Student Spotlight: Aliya H.

At YokyWorks, we love getting to work with so many amazing kids and their families. In honor of Dyslexia Awareness Month, we are excited to share an inspiring story from one of our talented students - Aliya!

Alyia is a bright, spunky 8-year-old graduate of the YokyWorks program whose favorite things include jump roping, hula hoop, reading, math, school, playing with her friends, Roblox and Minecraft. As she puts it, "I’m excited about basically everything…"

When Aliya started at YokyWorks, she struggled with reading and spelling, but reading is no longer a barrier for her. Her YokyWorks education specialist focused on developing her phonemic awareness skills - the ability to perceive, order and manipulate the individual sounds in each spoken syllable of the English language. According to Aliya, her education specialist taught her "more words and how to spell them, write them, and all the sounds that they make." Now, she devours chapter books from the Magic Treehouse series and any books about Minecraft.

As Aliya explained to us,

"It's more fun to go to school now because I really like writing, reading…I just really like it!"

Apart from being an avid reader, storyteller, and gamer, Aliya is proud of her dyslexia. As Aliya’s mother, Melodie, shared with us,

"Last week my daughter was watching a tv show and she came running in to me and she said, 'look at this character,’ she paused it right on his face and she said, ‘he has dyslexia... he has dyslexia just like me.’ For her it is not something to be ashamed of or to feel like it at all is going to hold her back. She doesn’t have hangups about it at all.”

Melodie attributes Aliya’s positive self-image to her own commitment to championing her daughter’s dyslexic gifts. As she asserts:

"There’s a lot of information on the advantages of dyslexia and it’s pretty exciting when you can see that a lot of those things line up with your child...I would tell parents, embrace the diagnosis of dyslexia. don’t let any feelings that you may have about a learning difference hold you back from diving into it, learning about it, and getting help for your child."

We are honored to be able to count Aliya among our program graduates and extremely proud of all she has accomplished. We can’t wait to see what wonderful adventures the future has in store for her!