About
My Way! …because every child learns differently and every child can succeed.
Our My Way! campaign isn’t trying to change the way you are taught at school. But we want to change the way some of you feel.
Did you know that one out of five children have some sort of learning challenge and that makes some stuff hard at school? This has nothing to do with how smart they are. It’s just that people’s brains are wired in different ways and we don’t all work in the same way.
My Way! wants to get people talking and understanding about the fact that every child learns differently and every child can succeed in their own way.
The idea for our My Way! campaign came from the school reading tours that Henry “The Fonz” Winkler and First News editor, Nicky Cox have been doing over the past three years.
Henry will be known to many of you as the author of the funny Hank Zipzer novels about a boy with dyslexia, based on Henry’s own childhood and the difficulties he faced with dyslexia.
On our tours, Henry reads from his books and speaks in an assembly, asking if anyone is finding school tough? He puts up his own hand and says: “I did.” He makes it okay. He tells everyone how he found maths hard, reading hard, spelling hard but how he was great at lunch! How he could eat a tuna sandwich better than anyone else in his class. And yet, he tells them, despite his learning challenges, how he managed to find his own way to succeed to become a famous actor, director, producer and author.
Henry and Nicky Cox will be visiting more schools on our 2011 reading tour this June but, for those of you we don’t get to meet in person, First News will be carrying regular reports in support of the My Way! campaign in the paper and on-line over the next year. We’ll be carrying reports, from kids just like you, showing how they are succeeding even though it’s sometimes difficult for them. And we’ll be telling the stories of successful adults like Richard Branson and Jamie Oliver who struggled at school.
Thank you so much to all our sponsors – the Department for Children, Schools and Families, THQ, uDraw, Walker Books and for the support of the Teaching Awards.
