No more struggle with words

“Christmas was a few days away. Robin sat by the window while his brother and sister helped their mother put the tree up. The house was happy but Robin wasn’t. His father had been away for so many days.”— From The Dolch Project

Storybooks and childhood often share a loving relationship. Big fonts, spaced-out lines, colourful pictures — they have brought joy to so many. However, this joy can prove elusive to youngsters with a wide range of learning disabilities, making reading a struggle for them. While there have been efforts to help them academically, there was not much focus on making reading a pleasure.

This is where The Dolch Project attempts to make a difference. Started by Bodhisatwa Dasgupta, Creative Director of advertising firm Grey, the project takes its name from educationist Edward William Dolch, who had compiled a list of 220 words ( Problems of Reading published in 1948) that occur frequently in books. Prompt recognition of these words aids fluent reading. Interestingly, even words such as know, blue and laugh, which are not spelt in the way they are pronounced, are in the list.

“Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat made me realise that it is not impossible to write attractive stories for children with limited words,” says Dasgupta. Writing under a pen-name, American writer-illustrator Theodor Geisel brought out this much-appreciated book in 1957 using 223 words.

Dasgupta harnessed the social media to collectively source stories that make judicious use of Dolch words. Eight months ago, he set up a Facebook page asking people to volunteer for the project and specifying that the ratio of Dolch to non-Dolch words should not exceed 80:20. The response was overwhelming — teachers, professional writers and parents enthusiastically contributed stories. The youngest contributor was an eight-year-old girl from Kolkata. The varied background of the writers ensured that the collection of stories was diverse.

“Writing a story using a given set of words was challenging and it helped me realise how so many of us take our reading abilities for granted,” says Pooja Lulla, a children’s writer, who contributed to the project.

Sowmya Surendranathan, Director-Services at FIVE, a Chennai-based centre for child development, is confident the venture will motivate children with dyslexia to read and take it up as a hobby. “Forty per cent of the children who come to us have some form of learning disability. Such children do not have low IQ, they just have sensory processing difficulties,” she says. She also points out that reading goes beyond mere academic requirement. “Even when you go to a restaurant, you need to read the menu. Gaining confidence with words is useful in more ways than we think.”

The Dolch Project now has 119 stories. Dasgupta’s efforts to publish them initially met with little success. “The publishers were weighing the monetary gains, but I was more inclined to ensure wider availability of the books,” he says.

Now a few Indian and foreign NGOs have approached him for publishing the stories and he expects to release the first volume of 30-40 stories by June. “I have also considered the idea of self-financing the project,” he says.

The project also raises questions unique to a multilingual country like India, where children often interact with more than one language — mother tongue, local language (when not the mother tongue), the school medium of instruction. For instance, when she used a bilingual book (English and Hindi) to help a dyslexic seven-year-old read, children’s writer Sandhya Rao discovered that he had trouble reading the English while the Hindi seemed almost a breeze. Is this because you read Hindi the way it is written? Do all Indian languages have this characteristic? What about other languages?

Linguists say the English script represents an earlier language, distinct from the English spoken today, leading to more anomalies between spelling and pronunciation. This can make it a relatively ‘difficult’ language. However, modern Indian languages too have several ‘redundancies’ — multiple letters for the same or similar sounds (s, n, r), for instance.

Sowmya believes it is better to concentrate on one language for students with learning disabilities. “The language of preference among children varies as it depends on the surroundings,” she adds.

Can a children’s book even be conceived without a splash of colour?

Certainly not; hence all stories in The Dolch Project are accompanied by illustrations, each distinct in style. Here again, Dasgupta used Facebook to connect with professional and amateur artists, who contributed enthusiastically to the project. Each artist was assigned ten stories. Like the stories, the artworks too are richly diverse and use a range of mediums.

Slowly, but surely, its Facebook page is getting more and more colourful with new illustrations. The one sent by Sreejita on December 14 depicts a child, armed with a huge, colourful balloon, climbing up a rainbow. A smiling Sun, adorning sunshades, waits to welcome him!

Ankita’s illustration, updated the next day, shows disability but without any fuss or apology. A girl is seated on a wheelchair in a garden, and is surrounded by colourful birds, squirrel and greenery. Castles and peacocks, rockets and rabbits and all else that inhabit the fascinating world of children are depicted.

“It is great to be a part of this project as so many artists and writers have come together. There was absolute creative freedom and the artists explored their realm of comfort to create the lovely illustrations,” says Sreejita Biswas, co-founder of comics e-zine StripTease the Mag and a proud Dolch Project contributor .