Greetings from the Iowa Branch of the International Dyslexia Association!

Many of us are catching our breath after an inspiring Regional Conference, "Linking to Literacy," which was held in Sioux City on September 26th and 27th. The Iowa Branch co-sponsored this conference along with the Nebraska and Upper Midwest Branches of IDA and the Iowa chapter of the Learning Disabilities Association. Teaming with these other organizations enabled us to pool our resources and to attract an impressive list of nationally known speakers. Many of the attendees also earned continuing education credits. We hope to do this type of event every couple of years as an additional way of serving IDA members throughout the region and promoting awareness of reading and learning disabilities.

We continue to get positive feedback on our annual spring conferences, held in recent years at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids. Please mark your calendars for April 18, 2009. This event will feature Marcia Henry, author of "Unlocking Literacy: Effective Decoding and Spelling Instruction." These events would not happen without a lot of planning and hard work from many dedicated and enthusiastic individuals. On behalf of all our members, I want to thank our members who do such a good job of planning our conferences. There are many opportunities for our members to be involved in IDA. One of the best things you can do is really quite simple: tell a friend about IDA. Also, if you would like to serve on one of our committees, if you have suggestions for activities that IDA can organize, or if you simply want more information about dyslexia, please contact us through one of the channels (phone, email, or postal) given on our web site www.ida-ia.org. Thank you for being a part of IDA and for all you do on behalf those who struggle with dyslexia.

Richard Bradford
IDA-Iowa Branch President

Linking to Literacy
Regional Conference
We hope you were one of the lucky ones who attended the Joint conference in Sioux City this fall! We were blessed with the presence of many well-known national speakers -- truly never has there been such a gathering of such prominent dyslexia experts in our state since the dedication of the Samuel T. Orton hospital wing in Iowa City. Eventually we will have some of the handouts on the ida-ia website so you may look those over if you were unable to attend. We are aware of some schools that used this two-day conference as inservice time for their teachers. Such foresight, and blessing that ended up being for our children!We are also grateful for the many businesses around the Sioux City area that donated money to help subsidize the conference. We would not have been able to hold this event without them. This was a joint venture with Nebraska IDA, Minnesota IDA and LDA of Iowa. We are hoping to explore having another venture like this in a couple of years. A huge success!

Terri Petersen