was Reed. He was reading at the 11th percentile, writing at the fourth percentile. After eight and a half months with her, he was in a public school, retested. He jumped up to the 64th percentile in reading, fifth percentile in writing, 97th percentile in grammar. He is now getting A's and B's in most of his subjects. A homeschooling mom did this in an hour and a half a week.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

That's hard to believe. I gotta be honest. Like you're giving me all this, like I believe you because you're an expert, but it's also like as a former educator, it seems like a second grader reading that book and a and uh you know, homeschooled mom doing all this and accomplishing all that in an hour and a half is is unreal. So I we need to learn more about this system. This how do you like what what can parents do at home right now, working with their kids, to have this kind of success?

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Well, the first thing you have to do is very simple. Find out the kids' speciality, find out a book that they're most interested in. My most popular one by far is this one. Welk Disney, the triumph of the American Imagination. This is a thousand pages for 17-year-olds, and I'll give this to 10-year-olds who can't read. All right. Why? Because they're fanatical about Disney. They want to know what the they they really want to know what the what the two universal themes are that make up the Disney magic when you go to the park. All right. Or Harry Potter is another popular one. Find out their speciality, teach them from the specific to the general, and then word

Implementing the Blueprint at Home

SPEAKER_01 10:48

analysis followed by articulation. And just so you can believe what I'm doing, I am a New York State Senate-funded dyslexia researcher. My first program was literally funded by the New York State government. We took a bunch of super motivated high school juniors and seniors with middle school writing skills in a public school, taught by a public school teacher, one class period a day for the school year. They increased to the average range of entering graduate students on the GRE writing assessments. They all went out of college, they all graduated, GPAs of 2.5 to 3.6, uh cost New York State taxpayers less than 900 a kid. The best dyslexic transfer college at the time was landmark. We were 3x as successful for less than 1% of the cost. They cost over 100 grand.

unknown 11:35

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

That was the first thing we did. Yeah, and that was over 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Wow. This is this is this is incredible because I wish we really leaned, I leaned in more to this because I remember like you know, you mentioned in your in student speciality, like how do you like tricking students into liking or your obsession, right? So Minecraft. I think you brought up Minecraft, like to for reading, and you brought up Harry Potter, and you brought up sports, and you know, all those examples. And then the the next part is the word analysis phase, right? So how did where how does it come from or what does the process look like as you go from that obsession or what that kid interest is to the word analysis? You know, how does a parent do that? I'm sorry, did you already explain that?

SPEAKER_01 12:20

Well, I explained that you want to go back, you listen, but for the more advanced kids, let me give you a more clear example. For let's say what what what grade level did you teach?

SPEAKER_00 12:29

I taught elementaries I kindergarten, third, fourth.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

So, what I'm about to do is show you how to do evolved paragraphs because my kids actually write far better, far more advanced paragraphs than their peers. So, real quick, I want you to pick a movie that you know really well, that you think is one of the best of all time, that everybody has seen. What's the name of that movie?

SPEAKER_00 12:49

You know, I'm gonna pull something from behind me here. Halloween. Halloween.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Okay, now I'm gonna ask you a really difficult question. I need you to reduce Halloween to a one-word

Writing Advanced Paragraphs: The "Halloween" Method

SPEAKER_01 13:00

universal theme that best represents that movie. Horror, right? Horror, okay. Now, well, give me something more than horror because we already know it's a horror movie.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Yeah, moody. Like for me, it's it's very moody. Like cinematic. Yes, okay.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

So, what you would do, if you're writing a review on that, you would write, you take the top actors, how do they do with that universal theme? How did the director do? How did the screenwriter do? You write your review, people decide if they want to see it or not. If they do want to see it, you've enhanced their experience because now they know what to look for. You haven't ruined it by telling them this happened, this happened, and this happened. Key part though, you can only do this in a very broad brush because your universal theme of Moody is so broad. So we have to focus on that. So, what we're gonna do is now to go back to Shakespeare, what we did in high school. Do you remember how we'd have a hero? Hero wanted to do something by one or more universal themes, then we would have our ultimate villain who tried the hero from stopping their which what the hero wanted to do. It was a person or a concept or some combination there, too. They would have a conflict in act one, jump up to act two, really stressed, and then resolve it in act three. Sound familiar? Absolutely. Here's how we solve reading. Here's how we do really advanced stuff in one technique that you probably don't know about. The first thing we would do is say, for what we're what the kid's writing on, this is more advanced stuff. We would say, we're gonna do an advanced form of word analysis. What does the hero want to do? Write out as many paragraphs as you can for each sentence, find the best, most important word in that sentence. Then you're gonna type out the word, and this is why you have to be in that speciality or this doesn't work. You then have to tell the kid they're gonna go to Marion Webster's online dictionary, find the definition, and type out the word and the definition. If you're outside the specialty, this will not work. If it's inside exactly, it will. And what I tell the kids, I said, remember that from part of the brain. We're dealing with word analysis. If you don't know exactly what the word is, you can't do word analysis. I can't help you. So they type out the word, they type out the definition. After they do that so many times, they know exactly what that word is. They do this in fifth grade in high school when they're studying for the SATs, they already know what these words is. They remember 70 to 80% of the definition. It's permanent. This is how you develop an advanced vocabulary of hundreds of words that jump the reading level. So then they do that for each one, and then you pick what is the best, most important word. That is your base universal theme, but it's still very broad. We then go to the thesaurus, put it in, and for the synonyms, you can pick five, ten, the whole level, multiple levels, and then you type out the word and the definition for each one until you find the one that best matches what's in your head. This does take a lot of time, but after I worked with Casey for six months, she I would ask her, go thesaurus this, run it down. She said in less than 10 minutes, she did 211 words, and this is the best one because she didn't have to look up anything. Okay. So what they do is then you find the best one that matches in your head, the kid's head. That's your universal theme, which allows us to laser focus to find the ultimate villain, hero, universal theme, ultimate villain, adds a couple of plus eyes, doesn't sound generally correct, no, until we get it done. Do you see how that's an advanced form of word analysis?

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Oh, yeah. No, I love the examples. I love how this is something that you could instantly implement, you know, in your classroom, but also at home. And you know, the audience here is, I think, mostly parents. So this is a great system.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

But here's the next thing, this is the key part of how we actually get the output. Then you go because reason one, two, and three, the best you best reasons you can. Here's the little form of word analysis. For each reason, then you reduce it to a simple universal thing. We in this case, we go to your script of Halloween, and based on that universal theme, we find a one-sentence quote that deals with the universal theme at the beginning of the script, one at the end. We put those two together. That's our data. From those two, we then create a topic sentence. From that top now, have you remember in grad school and in college that when you had the topic sentence and the data, it never really flowed very well. Yes. Have you ever thought of applying a warrant to a body paragraph?

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Yeah, you know what? I don't I don't even know what that uh you're smarter than I am. I don't know what to do.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

No, no, unless

The Craft of Research: Adding Warrants

SPEAKER_01 17:34

I teach from a book called The Craft of Research, which teaches PhD students how to do their doctoral dissertations. Okay. This is a central part, and there are two people outside of a doctoral candidate had any idea what this is. So a warrant is it connects the topic sentence and the data by answering a how and why question.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

So then you go ahead and do that, and that's the basis for an advanced body paragraph. So in less than 20 minutes, I showed you sentences and I showed you an advanced body paragraph.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

And this this is a this is a killer system. I love it, you know, to use the Halloween verbiage there. No, I love this. And you know, is this I did have a question, like, you know, the the bottom down or bottom-up approach, I'm sorry. For does it work for other subjects like math, or is it just strictly for reading? And I can see how this can be used for writing as well, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:21

I do reading, I do math. I'm sorry, reading and writing, I don't touch math. Some of my kids are geniuses at it, others aren't any good. I I leave it up to professional teachers to try with that. I just don't get involved with it.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Okay, okay, yeah, that makes sense. I was just curious if if there was any overlap there. Yeah, just just kind of let's see, what else do we have here? So, yeah, I mean it's come a long way because I remember, you know, going back to my teaching days, it was a lot of like sounded out and you know, like with the deluxics. And and you know, again, that's just super boring, and you know, this this pleads into just like again, taking the students' interest, kind of tricking them, so to speak, you know what I mean, like getting them really involved in something they love and they're passionate about, and then really just kind of you know, kind of doing the groundwork there. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

So here's the key thing like when I give people this massive book, they're gonna be on this one book for one to three years. That one book. But if you can read that book, you're reading that's for 17-year-olds. Okay, now think of what you're doing in school. You are purposely being outside their speciality all the time, because that works for 80 plus percent of the student population. All you had to do was was was to plan properly

Why Standard Classrooms and "Sounding It Out" Fail

SPEAKER_01 19:35

and work and then study hard, and then you were fine, or you did amazing. For a dyslectic, it doesn't work. We have to be in our speciality, go from the specific to the general, word analysis followed by articulation, until we're at grade level. Then you can put us back in and we'll be fine. But if you're trying to do this until we're at grade level or above, you are literally just wasting everybody's time, making everybody frustrated. And for the teachers, what I would tell you is you have to work with the parents to work with a kid and give them the grunt work at home because you got so many kids. Or you're just gonna socially promote them and it's gonna go nowhere. For parents, I just tell you it's just easier doing this at home and doing it yourself. Yeah, unless if you have a school teacher and that'll actually let teachers do what they want to do because the administration gets in the way all the freaking time.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

Exactly. Well, I'm not a teacher right now, and the class sizes too make made it a made it a constant challenge of how do you reach out.

SPEAKER_01 20:35

Yep. Oh, yeah, I yeah, it it's insane. I don't know how you do it, but I but I train teachers in this approach all the time. And you know, there's obviously some more to it than that, but you know, that gives you the basics, you know, and as I said, we did that in less than 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

Exactly, exactly. I love that. Where can my audience find your blueprint, your materials, your your system?

SPEAKER_01 20:58

The best thing to do is just go to dyslexiaclasses.com. That's within S. DyslexiaClasses.com. There's a button that says download free guide. Fill out three questions and set up a time to speak with me. It's a half an hour, it doesn't cost you anything.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

That's awesome. Well, Russell, I I appreciate you being on. Was there anything else you wanted to bring up or ask?

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Or I talk about okay. I think we covered it. You did a really good job. And uh as I said, we went just one thing really quick for parents that aren't dealing with dyslectics. My most advanced student, his name, his name is Grayson. He is a 99th percentile kid in math and science, nothing involved with dyslexia at all. He wants to get his PhD, work for NASA, and Terraform Mars.

The NASA Protocol: Publishing at 10 Years Old

SPEAKER_01 21:40

And we are working right now with him uh teaching his dad to teach him to do advanced paragraphs like we discussed, and then we're gonna show him how to publish an article that we're gonna submit to a major journal.

unknown 21:50

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 21:51

Okay, 'cause he has to publish. How old do you think Grayson is?

SPEAKER_00 21:55

He sounds about my age, but he can't be. More like fifteen, maybe. Yeah. Grayson's tenth. Wow. See, that is incredible. That is incredible.

SPEAKER_01 22:05

Well, so we take we take students all the way through submitting an article for publication. Because once you know the craft of research, context, original problem statement, and original solution, you can do AI. If you don't know that, I don't know how you use AI. The kids don't know how to do it by the time they're done with college. The employment market is not good. If they do, it's going to be phenomenal.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

It's incredible what you do for students and for kids that past educators or parents maybe gave up on them, their ability to read or their ability to be that successful in life. I just really got to commend you for all your work that you've done with these kids and all the great work that you continue to do. All right. So my guest today is Russell Van Brocklin. And Russell, parents are exhausted by nightly reading battles. Okay. And that's one thing that I struggle with personally as a parent to two toddlers. And you are a dyslexia researcher. If I could say that right, dyslexia researcher who jumped a failing student seven grade levels. So, Russell, what is the single biggest mistakes parents are making at the kitchen table? Well, first