Madras Dyslexia Association presents Online Musical Event to raise funds and spread awareness on dyslexia
Chennai: Madras Dyslexia Association (MDA) presents an online musical event – Dyslexicon ’21 – on 3rd April 2021 to raise funds and spread awareness on dyslexia. This fundraiser is intended to help MDA to empower more children with dyslexia and their stakeholders such as their parents, teachers and school management.
The Madras Dyslexia Association was founded by Mr. D. Chandrasekhar, who belongs to the 1970 batch of B.Tech (Metallurgical and Material Engineering) at IIT Madras and is a first-generation entrepreneur. He was presented the Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIT Madras in the year 2009.
Dyslexicon’21 will feature live streaming of musical performances orchestrated and mentored by Pioneer Suresh and being put together by ‘Timber Tones,’ a group of amateurs passionate about music. MDA is a non-profit service organization founded to take a pragmatic approach to help children with dyslexia
Elaborating about the unique aspects of this online fundraising event, Mr. D. Chandrasekhar, President, Madras Dyslexia Association (MDA), said, “Philanthropic contributions of any size helps us carry out initiatives to empower stakeholders of children with dyslexia and paves way to facilitate a person with dyslexia to be a productive individual.”
Mr. Chandrasekhar added, “MDA strives to sensitize people on dyslexia so that no child with dyslexia falls through the cracks. These children have abilities and strengths to achieve greatness and success.”
The key initiatives being taken up by MDA include:
Ø Raising awareness on dyslexia across the society
Ø Conducting stress-free identification and assessment for children
Ø Conducting full-time and part-time remedial classes for children with dyslexia
Ø Working with schools to set up and run Resource Rooms to support children with dyslexia within the school
Ø Conducting training programs for mainstream school teachers
Ø Conducting intensive training program to develop Special Educators
Ø Working with the government to empower children and teachers of government schools
Ø Integrating the use MDA Avaz Reader, an assistive device for reading. This has been developed by MDA along with Invention Labs.
In a class, children with dyslexia (statistically they are 1 in 6) are labelled as non-performers or lazy since they face difficulties in reading, writing, spelling or mathematics. However hard they try, they are unable to perform academically at the expected class-level. Children with dyslexia, miss out on the opportunities to explore, hone and showcase their innate abilities and talents as the “label” sticks to them firmly.
Early identification followed by structured multi-modal teaching, done in the way the child learns, is the best way forward to enable these children to bridge the gap between their potential and their actual performance.
To make this achievable, the stakeholders need to understand the various aspects of this neurological, hidden condition and provide the needed guidance with empathy. This also paves the path to unravel their unique potentials and abilities for out-of-box thinking. These strengths lay the foundation for incrementally and cumulatively develop and build the required skills for academic performance; success begets success!