The Dolch Book Of Fantastic Tales

PREFACE Sometime in December 2012, I received a mail from Rayomand at Contract, India. It was a forward, from a gentleman by the name of B. Narayanaswamy. Nary (as he liked being called) was a father of two children who had been diagnosed with The Sturge Webber Syndrome.

And he wanted to find out if Rayomand (or anybody else) could do anything to help with the cause and spread awareness.

I didn’t know what The Sturge Webber Syndrome was. And so I started reading. I met with counselors, doctors, to understand what I was dealing with. While I was researching, I stumbled upon something called The Dolch List.

The Dolch List, simply put is a list of 220 service words that are commonly found in the world around us. A child with learning disability (someone who’s been diagnosed with The Sturge Webber Syndrome, for example) would rely on this list to familiarize himself with words.

So obviously, a kid with learning disability couldn’t grasp a lot of words that a kid without learning disability could.

Which got me thinking – what do these kids read? Not the books we grew up on naturally, since most of the words in them wouldn’t be found on the Dolch List. So what then?

As it turned out, kids with learning disability didn’t have much literature to fall back on. The only author that wrote stories using the Dolch List primarily, was the talented Dr Seuss.

So I decided to start The Dolch Project. A project where random people on the internet came together to write stories using a library of limited words. With random illustrators illustrating these stories.

What you see here is the finished book – The Dolch Book of Fantastic Tales. It’s a series of stories written using mostly 220 words, written with love for children with learning disabilities around the world.

Thank you for being a part of it.

Happy reading.