Love Learning

Reading and the Non-Traditional Learner

Quite a few different types of learners do not thrive when learning to read in the traditional classroom. Because I’ve worked with many children who struggled with reading, when I think about teaching reading, I instantly visualize various pitfalls that yawned in my students’ faces.

Look at how reading is normally taught

Typically, children learn to say their ABC's, and then they're taught a sound that goes with each letter. The next task is usually to begin to sound out words made of a few letters. When children see a letter symbol, they must recall the sound that goes with the letter and retain that sound in memory while viewing the next letter, learning its sound, and storing that sound while approaching the next letter. And the process continues. Once children have learned to sound out words, they are supposed to know that they can recognize those words when encountered in other books. They are also supposed to understand that they are reading to extract meaning from the text, and this being true, they are to understand what they read and remember it once reading is completed.

Areas of difficulty in learning to read

Global Learners: Children who are global need some very specific helps if they are going to ease their way into reading. They need to know why they are learning all the letter names and sounds, or learning all those facts will be difficult for them. Telling them, “You need to learn all this material so you can learn to read” is not sufficient. They need to experience the art of reading in order to successfully begin to acquire the necessary skills. They need the goal or reason or relevance to the exercise clearly spelled out in order to be able to focus their attention and memory on the tasks at hand.

Visual Learners: This label encompasses many children. Children who are visual learners may have  acquired other labels along the way, including dyslexia, autism, etc. These learners may have a difficult time remembering the name of each letter and have an especially hard time relating sounds to letter symbols. When visual learners are working on reading, memorization is not their strong suit. They need something to help them learn the way they learn best, which is in pictures. They are picture thinkers who don’t learn by memorizing details and then constructing a whole out of them. They capture information all at once, just like a camera snaps a photo.

Kinesthetic Learners: Children who are active, kinesthetic children need to have some helps since it takes a lot of concentrated focus to get through the tasks usually associated with reading. Snippets of information, preferably ingested through visuals and movements, prove most successful. Kinesthetic learners typically prefer hands-on learning and activities that let them make things. Their attention will follow their hands.

Other Learners: Some children have short-term memory issues, and so decoding (or sounding out words) definitely presents a huge challenge to them. A myriad of characteristics of learners make traditional approaches to teaching reading not suitable. One size fits all certainly does not apply to methods of teaching reading.

What can be done to teach non-traditional learners successfully?

It seems logical to me that if we first study the child (and by this I mean many children who struggle), we will learn over time where the gaps occur, where the areas of difficulty lie within the traditional system of teaching reading. We can then take these areas of difficulty and address them. Rather than have two fistfuls of approaches to use, why not combine all the helps into one lean and clean approach to teaching reading that will close the gaps for learners of every ilk?

In our next posts we will talk about what happens to a child when he/she’s given a label and how that might impact his/her ability to learn to read. And finally, what would a reading program look like that addresses the needs of non-traditional learners? We’ll talk about that a step at a time.

Making Multisensory Math Materials

In my October 22 post, I said the following, and now I want to jazz it up!

For the visual & tactile learner, use dot cards to practice learning how many each number is. For instance, if you steer a child away from counting up to add, she will begin to rely on her strong  visual sense to understand the “how many” of each number as well as to learn the combinations of numbers that equal each target number. These dot cards show various ways to arrange five dots so that not only will a child have practice just glancing and guessing “how many,” but also a strongly visual learner will begin to absorb that 5 can be made of different combinations of numbers. If you encourage your child to rely on her visual strengths, she will be much farther ahead than if you sit her down to do math the old way, which is to count up, count on her fingers, or just write the answers to problems written on paper. SO BO-ring! I call the practice of learning via images, Visual Imprinting.

Visual Imprinting Sets the Background for Success in Math

Our goal in visual imprinting activities is to connect abstract concepts to a visual image that is meaningful to your child. Visual imprinting just happens; it is a subconscious form of learning. You could call it “learning through the back door.” Visual imprinting occurs any time we see a complete picture or a specific part of a picture in our minds. Even though the idea of visual imprinting is elusive and hard to describe, we can deliberately take advantage of it in our teaching. If we can embed concepts we want a child to learn within a visual or a pattern, learning will happen unconsciously.

There are many methods out there for bringing kids up to speed in computation, but the most fun and the most effortless involve visual games. Let’s make some dot cards, making that process into a craft, and then play games with the cards. If your child is having fun, he will not even know he’s learning!

Making Math [dot cards] – A Multisensory Activity

• The first thing you will need is a small stack of sturdy, square blank cards. Ideally they would be between 3½ and 4 inches on a side. Make them bigger if you’d like to.

• Tempera paint in bright colors

• Wet sponge on a plate

• Paper towels

• Old newspapers

• A place to let the cards dry

Making the dot cards

1. Start with one number first – say the number 3.

2. Make several dot cards using a variety of arrangements and color combinations.

3. The child will dip her fingertip into the paint and then press her fingertip carefully onto the card, making sure to only make the number of dots you planned to make.

4. First card can have dots of the same color.

5. Second card could have one dot the same as the first card, but then the remaining two dots in a new color.

6. Name your cards according to what the pattern reminds you of. See examples below.

The first card just has three red dots. The second card has one red and two blue. It reminds me of a bear face. The bear has a red nose and blue eyes! In the third card, the bear is looking over his shoulder to see who is behind him. The third card can be a slide or stepping stones in the garden, or whatever else you fancy. Even if you do not stress that 3 red dots and zero other dots makes three, or that two blue dots plus one red dot make three, the child is storing up the visuals in his mind to serve as a reference point later. In addition to the visual, the child is feeling the squishy paint, smelling the tart aroma, and is seeing the color on his fingertips. It would be a powerful multisensory experience if you had your child dip three fingertips at one time in the paint because he would feel the three, see the three fingertips coated in paint, and then he’d feel and see himself transferring the color from his fingertips to the card stock.

Making More Patterns

When you make dot cards for fours, play with the arrangement of dots. The first card reminds me of a child sitting down reading a blue book. The third card looks so much like a footprint to me. The middle card could be anything. To me, it looks like sets of twins walking, as viewed by a bird flying over their heads.

Note that I have shown 3+1, 2+2, and 1+3. Use the first and last dot cards to explore the fact that no matter how you arrange the dots, 3 dots and 1 dot will always equal four.

One more set

Fives are fun. Card one is a box with a blue belly button. Card two can either be a house, or a sitting bear with blue shoes. Card three could be a baby chair with pink feet. Note that in my cards, I’ve covered both combinations of numbers that equal five. Once again, two cards show the same combination of numbers (3+2 and 2+3), both equaling 5.

When you have made your dot cards through the number 10, lay them out in a safe place to dry. Check back here on Tuesday for games to play with your dot cards! In the meantime, have fun creating!

So You Find it Hard to Just Memorize?

Just this morning, a mother told me that her son is having increasing difficulty with reading and math. He was tested at his school and diagnosed with something called “specific learning disability.” He was given an IEP (individualized education plan) which allows various helps, but the mother said she feels he is not disabled; rather, he is not learning the way he is being taught. She is not alone. Over and over again I hear from parents who are desperate to find something for children who have been judged unable to learn.

Who should get the label?

I think in many, many cases, the teaching method should be the one labeled rather than the child. If a child cannot memorize strings of information or facts, is there something wrong with her? OR, is there something less than desirable with how she is being taught? Is memorization the best way to teach? Is it effective? How many adults out there find it difficult to just memorize? Is there a more effective way? If so, why are we still relying so heavily on memorization?

Alternatives to memorization

Use visuals that SHOW the information so that the child can look, understand, and remember. Example: understanding the difference between b and d. You can either tell the child, OR you can show the child a visual of the stylized letters. For the kinesthetic learner, you can act out the difference between b and d.

Let the child work out the problem for himself. Instead of asking the child to memorize math facts, give him some manipulatives such as plastic disks and two bowls, or a handful of smooth pebbles and two cups, and let him work out the answers as you pose the problems. Example: “Toby, count out five pebbles. Now, let’s find out how many pairs of numbers will equal five. In order to do this, divide your pebbles into the two cups and write down what you find.” The child would put the pebbles in the two cups and would write 2+3. You would prompt him to divide them up again another way. He might put one pebble in one cup and the remaining four in the second cup. He would then write 1+4. After some thought, he might decide that he can put all the pebbles in the first cup and have none for the second cup to make 5+0. The child will have discovered that there are only three pairs of numbers that will equal five. This is powerful. The child will have thought it through, handled the pebbles, represented the combinations in writing, and he would have been engaged in the activity rather than being passive.

For the visual & tactile learner, use dot cards to practice learning how many each number is. For instance, if you steer a child away from counting up to add, she will begin to rely on her strong  visual sense to understand the “how many” of each number as well as to learn the combinations of numbers that equal each target number. Example: These dot cards show various ways to arrange five dots so that not only will a child have practice just glancing and guessing “how many,” but also a strongly visual learner will begin to absorb that 5 can be made of different combinations of numbers. If you encourage your child to rely on her visual strengths, she will be much farther ahead than if you sit her down to do math the old way, which is to count up, count on her fingers, or just write the answers to problems written on paper. BO-ring!

Get away from memorizing words. How many of you have had children who just struggled to the point of discouragement with trying to learn to recognize words he was supposed to be learning? What is engaging about that? Frankly, it is the quickest way to make reading a chore and something to be avoided. Our colorful SnapWords® have rescued many a child from the drudgery of having to try and memorize (and later recall!) his all important lists of words. If you show your child a word like this one, is it not clear how engaged he will be? What will happen is this: He will put himself right into a pleasurable time when he was in the store with Mom and saw a teddy bear (or something cooler!). He will take a picture of the word in his mind and his recall will be easy. The tall letter was Mom, the U was the buggy holding the bear, and the Y was the front of the buggy. Best of all, the your smart visual learner will attach a positive emotion to this experience of learning how to read “BUY” so that rather than avoiding word work in the future, he will come to look forward to it.

Let’s throw out the labels!

I’d love to suggest something here. Please, can we be a little slower to call a child disabled? Is it not in the perfect design of a child to learn via pictures, images, movement? Is that not how she was beautifully created? What if we promised to react to a struggling child by looking FIRST at what we are doing to see if it might need changing? We could transform the world for many children! There is a better way; there is a more child-friendly way to teach.

On the Importance of Glue

I’m not talking about Elmer’s glue. I’m talking about the function and value of the sticky stuff. Glue sticks things to other things. If something is stuck to another thing, it is likely to stay there and not fall off and get lost.

Take sticky notes, for instance. Without the glue on the back, you couldn’t write yourself “do not forget” notes and slap them on the edge of your monitor as task reminders. Without the glue on the back, those “do not forget” notes would pile up, get shoved to the side of the desk, end up under papers to file or bills to pay, and eventually wind up fluttering to the floor to mix with the dust bunnies.

Glue – the substance that sticks things to one another – plays a very important role in the education of young children. Following are some for instances.

Glue Concepts Together

Instead of teaching a child the whole alphabet, then teaching him or her to relate sounds to each  letter, try picking up an A, sound it, then pick up a T, sound it, then glue them together to make a word! Doing this will immediately show the child what letters and sounds are for, will show the child that combining letters together make words we can use to communicate with another person, and will encourage him or  her to want to construct more words to use! Once the A and the T are glued together, you can pick up an F, sound it, and glue it to the front of AT. Eureka! Another word, and only three sounds used!

Glue Symbols to Real Objects

Symbols are really hard for many young children to handle. They are abstract, and to a young child might seem totally arbitrary. I mean why does E have three arms and not five or six? Why do they point right instead of left or even down? Why does an S have to open to the right on top instead of being face down? Face it - symbols are boring, UNLESS you glue them to objects from real life that are interesting to the child. For instance, the zig-zag that is letter M is confusing to many children. Some write it like this: W. Some add an extra zig or zag. Gluing the symbol to something real makes learning it fun, and remembering it easy. Glue a kinesthetic element to learning the symbol for M by saying: Climbing UP the side of the mountain (puff, puff), whew! Made it to the top! Sit down, slide down the side…but wait! There is another mountain! So climb up the side (puff, puff, puff), whew! Made it to the top! Now, sit down, and slide all the way to the ground!

Glue Letter Sounds to Fingers

Those same children that have a hard time keeping track of all the details of letters, their shapes, their  sounds, frequently have a difficult time manipulating the arrangement of letters/sounds into words. The letters that are available from which to make words float like disembodied fragments in space with nothing to anchor them together or to the paper. When you are helping a young child write a word you say, it will help a lot if you anchor those individual letters to your fingers so they can SEE the sequence all at one time, and so they can see how many there are, what order they are in, etc. I call this practice “finger-mapping.” Just as a visual person will have an easier time with directions if he or she can see the route on a map – see the shape of the route on a map – even so, children will enjoy seeing the map of the word they are going to write.

Take the word CAT, for instance. Many young children, who are beginning to learn to read, mix up the sounds of a word when they write it, and very often they leave out the middle letter. If you hold up three fingers and assign each one to a sound, it will be easy for the child to see how many sounds there are, what order they go in, and he or she will be able to quickly identify which sound was left out by referring back to your finger map of the word.

Glue Parts to the Whole

It is far easier for a child to learn a concept if he or she can see where it fits into the general scheme of  things. You might call it “locating the part within the global whole.” One problem children have with the way reading is traditionally taught is that they learn how to read or spell a word, but then before they know what has happened, that rule has CHANGED. It is so confusing! Good example: how many ways can you pronounce ough? A child will learn at some point that ENOUGH sounds like ENUF. So it would appear that ough really says UF. Another time, he or she will learn that THOUGH sounds like thō. In this case, ough really says ō. Another day comes and THOUGHT is the new word. This word sounds like THŎT, the ough sounding like ŎT. Many a valiant child would give up at this point; nothing makes any sense. It is a great idea to try introducing all the variables together in their global whole. See the example here: Once children know that is all and no more, they will have no problem absorbing the idea that there truly are six ways to pronounce OUGH.

These hints are all powerfully visual and tactile, and make for the friendliest way to teach a child so that learning is easy and fun! Using these types of methods to teach will act very much like glue, in that you will attract the child to learning, and the concept will stick in their memory unforgettably.

Using Movement in Learning

When I was in graduate school, excited to learn how to teach in a way that would result in a better learning rate for children, I kept hearing people talk about incorporating movement in learning activities in order to benefit tactile and kinesthetic learners. I was curious about that, so I kept my eyes and ears open to see what I could learn.

Paper Feet Hop

One cute activity I came across was a set of footprints cut out of colored paper, each one containing a sight word written with magic marker. The activity was fun for the children because the footprints were taped to the floor of a long hallway and the children hopped on each footprint as they read the word printed on the paper. I was curious at the time how hopping on the paper footprints would help the child learn the words more readily and wondered if possibly because the activity itself was fun, it engaged the learner and made him more motivated to learn his sight words. I can’t really say for sure. My lingering question had to do with the fact that if the movement in the activity was supposed to facilitate learning, if the word on each footprint was different, yet the movements were all similar hops, how was the movement tied to learning? I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and what I did was try and come up with movements that mimicked the meaning of the word.

Lean to the Right

1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20

I first started to pay attention to movement years ago while I was teaching a group of preschoolers. We had written the numbers 1-20 on a chart with four rows of five numbers. During circle time, children would take turns pointing to each number as they led the rest of the children in counting. One morning, Peter’s mother informed me that Peter had suddenly begun to count by fives and she was surprised, and quite frankly, really pleased. She wanted to know if we’d been working on counting by fives. I said no we hadn’t.

Curious, I began to watch Peter when he was leading the counting exercise. It happened that he would track to the right, pointing to 1, 2, 3, and 4, and when he got to 5, he would swing his body back to the left to quickly point to the 6. He moved the same way when he reached 10. I began to suspect that the swinging motion to the left became associated in Peter’s mind and body with the numbers 5, 10, 15, and 20.

Lame Man March

To try out the theory of movement prompting learning, when it was time to start learning to count by 2’s, we formed a line and marched as we chanted our numbers. We would lean heavily to the right each time we said an even number. “One, TWO, three, FOUR, five, SIX,” etc. Next, we repeated the same march, but we whispered the odd numbers and spoke the even numbers loudly while leaning heavily to the right. Finally, we just thought the odd numbers, but continued to lean and say the even numbers out loud. So we counted on hearing the even numbers at the same time our body leaned into the even numbers as a means of learning to count by twos.

Moves That Prompt Recall

A young friend of mine was sad that I was leaving his home after a visit. I assured him we could talk on the phone after I got home. He immediately asked for my phone number. “Hold on!” he shouted as he ran into the kitchen. “I need to punch it in.” I was amused to see him key my phone number on the microwave key pad. Then he announced, “Now I will never forget it!” And he didn’t forget!

A first grader I worked with several years ago had a really hard time remembering how to form an M. He always confused it with a W. We established that the M looked like MMmmmountains, and to this visual reference we added a motion of hands together and down, while elbows arch high up like mountain peaks. Whenever Joel came to that troublesome letter, if he did his mirroring motion, he always made the correct sound!

It’s true that some children don’t seem to rely much on movement that mimics the concept that is being taught; other kids, however, seem to be unable to learn without mirroring their learning with their bodies. For these children, any time we spend thinking up accompanying movements to learning is so worth the time investment!

Kinesthetic & Tactile Learners

What does it mean if my child is a kinesthetic or tactile learner?
Kinesthetic learners learn best when they are moving. If they are using their hands and bodies in learning, their attention will be focused right on the learning they are doing. Conversely, if they are expected to sit very still and pay attention and listen, success will not follow. The more they have to sit still, the less they can focus and learn! 

In traditional classrooms, often children are expected to sit quietly in their seats, listen, and then learn what they are hearing. Many times there is not the opportunity for students to experience the learning with their bodies and hands, apart from writing with a pencil on paper. While some people believe that a teacher would have to teach several different ways in order to accommodate the various learning styles, we don't think so.   
   Teachers will be successful in reaching all their learners at one time if they will develop a teaching style that is a synthesis of methods that target the whole brain. Child1st exists to help provide teaching materials that are multisensory; materials that make this task of teaching to the whole brain easier for the parent and teacher!
   Learners who need body movement and hands-on work include tactile, kinesthetic learners, and children who have been labeled dyslexic, ADD, and ADHD.

MORE:

• Kinesthetic learners need to move. They wiggle, tap, swing their leg, bounce, and sometimes just don't seem able to "stay in their seat"
• They will struggle with focus unless their hands are working on the learning
• They will benefit greatly from motions that are directly tied to learning
• They will do better if given actual objects to manipulate in learning to replace pencil and paper
• Their attention follows their hands. If their attention wanders, pointing to the next math problem to be solved will focus their minds on their immediate task
• As with visual learners, kinesthetic learners learn best in a way that is highly automatic: that of body motions stored in the body and cerebellum
• Kinesthetic learners are often gifted performers as athletes, dancers, and any skill that uses their hands
• Kinesthetic learners generally are very coordinated and have an excellent sense of body timing
• Kinesthetic learners will learn and remember best when allowed to move
• They can be taught to not disturb those around them while they move during learning
• Tactile learners are closely related to kinesthetic learners
• The tactile style is more moderate, involving fine motor movements, rather than the whole-body movements
• Tactile learners take in information through the sense of touch and feeling
• Tactile learners may feel like they have to touch, and explore objects in order to know them
• Tactile learners learn best with hands-on activities 

 Tactile learners enjoy manipulatives, using different media such as finger-paints, art materials, building projects, blocks or objects for math, hands-on science experiments, lap-booking (making their own books), games, making models, dioramas, etc. If your child is a tactile-based learner, you will find a project-oriented method of learning will probably appeal to your child's need to have active hands. Their motto? "Don't TELL me, let me DO it!"

Go to www.child-1st.com to learn more about our multisensory products.