KAYSVILLE—What started out as a way to help her son who was diagnosed with dyslexia, Kaysville Elementary kindergarten teacher Lindsay Kemeny developed a curriculum that is now being used nationwide. 

“It was my first year teaching kindergarten,” she said. “I had taught second grade previously. You spend all of this time in kindergarten teaching the letter names and sounds and I was so excited to bring my students back to my small group table and show them that now you know these letter sounds you can read.”

Kemeny said the books available to her were through a big box curriculum. “These were predictable, repetitive texts.”

There’s a lot of these books written where the whole point is to get students to memorize the pattern and look at the picture to figure out what the word is, she said. “There isn’t research to support any of that. It’s actually creating some really bad habits where we could teach much more effectively.”

Kemeny said her son was in second grade at the time. “He had been struggling to learn how to read. I was really kind of embarrassed because I’m a teacher. I’m doing all these things I was taught in college.”

Nothing seemed to be helping, she said. “We finally did some outside testing that year and we found out he has dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia. That’s a reading disability, writing disability and math disability. So that really started me on this journey.”

It really caused her to take a deep dive, said Kemeny. “What do students with dyslexia need to learn to read? What happens in the brain when we learn to read?”

 Kemeny said she just felt like a starved animal. “I couldn’t get enough. I was reading, watching things, listening to lectures on phonics and different things. The more I learned the angrier I got because I found out a lot of stuff I had been taught in college and in my years of teaching some of it had been debunked by research.”

That’s where it all started, she said. “I really wanted to make sure I was doing the best I could for the students in my classroom and making sure that what I was doing was aligned with research.”

Kemeny said she started working with her son as well as making changes in the classroom. That’s when she wrote her first book, “7 Mighty Moves.” “They represent the seven changes that I could organize into these seven overreaching categories to more effectively teach my students.”

There’s a whole other side to this, she said. “My son was diagnosed with depression at the same time he was diagnosed with dyslexia. His depression all centered around his struggles learning to read.”

He said and did things that no mother should have to hear and no child should have to feel, said Kemeny. “It was kind of trauma night after night. He would scream that he wished he were dead.”

Kemeny said it took her a bit until she understood what to do. “When I did I started working with him every day and then we really saw results. We did all of these things for his depression and when things got so bad we took him to a professional. But I found that out of everything I did the thing that helped the most was the ability to read because as his reading improved his self-esteem improved.”

It was gradual but really neat and beautiful to see him change. “That’s why I’m so passionate about this,” she said. “I just think teaching kids to read is one of the greatest gifts we can give them because it just opens up windows of opportunity for them.”

Kemeny has written three books for teachers and travels all over the country sharing her curriculum. Her books are “7 Mighty Moves,” “7 Mighty Moves: Reading Resources,” and the third one is “Rock Your Literacy Block” and she also has “Dacodable Comics” for children.

“A lot of times when I speak I share my son’s story,” she said. “I’m always telling him ‘this is because of you.’ It’s neat to see what's come out of the hard experiences that we’ve had.”