At the parent teacher conference, Kenny’s teacher told his mom that he should read for at least 20 minutes every day. All children love stories but some children hate books. Kenny hated reading books. What should his mom do in that situation?
Many children who learn differently, have trouble reading flat symbols on a page.
The National Center for Educational Statistics tells us that boys are 30% more likely to fail or drop out of school.
Now get this – according to education achievement data, there are more “boy geniuses” than “girl geniuses.”
They also outnumber girls in the top 1% of the IQ scale.
Why then are so many boys struggling or failing in school?
According to Ryan D’Agostino of Esquire.com, if you have a son, there’s a one in seven chance that he has been or will be diagnosed with ADHD…a psychiatric condition. By high school nearly 20% of all boys (6.4 million) will have been diagnosed with ADHD.
Meet Stephen Tonti, a successful businessman who grew up with the “disorder.”
As Stephen gave his story in the video above, he brought out some key points:
Theories about learning styles abound, and can become confusing. However, the newest discoveries in brain research have made things simpler by looking at thinking and learning from the perspective of the different functions of the two hemispheres of the brain.
Neuroscientists have described the left hemisphere of the brain as auditory-sequential. Left-brain functions include language, reading, writing, science, mathematics, logic, analysis, and time-orientation. Left-brain thinkers and learners appear rational, objective and reality-based.
Matt walked into my speech-language therapy room. I knew he liked music and had learned the alphabet letter sounds and months of the year through song, so I had some music playing when he entered. His face lit up, he began to clap his hands and jump around. Neither his clapping nor dancing were in time with the beat of the music.
Not only is Matt awkward in his body movements, but he also stutters when he speaks. In addition, he receives occupational therapy for handwriting issues.
Today, I proctored a state test for a group of five students who receive special education services. The photographs below show how they held their pencils. None of the pencil grasps demonstrated here match what the writing experts call “correct.” The tripod grip.
Writing must be tiring for these children.
As I circulated among their desks, I wondered if from their toddler years, every time they held a pencil or crayon, their parents and teachers ever thought that they were giving a signal that they needed help.
Pencil grip and learning?
You may be wondering, “What in the world is she thinking? What does one have to do with the other?”
So often, many people think that education is synonymous with learning. But it is not. Education is all about systematic instruction, while learning has to do with acquired knowledge…whether from experience, personal study, or teaching.
Quite often in my inquiry into learning and the many paths it takes, I come across someone who trumped the system and excelled to tell about it. Jonathan Mooney is one such young man.
Have you ever deeply pondered the mystery of learning to read? We take some shapes that we are told are called letters, bunch them together and call them words. Then we string different words together and call them a thought – a sentence.
It’s amazing how the human brain takes in information from varying sources (input), processes it then tells us what to do with it (output).
Many times, we take for granted the things that are easy for us to accomplish. Reading is no exception to that rule.
What would you do if you suddenly lost the ability to decipher what’s written on a paper or in a book? Click on this link and listen to or read about a kindergarten teacher’s experience with exactly that challenge: http://ow.ly/t1279
I like her indomitable spirit and how she developed a system of reading through writing.
In Thailand, observant natives noted how elephants liked to scratch the ground with sticks. Someone came up with the brilliant and creative idea to exchange the stick for a paint brush and the ground with a canvas. Take a look at the result:
Over varying amounts of time, one trainer painstaking teaches an elephant to replicate a painting. Do you remember the simile about memory you learned in elementary school? Someone may be referred to as having a memory like an…elephant. That’s right! Just as elephants can be trained to remember the moves for circus acts, they can be taught to remember the strokes for picture compositions.
