Love Learning

This summer, catch up with reading & math skills and have fun doing it!

There is nothing more mind-numbing for children than having to use their summer to work on something they had trouble with in school! I may not be a child any longer (trust me I am not!) but I still remember vividly how I felt as I slaved over my work while other more fortunate kids played outside my window! That was sufficient to halt all brain activity!

On the other hand, summer provides a perfect time to keep the brain sharp and to play catch-up for those areas that were difficult during the school year! We make it easy for you to entice your children into advanced learning in the summer so you can avoid the tears or tantrums over doing school work during holidays!

You will bring reading to life

Since 2000, SnapWords™ have had a track record of making learning magically happen for children of all ages. There is no way to effectively convey with words what happens when you approach a child who has been working way too hard to learn to read and to have them suddenly see something that makes absolute sense to them. We can tell you this will make all the difference for your struggling child, but seeing is believing after all. To say “the lights just came on” comes close to what happens.

We hear on a regular basis from parents and teachers that even for children who were completely unable to recognize words AT ALL, introducing SnapWords™ resulted in the children suddenly being able to read words, and best of all, remember them days later! Incredibly enough, since we opened our doors in 2006, we have never heard a single time that SnapWords™ didn’t work for a child. Not. One. Time.

The difference is in the delivery

Here is why they work:

• Kids don’t want to work on the same stuff they already know they can’t do. More of the same will not work. So tell them you are not going to do the old way again. You are going to do something completely different that will be fun and easy. Prime their brains this way.

• Most children who struggle to learn simply cannot memorize. Telling them phonics rules won’t work. They can’t sound out words. They can’t remember a word if you tell them what it says. This is because you are attempting to reach them in one particular area in their brain that is not the way they learn best. So let the traditional ways of reading go for the summer.

• SnapWords™ approach several other areas in the brain that are magical ways for young children to learn: their visual cortex via our images, primarily. The body motions reach the cerebellum and multiple other regions in the body. Both the visual cortex and the cerebellum are regions in the brain in which learning is rapid and permanent.

Try before you buy

I am so confident you will love SnapWords™ and will see the difference that we are offering a free download to print and try with your child. Watch his or her face as you show them the images. Do you see some interest? A bit of excitement maybe? This is key.

• The children will need to feel attracted to the product you use for it to be effective.

• They will have to feel some hope for change.

• They will need to experience some success pretty early on in the process.

Take a big fat discount for a limited time

We are in business to make children successful. Use coupon SUMMERMAGIC for a whopping 30% off your order through May 31, 2013!

*For Math Magic, check out our brand new math game cards to help cement those illusive math skills over the summer.

More summer learning resources

Activity and games that engage children during summer

Specific recommended resources for summer learning

More recommended resources by subject

Teaching strategies and resources that meet the needs of auditory learners

"If you are a strong auditory learner, it means that in most circumstances you need to hear yourself say it in order to effectively commit it to memory."    
Cynthia Ulrich Tobias, M.Ed.

Child1st addresses the needs of the auditory learner in our Easy-for-Me™ Reading Program by making sure that when children are learning, they are also sounding or reading out loud. One of the most powerful strategies in this program is the daily practice called “Quick Draw.” In this game, children utilize all three main modalities: auditory, tactile, and visual. Children who rely on hearing their voices as they learn thrive with this approach.

Read more about Quick Draw.

Why is a multisensory teaching approach best and what does one look like?

What does it really mean when we say multisensory? The accepted, traditional teaching techniques typically used in the classroom meet the needs of (left-brained) sequential learners. Concepts are introduced in a step by step sequence and are practiced and reviewed using drill and memorization; children must also show evidence of their learning in a particular time frame. This is all very good for children who are left-brained or sequential learners. The problem is, of course, that while the approach to teaching is great for those children who are sequential, every learner is taught this way and this traditional approach is ineffective at best for all the non-sequential learners.

Read more.

Try before you buy: FREE SnapWords™ to download

We have free samples of our sight word cards available for download on our website. Try them out with your students before investing in the complete resources!

Try them out.

List of sight words for kindergarten (and up) to download

We’ve created an index of which sight words are in each of our lists so you can compare to which words your child already knows or your district requirements and see which lists would be the best fit for you.

See the index.

Resources for parents/teachers of auditory learners:

The Sound of Learning: Why Self-Amplification Matters by Timothy Rasinski

The Way They Learn by Cynthia Ulrich Tobias

A Mind at a Time by Mel Levine, M.D.

Teaching ideas and resources for homeschooling families

One of the advantages of teaching your children at home is the ability to tailor the curriculum to meet their specific learning needs. Although every child is unique and cannot be perfectly described by one general label, children do typically rely on one or more type of intelligence, so it’s worth thinking about in order to make sure you are teaching in a way that will meet his/her needs most completely. Read more about how to discover your child’s giftedness. Allowing your children to do activities that take advantage of their natural strengths goes a long way toward building learning confidence and toward helping them advocate for themselves and their needs.

Once we start talking about different learning strengths, it’s easy to think that we must use completely different resources or methods for teaching each child if they are all so unique. However, research has shown that many nontraditional learners learn best through pictures and hands-on lessons. Read more about what the experts have to say about incorporating images and body motions into teaching.

So what are some resources that use images and body motions to reach a variety of learners the way they learn best?

To teach reading, the Easy-for-Me™ Teaching Kit contains everything you need to teach your children to read. The multisensory materials empower you to reach a diverse group of learning styles at one time while ensuring that no child is left out. The program is especially effective in closing gaps in understanding for children who have missed out on some basic skills and are not progressing as they should be. The materials are also perfect for beginners, and if used as outlined, prevent learning difficulties for many children who would otherwise struggle in learning to read.

To teach/review sounds, Alphabet Tales includes a story about how each letter came to have its shape and sound, creating a quirky, yet memorable learning experience. SnapLetters™ Teaching Cards are perfect for instruction in letter shapes and sounds and are a wonderful follow-up to Alphabet Tales which introduces each letter through story and illustrations.

To teach sight words, the SnapWords™ Help at Home Kit equips parents with tools to effectively boost a child's reading ability without resorting to flashcard drill and memorization. The kit includes 306 SnapWords™ Pocket Chart Cards that teach sight words instantly through visuals and motions - great for visual/tactile learners. Follow up learning sight words with our Sight Words in Sentences, which provides practice reading sight words in real sentences that coordinate with each level of sight words learned. Also included is the booklet How to Teach SnapWords™.

To teach sight words, while providing reading practice, the A Collection, B Collection, and C Collection are ideal. The SnapWords™ Teaching Cards introduce children to new sight words, while each section of The Reading Teacher's Encyclopedia provides practice reading and writing their new words through games and activities. Finally, the Easy-for-Me™ readers provide reading practice in context, using only words learned up to this point.

To teach spelling and phonics, The Illustrated Book of Sounds & Their Spelling Patterns (STSP) introduces all the sounds in the English language and includes all of their possible spellings to prevent confusion, to maximize vocabulary acquisition, and enhance the students' abilities to read unknown words.

Guest Post: Curriculum Selection-Picking the Perfect Titles for Your Child

Today, we're excited to have a guest post from Leah Nieman, homeschool mom and Co-founder of CurrClick.com. We love this story about one mom who learned to choose materials that met her child's unique learning needs instead of following what her friends or popular curricula suggested. 

I remember so clearly the day my daughter cried. I remember it like yesterday because I cried later that evening as well. Although that moment won’t stand out to anyone but me, it marked a turning point in our homeschool lives.

My daughter was always incredibly enthusiastic about “school work.” She’s a visual learner. I like to joke with her and say she lives solely in the right side of her brain, visiting the left side on a “needs to” basis. She was always good at math and science but those were never her favorite subjects. And she always processed them from a more artistic point of view.

This wonderful child of mine is also a perfectionist. Every coloring page was always colored with care. Each handwriting page was written beautifully with no errors. When it came to math she handled her worksheets fine, but most curriculum came with timed practice sheets. Because she processed math differently, she rarely finished these in the 2, 3, or 5 minutes allowed. This caused her great stress.

I spoke to other moms who insisted it was most important she be able to do these timed fact sheets. They weren't being judgmental at all. They were simply sharing their opinion because I asked. And, this was something that was strongly encouraged in the program they were using. My daughter knew her math facts, but I now had it in my head we really needed to work on these timed fact sheets. I feared I would put my daughter at some terrible disadvantage if we didn’t find a program that would help her learn this skill, so I began to look for resources to help. This only cause more stress for both of us. Nothing says to a child “Hey I’m really freaking out that you aren’t learning this” like hitting them with a steady stream of products one after the other-all teaching the same skill. I’m ashamed to admit at one point we had an entire section of our bookshelf filled with products all focused on this one skill! We had card games, bingo games, audio songs, triangular flashcards-you name it, we had it!

One day, after numerous attempts and countless products, I finally had my sweet daughter in tears at the kitchen table. Through her tears were words like…”I’m stupid!” and “I just can’t do math!”

None of this was true. She could do math perfectly. In fact, she was actually ahead in her math curriculum by a year. She just couldn’t spit out her math facts quickly. She was trying her hardest and still she felt like she was failing. In that moment watching her cry, I knew I had one of my biggest homeschool mom failures. I had been listening to the priorities of every other homeschool mom instead of focusing on what was best for my child. It was heartbreaking, eye opening and a big turning point in how I approached learning in our home.

I apologized to my daughter that afternoon. We talked about true education-it’s learning and there is no right or wrong way. We began approaching our days and our homeschool focusing on what was best for her. My role as her mom was to help support her and guide her so she would become a lifelong learner. It was not to crush her in the process. The same was true for my son's education. He is a very different learner, so the learning plans for both my kids turned out very different.

I’m so thankful that lesson came early in our homeschool journey. It changed the approach I took with my kids. I wanted to grow lifelong learners, but until that moment I was still stifling them. I was too busy listening to what everyone else was saying was “the best” or “the most important” educational path to see what was naturally best for my kids.

We’re entering convention season. Many of us are reading homeschool blogs, magazines, and articles. Many of us will even be heading to homeschool conventions. It’s exciting to learn about the various ways to educate our children. And, we do want to learn about what’s available in the homeschool market. We also want to seek out information and advice from the homeschool community. Our community is an awesome resource of support and we want to stay connected! But, when thinking through all the great stuff on the market, remember first your kids and their learning styles. Ask yourself is this product a fit for them? Will it work for the way they naturally learn? Is it causing tears or crushing the learning desire of my child? Then make your curriculum selections based on your answers. And, don’t ever feel trapped by something that’s not working. One benefit of homeschooling is you are always in control of your child’s curriculum. If something isn’t working, set it aside and find a product that does work and move forward. The goal is always to create lifelong learners.

 

Hi! I’m Leah Nieman. I’m a wife, homeschool mom and Co-founder of CurrClick.com. My husband and I live with our 2 children in Central, Illinois. We’ve homeschooled since 2001 and have just crossed the “homeschool finish line” with our oldest daughter. I’ve been using eCurriculum and other forms of online educational resources in our home since 2002.  I juggle family life, homeschooling and work while trying to keep it all balanced with the amazing love and support of my family. It’s somewhat of a learning curve and I find it’s always a work in progress.

Is it auditory processing, or a normal developmental stage?

The calls and emails from parents of really young children continue to come in. The content varies a bit from one to the next, but the overarching theme is the same. The child is young and he or she is failing to measure up to expectations. I believe that the reason there is such a flood of kindergarteners being sent up for evaluation is because of their age and their level of development. They are not able at this age to do the traditional left-brained type of learning and they shouldn’t. Schools are heading in the direction of early intervention, which is amazing, but my beef is what results from this early intervention. The pivotal question is, once we notice a child is lagging behind, what do we do next? Scrutinize the child or the teaching approach and materials? Sadly, the focus always goes to the child and his or her shortcomings. This implies that there can be no issue with the teaching method or materials. Hmm.

Here is the most recent email I have received:

“My son is 6 and in K, the staff is suggesting he suffers from auditory processing, however; my belief is that he is smart and right-brained. He has wonderful long term memory, but struggles to retain info pertaining to sight words and numbers. He also has difficulty transferring sight words into book form. I know he is smart so I am frustrated at this point and will not let the school give him a label that does not fit or isn't even age appropriate at this time. In addition, my son has great comprehension skills and pays very close attention to detail. He states he gets "bored" in school. I am so, so happy I found your website today!!! I would love to call you to find out what products will be most helpful for my son. Thank you so much, your website has given me hope!!” 

This is another parent who is doing the best job of advocating for her child. There are a few things from her communication I would like to highlight.

The topic of auditory processing … is the child really suffering from auditory processing issues?

• Could it be that he is not an auditory learner? Could it be that (as his mother suspects) he is a visual/right-brained learner and sounding out words doesn’t work for him? I have written many blog posts about the practice of making every child learn to read by sounding out words and how this is detrimental to all those bright visual, right-brained learners.
• And could it be that all the issues stem from the fact that his age falls squarely into the developmental stage in which the right hemisphere is rapidly elaborating?
• It could also be that the child is global and can make no sense out of sequential steps leading to a goal as yet unknown to him.
• Could it be that the child is simply reflecting what we know is true, and that is that “remembering” stuff is made so much easier if there are hooks for learning?

The topic of retaining words and numbers….has to do with the fact that these are symbols – and until a child fully learns the ideas those abstract symbols carry with them, they will just look like little bent wires, each a bit different from the previous one. The most effective way to teach anything that involves abstract symbols such as numbers and letters and words is to embed them in images that will convey the meaning, what the symbols represent, and will provide the child with an image which his mental camera can snap and store. Just that quickly!

The topic of boredom in school… makes it sound like we are discussing a bright child! It is heartbreaking to me that so very often the children who don’t quite fit in and can’t learn the way they are being taught are being singled out in rapidly increasing numbers to be scrutinized, dissected and finally labeled.

The uniqueness of each child… is apparent to parents more than anyone. This mother was able to detail the strengths and unique “snowflakeness” of her son. Her child is not like any other child and when he grows up he will be able to retain his own unique set of gifts and abilities. It is sad that when in school, children are expected to all look alike, learn alike, and have strengths in every area. We as adults don’t expect that from ourselves. We readily say things like, “Oh, I’m not good with math; I am good with designing systems, however.” And we give ourselves the luxury of doing what we do best and what we enjoy. The master gardener is not down on herself for not having the skills of her accountant. Each is uniquely gifted. Let’s give our children the same latitude we give ourselves. Let’s redouble our efforts to pay the most attention to what they do well and encourage them with the rest, but not in such a way that they feel criticized.

What really breaks my heart… every time I am confronted with this topic is that rather than scrutinize the method, the materials, the delivery, when a child stumbles, she is deemed faulty. She is automatically called less than capable. And this is not done quietly. Oh no. This label requires big meetings, it comes up all the time, and the child is flagged as “special” among her peers. She has to leave the “normal” classroom if she does indeed wind up in Special Ed, and every time she makes that march to the door in front of the class, her ability to believe in herself sinks a bit more.

Why this is bad… is because no child will succeed at learning unless he/she believes they possess the ability to do so. It is that simple. Most children, once they are labeled and thus told they are less than, will cease to reach. There are some children who are stubborn enough to try and defy that label that says they can’t do the work, but most children don’t have the inner strength and persistence to go against what ADULTS are telling them.

When I taught, I wanted to work with the strugglers because I was convinced there is no such thing as a brain that doesn’t want to learn, nor can learn. I just couldn’t accept that. I felt that if I failed as a teacher to help a child learn, I needed to change my approach. I needed to find out what did help the child learn. And what I found out when I got my very own failing students was that teaching them the material was not the challenge for me. The biggest challenge was helping them overcome their lack of belief in their ability to learn. And that, folks, is just a tragedy.

The conclusion of this little discussion… is that I believe parents should continue believing in their children, they should keep advocating for them, and if necessary, they should refuse the special ed designation if it goes against what they know in their heart of hearts is true about their own child.

When smart children are judged learning disabled

In the past few days, I have received a flurry of emails and phone calls from parents of kindergarten and first grade children. What these parents have in common is that they all have children who either are about to be screened for learning disabilities or who already have acquired that label. In each case, the parents either rattled off the disabilities their children have or tell me the behaviors and problems with learning their child has. In each case, the parents communicated that their child is smart, but in the face of such overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they go along with the notion that their bright child is indeed learning disabled.

Here are some typical comments

Email from a mother: 

“I have a six year old son who has been diagnosed with a reading disability and possibly many more...such as math, anxiety, attention etc. I have been trying to teach him number recognition as he struggles with the teens and fifties, thirties etc.

He knows most, if not all, his consonant sounds. He struggles with the vowels, digraphs etc. He has processing issues, and his working memory is also a problem. He can decode, but sometimes forgets the initial sound etc.

It is painful!

He has some basic sight words like a, the, and, no, go etc...but it appears that these too can come and go in his memory.”

Phone call from another mother:

Her child is also six, is slated for testing for disabilities (particularly ADHD and dyslexia), is beginning to have behaviors in school, can’t learn numbers, can’t remember words she has learned, can’t sound out words, and confuses sounds. Her mother said feebly, “She really is bright and creative, but she is starting to hate school.”

What does this mean?

There is obviously a disconnect between the children and the material they have to learn. Both children are six, which means that developmentally they are in a place where the right hemisphere of the brain is rapidly developing (the further development of the left hemisphere will begin after age 7). A large percentage of children remain predominantly right-brained processors throughout their lives. This stage of development directly impacts a child’s ability to handle the demands of learning when the material is presented in a predominantly left-brained fashion, which is the case for traditional curriculum.

I have written extensively about this, and yet I think that the best way to communicate these ideas in a meaningful way is to share the words of parents who have decided to try materials that are designed to be right-brain-friendly.

Here is what two parents have shared with us

This first email is from the parent who called to discuss her daughter’s needs:

“Thank you very much for your time yesterday.  You made me feel more confident in helping my daughter. I will take all the suggestions and help that you gave me.

I did show my daughter the 5 frame math chart last night* and she really liked it.  We discussed the patterns and she could recognize numbers that she couldn’t recognize this past weekend.  I sat there shocked!  I then picked up the “try before you buy” pocket chart cards that I printed out this past weekend  (we looked at the cards Saturday night and discussed the pictures and I had not showed them to her for two days) I showed her the word side of the card and she just breezed through them. Again, I was shocked! I had to physically close my mouth with my hand. 

I am very excited about your products and can’t wait to use them. I will follow your suggestion with the RTE. Thank you for that email. Thank you for giving me hope and Thank you for taking the time!!”

(*The comment about the five frame chart had to do with the child’s difficulty with recognizing numbers. Check out this post about how to use a five frame chart to help children learn to count and recognize numbers. Also our new edition of Right-Brained Addition & Subtraction will be released in March 2013. This book will transform your child’s experience with the foundations of numbers and computation through 10. Join our mailing list so you can be notified of its release.)

And here is another email from a happy mother:

“I can't tell you how relieved, happy, and excited I am about your product. My son has been trudging along through K material, not liking school, and I felt he was working very hard with very little to show for it. Progress was being made, but at a snail pace.

The first day we used the SnapLetters he started to gain momentum. Adding these SnapWords, he's flying. He's excited and happy about working on reading. I can't explain the relief I feel to not have him struggle to learn. He feels smart, and he is. But he didn't know it until now.”

February 20, 2013

Try it for yourself

If any of this describes your situation with your child, please know there is hope. Children’s brains WANT to learn, and they are beautifully designed to do just that. If a child is struggling, please first check out some right-brained products. If your child responds to them, you will know it immediately. The lights will come on, the behaviors will depart, and the learning will be rapid and amazing. This is because a right-brained child is equipped to learn using their amazing brain camera which snaps mental images of information if the information is arranged so that this can happen. Your child CAN love learning!

Resources

Try free samples of sight words before you buy.

Get tips on teaching vowels.

Get free samples of resources for beginners and older right-brained learners.

See our product recommendations for parents.

Check out our math resources.

Sign up for our newsletter.

How to help your at-risk students learn

How to help your at-risk students learn. Wow, there’s a topic for you that looks super ambitious and way too general. But there are some ideas we can consider that will go a long way toward helping at-risk children learn successfully. The challenges these children face might be in reading, in math, or in every subject they have.

And I want to clarify what I mean by “at risk.” To me, at risk can refer to “at risk of failing to learn to read” or it might mean, “at risk in life in general.” I have taught in “at-risk schools” and have taught in middle class “safe” schools, and in both scenarios, I had children who were at risk in life and children who were at risk of failing in learning to read. What I want to share is not rocket science but hopefully will be an encouragement to those of you who are teaching children who are at risk in one way or another.

Recognize the primary obstacle the child is facing

Any child who is at risk is going to be hindered because her emotions are hijacking her thinking brain to one degree or another. A child who is living in an unstable home situation is going to come to school preoccupied with just getting through another day. Some children live with neglect, with criticism, with anger, with poor diet, inadequate contact with a parent. Some don’t know where they are going to even sleep that night. I’ve taught them. I have had students who had a parent in jail, one boy who saw his father kill his mother. I’ve had children in my classroom who were severely abused; many who came to school hungry and exhausted. No matter what the situation, if the child does not feel secure and cared for, he or she will be at risk also in the classroom.

Recognize what is going on with the child

When a child faces threat of any kind, his emotional brain takes over and puts him on high alert to help him avoid danger or threat. When this happens, the thinking brain shuts down. So, quite simply, the biggest obstacle to learning for an at-risk child comes from inside his own mind. As long as he feels any threat or danger, he will remain controlled by his emotional brain. And as long as the child remains controlled by the emotional brain, learning is not likely to happen.

“Threat” and “danger” don’t have to be physical, either. They can be emotional in nature and still hijack the child’s ability to think and reason. Ridicule, failure, and derogatory comments are all threats to a child. For children who have failed, the very idea of doing a task again that they were unable to do before looks and feels like threat. Under threat of this nature, behaviors can vary from a child zoning out, to a child acting out horribly in class. All the behaviors are calculated to help the child avoid what he perceives as threatening.

What to do

• Obviously the very first thing to do is to remove the threat and make the children feel safe. We can’t change their home life, if this is where the threat originates, but we can make our classroom a safe haven for our students.

• Be as consistent as absolutely possible. A child who is already in fight or flight mode doesn’t need to enter a situation that is unpredictable. A moody adult who one day is happy and overlooks little annoyances and the next day is hardnosed – well, this will just exacerbate the “behavior problems” of the children in the classroom.

• Choose very carefully which hill you plan to die on. Choose very wisely which things absolutely must happen in your classroom and let everything lesser go. Let me give you an example. In the last school in which I taught, the attitude of the administration was that because we were a failing school planted squarely in the ghetto, we had to look and act even more together than we normally would. This meant teachers had to wear closed shoes, never open back ones, kids could not wear printed tee-shirts and had to at all times have their shirts tucked in their pants, you know, really critical things like that. My room was full of at-risk kids. In fact I can’t think of any one of my students who was not simply surviving. So when we lined up to come back in from recess, I didn’t feel it was my hill to die on the make sure all my kids’ shirts were tucked in and I certainly did not write them up for wearing printed tee-shirts. For one thing, they were not buying their clothes as second graders, and for another thing, we were lucky the kids were even IN school wearing something. In addition, the children who were perennially late and showed up sans homework and even sans book bags did not incur my wrath. There were children who never knew where they were going to sleep that night, and I didn’t feel it was critical to try and make them always keep their book bag on their person. My hills to die on for these children were simple: don’t hurt anyone, don’t hurt yourself, we take turns talking, and during class we don’t do anything that will keep the others from doing their work.

• Ensure success for each child. Just because the lesson plan book says that my class should be able to do X, Y, Z by today doesn’t mean that all the children have the necessary skills to perform at this level. So it is my job to be aware of exactly what each child is able to do, and support them as they stretch out a bit. For one child this might mean if he agrees to stand up and read something he wrote, I will be right beside him to make sure he feels he is not alone up there. For another child maybe it means he gets a little play money dollar every time he double checks his letters to make sure they are not backwards. Above all, I must never ever shame a child or expose him to the gazes of the other children when he has failed.

• Involve multiple regions in the brain and body. When I teach, I will not do so only verbally. I will use pictures, will give examples, will make it fun, (yes even teaching punctuation can be fun!) will insert humor, will let them act out the learning, and will take them outside for a novel and memorable lesson. I will also encourage each child to use their area of strength to show me what they learned. For example: In my reading group, if I sensed that a child was still a bit shaky on the sight words he would have to read in the book for the lesson, I would display the SnapWords™, picture sides showing, and let him refer to them as he read the book. His feeling of being supported and safe allowed his thinking brain to take charge and he did much better.

• Teach in such a way that you are teaching the child, not the lesson. For example, I knew well which ones of my children needed to see the end result before they could do their project. I knew which ones needed me to fingermap their spelling words (they needed the visual map of the word in order to see it in their heads and then successfully write the words), I knew which children learned from whole to part and I didn’t make these children have to sound out words – because they just couldn’t do it. After all, I wanted them to be able to read, not sound out words.

• Support each child by taking the time to find out his or her strengths and then make sure and share this information with them so he or she can feel competent.

• Don’t focus on bad behavior. Distract, redirect, attract their interest away from what they were doing. I had a child for two years who was a bit of a hellion in class. One day I realized I was spending a whole lot of time trying to get this boy to STAY IN HIS CHAIR. Because I knew this boy was in a very precarious situation at home, I didn’t want to make his being in his chair my focus. That was not the hill I was prepared to die on – and I would have, too. He just would not stay seated. So one day I said, “Zechariah, you may stand up all day if you want to. Here are my conditions – don’t get in any other student’s way by standing in front of them, and get your work done. Zechariah stood for two years, even while writing. And his behaviors vanished. The only time he acted up was when there was a sub in the room for the day. I would come back to school the next day to find angry notes about this horrible child who would not obey.

• What about homework? As a first and second grade teacher, I didn’t find it productive to be mad and punish my children who didn’t bring homework. For one thing, I felt this was a function of home and lack of management there. I did reward those who brought homework, found out who didn’t have paper or pencil at home and supplied that, and for many children I had them show me they knew the concept they were supposed to practice for homework. For the most part, I didn’t go the homework route anyway because that created a hill I would have to die on, and I didn’t feel like going there.

I think the bottom line here is that we have to be counterintuitive with at-risk kids. They will be behaving badly and our nature rises up and wants to correct the bad behaviors. They might appear lazy. They will be forgetful and careless. They might lash out and be mean to other children. All their behaviors will tax us and drive us crazy if we let them. But remember the chaos in the brain as the child is feeling unsafe and threatened. What is going to help that? Yelling? Punishment? Or a warm welcome, an understanding teacher, and the ability to be in a safe place where there is good stuff going on. And use pictures! This is the most brain friendly way to communicate ideas to children. Especially tired, hungry and insecure children. The more brain-friendly, the better!

What to do when bright children struggle with reading

From my inbox this morning:

“My daughter is in grade 3 and has always struggled. It’s getting worse as now she is questioning self-worth, what an awful system we have that this could happen outside the home. She is very in tune with what is expected at school and realizes she is not meeting requirements. I figure she is a right brain as everything outside of school she is sharp as a tack.” 

We receive this type of communication on a regular basis: “My child is bright everywhere except in the classroom and his failure in the classroom is impacting him negatively in terms of how he views himself.” My heart aches for these children and for their parents! It is especially hard when parents suspect their failing child is right brained, because these children have so much potential, so much giftedness, feel things deeply, are so in tune with others, and yet once you squash their spirits with failure, these children can totally shut down.

Two critical actions to take when your child fails

The minute you discover that your child is struggling with reading, ACT. Please don’t assume it will just get better the older she gets. Don’t assume that her teacher will know what to do to help. Don’t even assume that the special needs team will know what to do. You know your child better than anyone does, and if you observe that she is smart and capable outside the classroom, yet she is failing IN the classroom, please don’t rush into testing her for learning disabilities (although it might be helpful to get her eyes checked in order to rule out vision problems.) The first two actions to take are to try something radically different to see if she responds positively (does she learn quickly using a different approach?) and at the same time, direct her attention to her giftedness and away from her failure.

Think of it this way… if you see your kitchen going up in flames, would you decide to analyze the fire to determine its source? “Let’s see, could the wiring be faulty?” No! You grab the fire extinguisher and let it fly on the flames. After the fire is out is the time to do some investigation and hopefully prevention.

Try something radically different

When a parent calls to talk about their non-beginner who is struggling, I never recommend a tricky, complicated fix. Usually it is helpful to try a handful of SnapWords™ to test the waters (download free samples) If the struggling child is attracted to the images and quickly picks up the material because of the teaching method, we know that the child benefits from right brained elements in his learning. At this point, so many positive things have already happened: 1. We have identified quickly that there is a successful way to approach the child’s learning, 2. we have directed the scrutiny away from the child and his failures, and 3. we have created a situation in which the child experiences some rapid success. The outcome is that we will be able to positively reinforce the child and his brain’s ability to learn!

Step away from the failure and focus on giftedness

When I speak to parents of very discouraged children, I talk first about the child and what is going on and then we focus on what materials might be helpful. Throughout this, though, I always reinforce to the parent the importance of sharing with their child something like the following: Up until now we’ve been missing the boat in how we taught you. You are so smart in how you learn and remember, and we have been teaching you in a way that is slower. Images are fast! As fast as a blink of an eye! Let’s do it the easy way, and thank goodness, you are really, really good at remembering visuals.

A new belief needs to be reinforced until it has time to really take hold and flourish. As we support our children, we can help them achieve little successes that will in turn lead to bigger ones. With our help, children can learn about their own learning strengths and how to channel those strengths to help themselves; this new knowledge will stand them in good stead as they progress through their years in school.

Recognize that what the brain hears, it accepts as fact

It would be really interesting to conduct an experiment about people believing as fact things that they repeatedly hear. Just how much can positive beliefs and a positive environment impact the achievement level of a particular class? Say a teacher is given her class list at the beginning of the year and she is given student reports that have been doctored up a bit. So instead of reading that “Anthony tries hard, but he is two grade levels below where he should be in reading” and “Jeremy is failing, but it is because he doesn’t try” the teacher would be led to believe that both boys are academic whizzes. I believe that this mental prompt would have an impact on the teacher and how she views the students and how she teaches them. She will transmit her assumption that her students will do well, shaping how they think about their abilities, and, in turn, impacting their performance. What we convey to our children can absolutely make or break them academically and in life.

Remember, what the brain hears, it believes and accepts as fact. If I tell a child, “You have a learning disability,” the child might hear, “Don’t even bother to try because it won’t do any good. Your brain is broken.”

Harness the power in positive emotions

I talked a lot about the strengths and gifts of visual and other right-brained learners here on the blog. Please take advantage of this content as you set out to encourage your child. It is critical that we immediately create a safe environment for failing children (free of exposure to negative attention), one in which they can feel good about their abilities, one in which they can succeed, and so forth. The reason this is so important is that as a person thinks, so is she. Once a child gets the idea in her head that she is inferior, she will BE that.

If you can just get a child to truly believe she can do it, she WILL do it and in many cases will rise far above her potential. Conversely, once a child is convinced that she cannot learn, she will not. That is how powerful a role our emotions play in our lives.

What to do when your child does poorly on reading tests

A comment come in yesterday from a visitor to our website:

“My son tested and retested poorly on the d.i.b.e.l.s. testing in kindergarten and now 1st grade. I am not getting any feedback from the school as of yet. He has trouble sounding out words and recognizing sight words.”

This is a common problem for children taking DIBELS, or Fox in the Box, or whatever test is used in the particular district. And testing is coming this fall as surely as summer follows spring.

DIBELS is timed, and the goal is to see how many words the child can read in the time allowed. There is also a part of the test that requires a child to read nonsense words. Can you only imagine if a child can’t sound out real words, what she would do with words like “talp” or “smint” or “lesk”? One of the reasons we can read fluently as adults is because our brains become familiar with the patterns in words, so without actually having to look at each letter in the word, we glance and recognize the word. So for children, nonsense “words” are impossible. There is no underlying meaning tied to them.

The reason I began to design SnapWords™ back in 2000 was because I had very bright kindergarteners in my classroom who struggled to sound out words and couldn’t remember from one moment to the next the word they had just labored to figure out. Reading was a chore and a real pain for them (and for me). One word that especially stands out in my mind as causing difficulty is the word HELP. It is not a hard word, is not tricky, and is straightforward to sound out. My kindergarteners could sound it out, but if they saw the same word again on the next line of text, they didn’t remember ever seeing it. I was frustrated and so were they.

There are several reasons why my students had difficulty sounding out words and with the related issue of not recognizing words on sight.

• Many children get stuck in trying to sound everything out because that is how we traditionally teach reading. Children who struggle with holding individual sounds in their minds long enough to blend them into a word are considered to be at risk in reading. If a child believes that sounding out a word is reading, he or she will likely not move into the skill of reading a whole word all at once. HELP will always be H-E-L-P to them, no matter how often they see the word.

• Many children don’t naturally think from part to whole, so for them, to have to retain four or five sounds in their minds in the correct sequence is just plain hard. These are the children who can far more easily learn to recognize whole words and remember them easily.

• Another problem for many children is learning sight words without any visual helps. Many children just don’t look and remember, even with many repetitions of the drill. There are too many words that look similar to each other.

What can be done to help these children?

• Make sure they know their basic sounds. If they don’t know the sounds letters make, they really will be in trouble. But you can use visuals and body motion to teach this skill easily. If the child sees the letter in an image that is shaped just like the letter, learning will be easy. Then have them make the body motion that mimics the letter also.

• Introduce sight words using the same approach: visuals and body motion. If you want to be sure the child can truly segment a word into its parts, just be sure he or she can read the whole word first. Also make sure that the meaning of the word is conveyed along with the word because in this way children will understand that reading is a process of recognizing groups of letters that convey a message. So we go past word naming and into words that carry visual images of the meaning they convey.

What a difference it would make to a child to see the stylized HELP next to the plain HELP.

Many of our customers and website visitors have found us because they have been searching for helps for these very common reading obstacles. Inability to sound out words or to recognize them on sight is not a sign of looming learning disability; instead, let’s see them as signals that quite possibly the child is a visual or right-brained, or global learner who needs to learn words all at one time complete with meaning before he can hope to take the word apart into its components.

Using multiple learning elements to reach children with a variety of learning strengths

Following are some comments we've received lately in response to our question, "How can we help?"

"My five year old doesn't recognize words all the time; she forgets."

"My son will be a 1st grader this coming school year. He needs some help to improve his reading skills."

"I would like flash cards to help my son learn how to read. He has trouble remembering his spelling words from one week to another. I would like to try these sight words cards to see if it will help him to getting ready for next school year. He is behind due to his learning disability."

"I just found out I have a child with dyslexia and am trying to find ways to help him."

"I am teaching my son and daughter words to keep them caught up over the summer break."

"Interested in sight word flash cards to begin increasing a 4-yr-old's sight vocabulary."

"Looking at sight words for my students who are at educational risk."

"I teach kindergarten and have students who struggle with memory issues."

"I would love more sight word ideas. Also more ideas for teaching ESL students!!!"

All these parents, grandparents, tutors, and teachers are looking for something to help this diverse group of children. The children are all different ages, genders, from different backgrounds and have many different learning preferences.

However, there's something at the core of them all. They need a different approach from the traditional, with its focus on the sequential, systematic, lecture and memorization-based teaching. Since every child is unique, these children need a teaching approach that combines a variety of learning elements (such as visuals, body motions, patterns, stories etc.) so that every learner will be reached. With such an approach, each child will rely on the elements that align most strongly with his/her learning strengths and simply ignore the tools that aren't as effective for them.

And research has shown that many beginning and nontraditional learners learn most easily when information is presented through visuals and using body motions. We wrote a blog post a couple of years ago that explains some of the research behind this idea. You can read it here.

This idea of combining multiple teaching elements in one curriculum to reach children with many different learning strengths is what fueled the creation of Child1st learning resources, beginning with SnapWords™ sight word cards. These sight word cards with pictures include visuals, body motions, and the words used in sentences to provide context and meaning.

What tools or strategies have you found to be most effective with learners with diverse needs? Or what has been your greatest challenge as you've taught nontraditional learners?