The mom behind the doodles

DexteDoodle started where most of it starts — on the floor, with crayons, teaching a child who didn't learn the way the page expected him to.

I'm a homeschool mom of two boys, eight years apart, with completely different ways of learning. One was hardwired for the tangible, checklist kind of smart — he read almost 500 books in kindergarten. The other was loaded with the soft kind: the noticing, the feeling, the child who, before his fourth birthday, looked at me and said, "I am never going to see 3 again." One devoured anything new. The other needed the same three books, over and over, and couldn't sit still for any of it.

Same house, same mom. And nobody handed me a manual for either of them — because neither of them came with one.

The dinosaur only he could see

My youngest once entered an art competition and drew a dinosaur. The judges placed it in the abstract category, where it won a ribbon. He was not pleased. To everyone else it was abstract art. To him it was, plainly and obviously, a dinosaur — he'd drawn exactly what he saw. The rest of us just couldn't see it yet.

That ribbon taught me the whole job. Teaching a child who learns differently isn't about correcting his picture. It's about finding your way into it — bringing the lesson into his world until the skill stops being abstract and becomes a dinosaur. Clear, obvious, his.

Why I make stories instead of worksheets

Before kindergarten, you need to know where your child is — is he getting his letters, his numbers, the strokes that become writing? But a page that's only a page is a chore with no reason inside it, and kids push it away. They're built to learn by living, by playing, by being inside a story.

So I built the middle I always wanted: one story your child colors, traces, draws himself into, and hunts through — so it feels like play to him — where every page quietly maps to a named kindergarten-readiness skill, so you get proof you can point to. He gets the lived feeling that makes him lean in. You get to stop guessing.

That's DexteDoodle. Stories first, skills riding inside them — because children learn by playing, reading is the foundation, and drawing and coloring build the skill.

Thanks for being here. If you ever want to say hello, tell me about your own dinosaur-drawer, or ask a question — I'd love that. You can reach me any time at my contact page.