Love Learning

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.

The Bridge Won’t Stick to His Foot. I Promise

I have worked extensively with children who struggle with reading. What I learned is that if there is a gap in understanding, that gap might as well be a mile wide because of how effectively it stops the child from progressing. If the child is in kindergarten, educators and parents don’t worry too much because they see that he or she is very small. Surely with more repetition, the child will begin to catch on and all will be well. It is a lot harder to be sanguine about a child in sixth grade that is still rooted to the same spot as he was in kindergarten. Unfortunately, now the issues have multiplied because the early foundation for learning is not in place for that child.

The gap, or the missing element, might be a very small and insignificant concept, but not addressing  the gap could result in failure for the child. Many gaps arise from our traditional system  of teaching reading in a sequential, highly left-brained manner. Children who are strongly right brained will simply not understand material, from time to time, that is presented verbally, sequentially, and through symbols. These children will greatly benefit from tools which utilize visuals, movement, or story to create a bridge to understanding. It is easy to ignore the gap, and yet it is not hard to remedy, to provide a visual or kinesthetic bridge just in the nick of time.

Sometimes, a concerned parent took a close look at the visual materials I was using and became really concerned that their child would end up depending on the visual tool and never move past it to doing “real learning.” I can totally understand this concern. I wouldn’t like having my child reach high school still singing the ABC song in order to identify the alphabet.

The great news about visual tools is that they truly bridge a gap in learning, but the moment the child skips across the bridge that spans the gap, they understand the concept and do not consciously depend on the visual tool any longer. I can assure you that if you use visual tools as you teach, the bridge will not stick to your child’s foot! He or she will walk over the bridge and move on.

Let’s look at some examples of visual tools and how they work to bridge a gap in understanding:

Learning Numbers

If you have a child that finds it hard to relate number name to symbol, create a visual out of the number so there is a memory prompt embedded in it. At Child1st, we have a stylized number set and a song about the stylized numbers which make it easy for even toddlers to learn their numbers. I discovered by accident that some younger siblings of preschoolers could locate a number on demand because they had overheard us singing the number song and talking about the stylized picture of the numbers. WOW! While I am not a proponent of urging younger and younger children to count and read, my point is that visual tools are nearly magical for conveying learning effortlessly.

Our image for number 8 is the snowman. The child can learn that 8 is the snowman who ate a carrot. At first, in order to recall the name of that symbol, the child might call the number “snowman.” At this point, a concerned parent will understandably worry that her child might not ever call 8 “eight.” But be patient. It won’t be very long at all before the visual fades and your child will just see an 8 and will say “eight.” Using the visuals just makes learning easy and fun.

Teaching Digraphs

 It is not easy for a young child to remember which digraph makes which sound. They all look very  similar. All have an h, for one thing. We have stylized the digraphs to help your child quickly learn and remember. See SH for instance: Any child will be able to recall a time they heard a baby crying and maybe even hear a mother saying “Shhhh.” Making the S in the digraph into the crying baby, and the tall H into the mother who is saying “sh” makes it very easy for your child to learn and recall. The obvious hand motion to go along with this digraph is the one the mother is making. This visual/kinesthetic tool is simple and powerful.

Teaching Sight Words

Some children simply will not have much success learning all their letter names, then attaching a sound to each symbol, then learning to combine these into parts of words (such as blends and word chunks). By the time they are finally asked to make a word and remember it, they are snowed under with a myriad of details they have no idea what to do with. It is a well-known fact that a large percentage of the population is global in the way they perceive and process information. Globals have a tough time with steps and sequences when they don’t know what the point is. In other words, globals struggle to learn anything until they have seen a picture of the goal. If you take stylized high frequency words and enjoy them with your young child, then most of the time, having seen the purpose or the final goal behind learning letters and sounds, breaking the words apart is child’s play. (No pun intended). If we assume reading HAS to be taught in a step by step sequential manner, we are going to keep on teaching that way, and we will keep on losing a large percentage of our children.

My experience with kindergarteners who struggled to remember anything about letters and their sounds was that once I began using the stylized materials with them, I could hardly keep up. That is how powerful the visuals and the motions are for these young children. It did not take more than a few passes through the list of stylized words before the children were reading the plain backs of the words. In fact, after ONE pass through the cards, the next step is to have the child call out the words on his own. The third step is to turn the cards over to the plain font side and see how many the child can read without the visual prompt. Usually the child can read a large percentage of the words. Those she cannot recognize will be set aside to enjoy again via visuals.

The visual is the bridge to memory, not a crutch or a permanent condition. Using visuals with learning is the best way to work smarter, not harder! Think of the discouragement and failure you will save your child from!

How to Beat Those Tricky Vowels

One efficient way to discover challenges in reading that are common to all the grade levels is to be a Title 1 teacher for grades K-7. Before the year began, I expected to confront a myriad of problems, each child struggling with a unique set of issues.  What I found was that in most cases, what the kindergartner had a hard time with, the 3rd and 6th graders also had problems with. It does make sense. After all, if you don’t get something in kindergarten, just getting older is not going to suddenly bring understand where once there was a gap.

One weakness shared by most of the struggling readers was in identifying short vowel sounds in words. My students had a hard time memorizing word spellings, and because they were very weak on vowel sound discrimination, their spelling tests were torture for them. It followed that reading was torture for them as well.

The first thing I did for these kids was show them the visuals for the vowels and tell a hugely abridged version of the story for each letter. As you can imagine, the junior high kids were underwhelmed with my idea to show them little kid stuff. I did my usual “please forgive me, but just take a quick peek at these cards” and we quickly moved on. In spite of their grumbling, the visual worked beautifully to help cement the sound of the vowel. Visuals for the vowels:

We briefly talked about how the SOUND for short A is the sound at the front of “anthill.” I showed them our hand motion for A.

 We make an anthill with our fingers, and then touch thumbs to make the tunnel Abner made as he tunneled through the anthill (see Alphabet Tales for stories). For E, I asked the kids to make a fist and notice the lowercase E their fingers made. For I, we had an upraised hand similar to the feathers on Ike’s head. The O was Oscar’s wide open mouth, and the U was Uncle Ule’s up-side-down umbrella.

Having introduced the vowel sounds, related them to the symbols (letters), and having established our hand motions for those vowels, we next moved on to actually using these newly-acquired tools! We played little games together to practice listening for the vowel sound in words.

Listen for the Vowel:

I would call out a list of words, and for each word, the kids would do the hand motion for the vowel they heard. Sample word list follows:

Sand, tent, with, bus, off, Tom, bat, best, fresh, sun, punt, shop, west, nod, fun, fin, pen, pun, pan, pin, hop.

If you need a formal assessment for your students’ knowledge of vowel sounds, just have them number a paper, listen to each word, and write the vowel they heard inside ea.

Quick Draw:

To practice listening for sounds in words, and especially for distinguishing between vowel sounds, I found playing Quick Draw was very helpful. Each child has a white board, or if you are as lucky as I was, you will have enough room on your big white board to accommodate all the kids in your group. Each child stands with his or her back to the white board, marker ready, and then listens while I call out the word.

• “The word is CLASS.”

• “Sound it with me.” The kids sound with me as I segment the word for them, “C-L-A-SS.” I use the motion for A as we sound in order to give them a visual cue for the vowel. I am also using fingermapping, which gives them an instant visual map for the structure of the word. There will be more on fingermapping later.

• “Sound and Write!” This is the cue for the children to quickly turn and write their word as they say each sound. This part is critical. They need to say the sounds out loud and hear themselves saying the sounds, at the same time they are seeing their hand write the sounds.

• I do a quick visual check for accuracy and then move on to another word. If there is an error, I do not say the name of the missed letter, rather we SOUND OUT the word as the child is looking at the word they wrote so they can identify the missing sound and make the correction.

More Tips:

• If the child is reading for you and mispronounces a word, just cue him with the hand motion for the vowel sound.

• If you suspect your child is a kinesthetic learner, have him or her make the hand motion for the vowel sound as often as possible.

• Play Word Morph: start with one word, and then change a sound with each new word:

                EX: BAT, BIT, BUT, BOT (bought), BUT. Mix the words up so they are not in a predictable order and have the child give you the hand signal for the vowel again.

                You may also use word pairs for quick vowel sound practice: CUT/KIT, GNAT/NET, BET/BIT, COT/CUFF, NIT/NET. Hint: E and I are frequently taken for each other, as are O and U.

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!

I'm Not a Brain on Legs

“…we tend to regard it [thinking] as a kind of disembodied process, as if the body’s role in that process were to carry the brain from place to place so it can do the important work of thinking.” ~Carla Hannaford, PhD. Smart Moves, Great Ocean Publishers.

When did you last spend some time with a goat?  Got really close to it, close enough to catch a whiff?  Watched it blink its large, dreamy eyes?  Did it nose up to you through the fence earnestly chewing its snack, its jaws moving in a sideways grinding motion? Did you pet the goat, feel the texture of the fur, the warmth under the skin, the roughness of the horns or hooves?

How long would you need with the goat to really understand it and remember the sound, the smell, the feel?  As much time as memorizing all of its body parts, characteristics, habits, number currently residing in Arkansas vs. Michigan, and the things they have in common with other animals in their species? Which experience would be more memorable?  Which would produce an emotional response in you, whether disgust, enjoyment, or fear?                                                                                      

Strong Memories

What about a child?

If there were TIME, and you could take a child to see a real goat, wouldn't the sensory input to the brain be just as rich and powerful as yours was?

If you're teaching mammals, for instance, you could show the child a picture of a goat and list the characteristics of mammals just as we did above.  You could expect the child to be able to list them again in a few days to see if he or she had learned it.

Or, from this one unforgettable, multisensory experience with the goat, you could branch out with far more understanding to learn how a cow differs from a goat. What they have in common. What a cat has in common with the goat.  Once the child has this one unforgettable experience, you've got an open door.

But who has the time?  Can you really afford to spend all the days necessary on field trips in all the different topics in all the different subjects to open these doors?  I never could.  I still shudder when I recall the huge volume of paperwork I constantly had to do as a teacher. Reports, beautifully formatted lesson plans, grading tests and homework assignments, individualized strategies for each child, etc. My biggest stressor while teaching was the fact that I never had time to sit and contemplate the best way to teach my kids.  I grabbed handy resources and I knew that it was not best for my children.  I have to admit that the most efficient way to communicate new information is simply by verbalizing the contents of the lesson and expecting the children to listen. Lacking time, I did it like I had been taught myself.

 

What Do the Experts Say?

            Although this is tradition, the practice doesn’t seem to be compatible with what neurophysiologists are saying about learning.  Going back to the quoted book, Dr. Hannaford says that our senses gather information, and that through movement we express knowledge and facilitate greater brain function. (See page 12, Smart Moves).

            What does it really mean if we say learning happens all over the body? According to research, our senses capture information from our surroundings and then feed the brain with information from which an understanding of the world develops.

            The seemingly insurmountable barriers to teaching the way a child learns best must be conquered if our children are going to learn. Is it fair for me to teach them in the way that is most difficult for them just because I don't have time or resources to do it differently?  Is it fair to label kids with a disability if they then don’t “get it?” It's a big problem.

So what can be done about this gap between time and good practice? I'd love to hear what some of you have done.  What have you found works to make new information accessible, friendly, real, and multisensory for your children, while still “covering” all the material you are supposed to be teaching?

Multisensory Learning

MULTISENSORY LEARNING- What it Really Means

Many products claim to be multisensory . How can you really know to what extent the learning experience will be truly multisensory for your child? Because learners are all different, the most excellent learning experiences, the most effective learning activities, are going to be the ones that utilize components from all three modalities at one time . It is not sufficient to have a child looking and writing at one time. Yes, it is involving two senses, but that is not enough to make a powerful multisensory learning experience for your child.

The graphic organizer that follows will show you what elements might be included in a multisensory learning activity so you can judge for yourself if a product or learning activity truly merits being called a multisensory activity. Please bookmark our blog in order to keep up with postings about this topic as we post them.

I could have put this information in a string of paragraphs for you to read, but since I am a visual learner myself, I found it appealing to make a visual graph of the information. Please start on the left with the title in the orange box, and proceed to your right to explore the three modalities and suggested learning strategies for each one. A 24" by 36" poster is now for sale in our store. Click HERE

For the left-brained learners -- an outline:
WHAT IS MULTISENSORY LEARNING?

Definition: The best Multisensory Learning Experience engages all three modalities simultaneously.

I. Visual Strategies for Learning
   A. Tie learning concepts to known objects
   B. Show learning detail in its global whole
   C. Illustrate own learning
   D. Discover patterns found in learning
   E. Use Visual Maps
   F. Show learning in a graph (like this one above)
   G. Embed visuals in symbols

II. Kinesthetic and Tactile Strategies for Learning
   A. Writing learning
   B. Body movement tied to learning
   C. Hands-on constructivist learning
   D. Visualize motion in learning
   E. Act out learning

III. Auditory Strategies for Learning
   A. Sounding or speaking during writing
   B. Storytelling for teaching concepts
   C. Rhyming and rhythm
   D. Auditory amplification
   E. Reading out loud

Examples of Multisensory Learning Activities:

Learning the ABC and related sounds:
Use our Stylized Alphabet Cards which use the following strategies:
● Tie learning concept to know object, such as M for Mountains, T for Table
● Embed visuals in symbols - each letter is stylized to look like the known object
● Writing learning - kids write the letter sound on whiteboards as they are learning them
●  Each letter has a corresponding body motion/ hand motion
● Visualize motion in learning - when making M, kids imagine walking up the first hill, sliding down the other side, then walking up the second hill, and sliding down the other side
● Sounding during writing - each sound a child learns, he will write on whiteboard with colored marker WHILE he is sounding what he is writing
● Storytelling for teaching concepts - sounds are introduced and related to their shapes using Alphabet Tales, fully illustrated stories that tell how each sound came to be formed as it did

Learning sight words and related meaning:
Use our Stylized Sight Words which use the following strategies:
● Embed visuals in the symbols - our sight words are not illustrated, rather they have the visual embedded in the word
● Storytelling for teaching concepts - the sentence on the reverse side of the card not only implies a story or a setting, but teaching reading comprehension
● Body movement tied to learning - the motion on the reverse side of the card is a kinesthetic strategy
● Reading out loud - children will say the sight word, do the body motion, and see the visual at the same time