Introduction

Sometimes you know that a meeting is just meant to be.  When you have a passion for helping students read and write.  When you are looking for just the right reading materials for struggling readers.  When you have a drive to find the “Just Right” text that they can read. When you want to share that motivating drive to get kids reading and you find someone else that shares that passion.

That is how I feel about meeting author Yasmin John-Thorpe last November in Green Valley, Arizona.

I was attending a community arts and crafts show in my new community with my long-time friends, Deb Nesbitt and Terri Gutierrez, who had also recently moved there.  I happened to walk by a table loaded with children’s books. Being a former classroom teacher and still having a love of children’s books, I had to stop and browse. Yasmin had her colorful children’s books about the desert southwest on display.

I was intrigued by the delightful pictures and fun stories about animals and life in the Sonoran Desert. Originally from the northwest and recently transplanted to the desert southwest, I immediately thought of all the students attending Successful Learning Educational Services back in my home state of Washington and nearby city of Portland, Oregon.  I wanted them to be able to learn about the amazing creatures and life here and as I browsed through the texts, I knew that many of my young dyslexic friends who would love her books, would not be able to access the print.

I introduced myself to Yasmin, shared my love of her books  and explained my dilemma of wanting to purchase her books for my students and yet knowing they would not be able to read them.  I asked if her books were in a digital format. She said that they were not. I wondered if she would be interested in talking more  about that. As I talked with Yasmin, I learned that she lived in my community. I gave her my business card, took hers, and asked if I could possibly meet with her to discuss this more.  To my delight, she said yes. And that is how this journey began.

Sharing Our Passion for Literacy

Upon meeting Yasmin a couple of weeks later over lunch, I learned of her amazing  journey into authorship. Yasmin is a self-published Canadian author, who has written books on Canada’s place in WW II, adult novels, and several amazing children’s books on the desert southwest.  She has worked with children in a number of schools to help them become better authors, has conducted summer writing workshops for children in years past, has mentored budding authors, and was now taking time to listen to my plea to turn her books into a digital format for easy access for MY students.  I explained that most dyslexic students would not be able to read her books, but that they would be very interested if they could learn about these amazing creatures of the desert southwest, if only they could ear read her books.

January 7, 2019  Our first meeting at the The Grill in Quail Creek, Green Valley, AZ

Yasmin was intrigued.  She promised that she would have her assistant look into what it would take to do this.

More Introductions

A short time later, another friend of mine, Connie Leinhos, visited me.  She, like my staff and I, tutors students with dyslexia. We visited Yasmin in her home.  Another great visit, and another plea to help make accessible books for Connie and my business’s students.  Yasmin was listening and becoming more intrigued by this need for decodable books. Yasmin gave a few of her books to both of us, which we took to read aloud to our students.

Cheryl Anthony, Connie Leinhos, and Yasmin John-Thorpe  March 2019

The Planning Begins

We had such a good visit Yasmin and I  decided to meet again.

At this meeting Yasmin shared that she would work with her assistant to get a couple of her books digitally recorded so that our dyslexic students could access them.  True to her word, she did just that. It wasn’t long and a couple of her books became available on Amazon.

At our next luncheon meeting, Yasmin agreed to let me interview her in a podcast on my website so that she could share her story and tell more about her amazing stories.  So, before the holiday season ended, we had recorded two short podcasts and two of her books were available digitally.

Yasmin John-Thorpe reading A New Home for the Q’s, a first attempt at recording her book.

This was great progress!

To check out Yasmin’s books, click the photos below.

If you are interested in listening to our podcasts, they can be found here:

Part One

Part Two

Watch for my blog next week to learn what we are up to NOW!

Cheryl Anthony, MS Ed.

Dyslexia Consultant

President, Successful Learning Educational Services

Technology can be the knowledge of techniques, processes, etc. or it can be embedded in machines, computers, devices and factories, which can be operated by individuals without detailed knowledge of the workings of such things. Until recently, it was believed that the development of technology was restricted only to human beings, but 21st century scientific studies indicate that other primates and certain dolphin communities have developed simple tools and passed their knowledge to other generations.

We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we cannot know if we’ll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it. — Stephen Hawking

The prehistoric discovery of how to control fire and the later Neolithic Revolution increased the available sources of food and the invention of the wheel helped humans to travel in and control their environment. Developments in historic times, including the printing press, the telephone, and the Internet, have lessened physical barriers to communication and allowed humans to interact freely on a global scale. The steady progress of military technology has brought weapons of ever-increasing destructive power, from clubs to nuclear weapons.

Technology has many effects. It has helped develop more advanced economies (including today’s global economy) and has allowed the rise of a leisure class. Many technological processes produce unwanted by-products, known as pollution, and deplete natural resources, to the detriment of Earth’s environment. Various implementations of technology influence the values of a society and new technology often raises new ethical questions. Examples include the rise of the notion of efficiency in terms of human productivity, a term originally applied only to machines, and the challenge of traditional norms.

Financial assets range from low-risk, low-return investments, such as high-grade government bonds, to those with higher risk and higher expected commensurate reward, such as emerging markets stock investments. Investors, particularly novices, are often advised to adopt an investment strategy and diversify their portfolio. Diversification has the statistical effect of reducing overall risk.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because somebody had the foresight to plant a tree a long time ago. — Warren Buffet

An investor may bear a risk of loss of some or all of their capital invested, whereas in saving (such as in a bank deposit) the risk of loss in nominal value is normally remote. (Note that if the currency of a savings account differs from the account holder’s home currency, then there is the risk that the exchange rate between the two currencies will move unfavorably, so that the value in the account holder’s home currency of the savings account decreases.) Speculation involves a level of risk which is greater than most investors would generally consider justified by the expected return. An alternative characterization of speculation is its short-term, opportunistic nature.

Investments are often made indirectly through intermediary financial institutions. These intermediaries include pension funds, banks, brokers, and insurance companies. They may pool money received from a number of individual end investors into funds such as investment trusts, unit trusts, SICAVs etc. to make large scale investments. Each individual investor holds an indirect or direct claim on the assets purchased, subject to charges levied by the intermediary, which may be large and varied. Approaches to investment sometimes referred to in marketing of collective investments include dollar cost averaging.

Trade in stock markets means the transfer for money of a stock or security from a seller to a buyer. This requires these two parties to agree on a price. Equities (stocks or shares) confer an ownership interest in a particular company. Participants in the stock market range from small individual stock investors to larger traders investors, who can be based anywhere in the world, and may include banks, insurance companies or pension funds, and hedge funds. Their buy or sell orders may be executed on their behalf by a stock exchange trader.

A potential buyer bids a specific price for a stock, and a potential seller asks a specific price for the same stock. Buying or selling at market means you will accept any ask price or bid price for the stock, respectively. When the bid and ask prices match, a sale takes place, on a first-come-first-served basis if there are multiple bidders or askers at a given price.

One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. — Ron Chernow

The purpose of a stock exchange is to facilitate the exchange of securities between buyers and sellers, thus providing a marketplace (virtual or real). The exchanges provide real-time trading information on the listed securities, facilitating price discovery.

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is a physical exchange, with a hybrid market for placing orders both electronically and manually on the trading floor. Orders executed on the trading floor enter by way of exchange members and flow down to a floor broker, who goes to the floor trading post specialist for that stock to trade the order. The specialist’s job is to match buy and sell orders using open outcry. If a spread exists, no trade immediately takes place—in this case the specialist should use his/her own resources (money or stock) to close the difference after his/her judged time.