If you’ve been around the educational scene for any length of time you would have heard these statistics:
Category Archives: Vision
What You Might Not Know About Your Home and Your Child’s Learning
Every evening, Johnny sits at the dining table to do his homework. Nearby, the goldfish are frolicking in the fish tank. He watches their bodies glisten as the light hits them.
“That’s fascinating!” he thinks.
He’s intrigued.
Reality…About Children Learning and Mothers/Teachers Teaching
This post is the follow-up to yesterday’s: https://www.florencecallender.com/dreaming-about-children-learning-and-mothersteachers-teaching/
“Life is like a departure lounge. The place you end up depends on which ticket you bought.” ~ Dr. Dion T. Harrigan
When children are born, they each come with their own “equipment.”
Law enforcement officers turn to their fingerprint files when searching for a criminal. The doors to some high-tech offices are now opened by the eye-print of the person seeking access. Blind people identify the person addressing them by their voice-print. An approaching individual can be recognized by his gait. The identity of a dead person may be ascertained by his dentition.
Learning for Success in School and Life…The Visual-Spatial Way?
A few years ago, I went to visit my friend during my vacation time. When I walked into her home, I straightened up immediately. Everything was in order.
You know the stuff your parents tell you as a child like, “A place for everything, and everything in its place?” She followed that principle.
I peeked into her closet. The clothing hangers were all white. And not only were her clothes sorted by category, but also by color.
Learning Through Stories
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.
4 More Listening Tips for Learning Success
Good listeners are good learners. Conversely, a struggling listener is a struggling learner. Why? Because Listening is:
- A whole-brain, whole-body experience that connects us to the world outside of ourselves and is the most basic precursor to interaction, speaking, reading, and writing.
- Our primary modality for connecting and communication with others.
- A foundation for the higher-level skills associated with academic learning.
Upside-Down Teaching?
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.
3 Warning Signs Your Child May Have a Learning Disability – Part 2
3 Warning Signs Your Child May Have a Learning Disability – Part 1
This is the 1st of 3 articles in which I talk about the impact of movement on learning.
Learning & Movement – The Pencil Grip (warning sign #1)
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?”
The Mystery of Un-Learning
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.