A parent was sharing with me recently about her son’s struggles in school. He dreads going to school and comes home almost daily saying, “I’m not smart enough.” The school has offered this boy a 504 Plan, which will allow him to have accommodations in the classroom, such as fewer spelling words, taking tests in a quiet room, and a copy of another student’s notes in order to study. The parent was told, “These accommodations will make things easier for your son.” In despair, Mom says, “I don’t want the school to make things easier. I want them to actually…
I just saw a commercial on T.V. that terrifies me a little bit. It shows a proud young couple with their toddler who is learning to recognize numbers and letters and even learning to read through an app on his iPad. Wow! A toddler learning to read! He’s going to be great in school, right? Not necessarily. Because believe it or not, recognizing a few words is really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all of the skills needed to be an automatic and independent reader. As enticing as technology is, it’s old-fashioned playtime that helps…
Yesterday was President’s Day and it brings back memories from my childhood of my parents saying, “If you work hard enough, you can do anything. You could even be president of the United States someday!” What a great message for our kids! As parents spend hours and hours and hours wading through tears, avoidance, and arguments to get homework done each day, it may not seem that “if you work hard enough, you can do anything” applies to their kids. And that seems so unfair. Why should kids who are as smart or smarter than their peers, be limited in what…
My mom and I have season tickets to the Rubicon, a wonderful little professional theater in Ventura, CA. Yesterday we saw a play that takes place towards the end of WWII. The main character is a young man, Raleigh, who had enlisted in the army but was discharged before he could serve because he has epilepsy. Raleigh’s mother, a crotchety older woman, is embarrassed that her grown son is not serving in the war, saying that he has always been lazy – that whenever he doesn’t want to do something, he has these “fits” to get out of it. Of…
How Retained Reflexes Impact Behavior and Learning There was a big snowstorm on the east coast a couple of weeks ago. It caused over 2000 airline flights to be cancelled. I assume people got to their destinations eventually, but I also imagine that it caused a great deal of anxiety and disruption to people’s lives. Just as air travel is dependent upon an organized system of flight patterns, our nervous system is organized around a system of reflexes. Primitive reflexes support survival and development in infants, to be replaced with higher-level reflexes as the brain and muscles mature. Reflexes need…
A friend at church was catching me up on her grown sons. As she talked about the incredible mechanical abilities of one of her sons, who can completely take apart car and motorcycle engines and easily reconstruct them, I thought, “He must be dyslexic.” Certainly not every person with strong mechanical abilities is dyslexic, but there is something really special about the dyslexic thinking style that fosters talents that require visual spatial thinking. Our dyslexic learners are often big picture, conceptual thinkers who see the world differently. They can see how things fit together without ever looking at a set…
Parents, Pushing the Limits, and Time Make Golden Globe Winners and Change the Future for Struggling Students Last night at the Golden Globe Awards, nearly every winner thanked their parents. They also thanked those who pushed them to their limits so that they could be the best they could be. When Leonardo DiCaprio won Best Actor for The Revenant, he mentioned initial talks about the film 2 years ago. What does this have to do with students with learning challenges? Parents, you are the anchor for your kids. I meet desperate, heartbroken, exhausted parents everyday that just want to find…
Welcome 2016! My husband David and I spent the first day of the new year taking an 18 mile bike ride at the beach with old friends. What a great day! The bike path is fairly flat (always a plus!), has an unobstructed ocean view, and has a great sound track! There are just a couple of spots where we have to leave the beach and veer up onto the street, carrying our bikes up a set of stairs to get there. Those few spots are like little glitches in the pathway – a part that’s incomplete. Which got me…
Several years ago, we had a student whose challenges with speech articulation were so significant that his mom explained on our first meeting, that there were certain sounds that he could not physically say. Grayson was 11 and had had private speech therapy as well as speech services at school for most of his life. After 3 weeks of sessions at Stowell Learning Center, Grayson was able to say every sound both in isolation and in connected speech. His speech therapist at school, who did not know he was attending the learning center, said at his IEP meeting, “Have you…
Most of the parents I speak to would put “Self-Esteem” at the top of their list of concerns for their children or teens with learning or attention challenges. And rightly so, as confidence and self-esteem often take a beating when students struggle in school or with homework. You’re so awesome! You’re so smart! You’re an amazing athlete! Praise is good right? But what kind of praise? Our students with dyslexia, attention deficit, giftedness, and other learning differences are plenty smart, but praising them for being smart may have the opposite effect of what you might expect. New York Magazine published…