By the time she was in Grade 4, Colleen O'Connor's family thought she had started down the road towards becoming a bully but then her grandmother stepped in and her path changed.

When she was two years old, Colleen O'Connor started writing "notes" which she would later translate for her family. Of course they were just scribbles on a piece of paper but they looked like notes and she loved "reading" them.

"She had all the attributes of being very verbal," her grandmother, Helen O'Connor, says. "She was very precocious, very up and coming and yet when it came to the crunch, she couldn't crack the reading code, and her life became just a misery because of it."

Colleen started Kindergarten a year after most of her friends because her birthday fell in February. So her mom sent her to preschool when her friends started Kindergarten and when they were in Grade 1, she went to a public school Kindergarten in the morning and a private Kindergarten in the afternoon.

All went smoothly until Colleen was in Grade 1 and she just couldn't seem to learn how to read. Things got worse the next year and they kept getting progressively worse until, by the end of Grade 4, she still wasn't reading and of course that affected her other subjects as well.

"By then the situation had morphed into a horrible problem," Colleen's mother, Charlotte, told me. "The longer the situation lasted, the worse she felt about herself. Finally when kids started calling her stupid, she began to lash out at them in a physical way ... The system seemed to have been designed for her older sister and kids like her," Charlotte concluded, "but it sure didn't work for Colleen."

Colleen's grandmother, a retired Special Education teacher, and her husband had just bought their retirement condo in Victoria but when she began to visualize Colleen's future, they sold the Condo and moved back to the Lower Mainland so she could develop a home schooling program for her granddaughter. A year later Colleen was reading.

With Colleen back on track, Helen and her husband returned to retirement life and bought a place in Parksville; however, given her previous school record and the strong bond she had developed with her grandmother, Colleen asked to move with her. So her mom became "like a divorced parent" traveling back and forth to visit on weekends. A year later she moved to Parksville as well.

Grade 6 and 7 went well for Colleen but in Grade 8 things took a turn for the worse again.

This time instead of home schooling, Colleen found her way to PASS (Parksville Alternative Secondary School).

Given the one-on-one help she needed and the opportunity to work at her own pace, Colleen is doing very well; in fact she expects to graduate a year early.

Although Helen doesn't expect her granddaughter to ever read for pleasure she could, should she choose, find an appropriate college level program.

So why did this "precocious," "up and coming" child find it virtually impossible to "break the reading code"? Helen has been trying to answer that question for years and she has found only one possible answer.

A few years ago Colleen told her that when she was in Grade 1 or 2, one of her friends told her she must be stupid because she failed Kindergarten and Colleen seemed to believe that not realizing that it simply had to do with her birthday falling in February.

Small thoughtless comments really can make a huge difference...so can small positive comments...so can grandmothers...and so can persistent students.