Eye Can Write: A memoir of a child's silent soul emerging

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I hope that, like Jonathan, with the right support the children that we represent will also be able to achieve their life long ambitions. Three weeks before Chantal’s due date, the family was in a serious car accident that resulted in the emergency caesarean section birth of Jonathan. The motivation of his mother to adapt the national curriculum and the volunteer teacher who helped in his lessons coupled with Jonathan’s own intelligence enabled him to find his voice. By Year 5, two years after I started literacy and numeracy lessons, I had caught up with my peers and joined my local primary school full-time,” he wrote in his Guardian testimony .

Jonathan's memoir was 'dictated' by him and transcribed by his mother in a painfully slow process, letter by letter. Devastatingly she suffered a placental abruption, which is when the placenta separates from the uterus, depriving the baby of oxygen.Immersing myself in a story is the most enjoyable, wonderful escapism; books have nourished my mind and prevented mental decay during my years of silence. As we read he moves the scene at just the right pace so that we remain immersed in the landscape as he introduces us to his very believable characters. The introduction, written by Jonathan's mum, shows the medical problems that challenged Jonathan's early years, many times coming close to dying.

His most compelling image is: “As I stretched my body to its full height (my scoliosis had elongated and vanished altogether), I realised the dragon cerebral palsy had been banished from the lair of my body. Inside you disappear to magical places, but most of the time remain imprisoned within the isolation. The experiences of Sophie and Jonathan only serve to highlight the need to reform our special education needs system and emphasis the growing urgency of the situation.

This book is an absolute revelation to me both from her parents' point of view and anxieties and their daughter's. Teach Us Too’ had been born, and national newspapers began to pick up Jonathan’s story, with his proudest moment being seeing his poem “Song Of Voice” printed in The Times. The moments shared by Jonathan’s mother when she realised exactly how much her son was capable of and would be able to do with the eye pointer boards are profoundly emotional and full of pride.

Jonathan’s complex health needs mean that he is never alone, and yet he was very alone in his locked-in world that had a window on the outside world, but no way to communicate with that outside world. it was compelling to hear the story from the perspective of the mother, of the challenges she faced. It’s for us to help him to live life in all its fullness here, but it’s not for us to hold on so tightly that it gets to the point where he needs to go, and we can’t let him.It is painstaking work — a ten-word sentence takes around a minute to spell out — but what emerges is strikingly articulate. He knows things - the smirks, the knowing smiles, the tell tale side-glances, and being in his constant presence tell me that. It is the fascinating memoir of a twelve year old boy with cerebral palsy, written using only his eyes (hence the title). I know there are many special education teachers who go above and beyond but in a system where it seems that children's academic level can be based purely on their physical limitations. This amount includes seller specified domestic postage charges as well as applicable international postage, dispatch, and other fees.

These two years included his mother’s battle with the local authority to establish that Jonathan was not receiving education at the level he deserved in the school for children with special educational needs and that it was proportionate and appropriate for him to enrol fully in mainstream education. Jonathan has overcome such a huge obstacle in his path and as a mother of a son with special needs, I am so ridiculously proud of what he has achieved and the questions he has posed . Most recently Michael asked to check a short thought I was to share at a carol service – thankfully he told me not to change it, as his feedback arrived the morning after the event! Having struggled with cumbersome communication books which didn’t have the words he wanted to say Jonathan was introduced to an E Tran frame through which he learnt to use eye pointing to achieve literacy and numeracy.He was locked inside his own mind, aware of the outside world but unable to fully communicate with it, until he found a way by using his eyes to laboriously choose individual letters, and through this make his thoughts known.