Love Learning

Why Bother With Recess?

Last week, Education Week posted a thoughtful commentary by Cynthia A. Elder and Michael C. Obel-Omia called "Why Bother With Recess?" We wanted to share this excerpt with you:

"As of 2009, 30 percent of the nation's elementary schools had done away with recess altogether. Of those that maintained recess, 40 percent had cut it back significantly. If current trends continue, recess may soon be a thing of the past for our students.

In the wake of the federal No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top policies, schools across the country have been scrambling to improve math and reading scores, beginning with students as early as kindergarten. This laudable goal may come at the expense of activities that help children to be productive learners during the school day.

More than ever, students must learn to self-direct, negotiate, invent, compromise, and take responsibility for their own actions. The decision to limit or eliminate the unstructured play afforded by a recess period may detract from students' ability to focus on the very subjects we use to measure success. Several thoughtful researchers have proved that creative thought, which is a large part of recess and play, can be viewed as an important aspect of problem-solving.

Why is unstructured play critical to student achievement? The answer lies, in part, in the way the brain processes information during a typical school day."

The whole commentary is great and speaks to the importance of movement and free play in developing strong brains and bodies. A little while back we also wrote another post about the negative effects of withholding recess from struggling students.

How does Orton Gillingham compare to the Child1st multisensory reading products?

Over a decade ago, I was teaching a group of beginners. At the time, I was intrigued by the fact that all of the children were either strongly visual or kinesthetic learners. In retrospect I realize that any child who is under the age of 7 tends to be a visual learner. At the time, however, I thought it was a really interesting coincidence.

I used an approach that was very similar to Orton Gillingham. Over time, the children became whizzes at giving me the sounds for a list of sound spellings such as the one below.

B	C	D	F	G	H
J	K	L	M	N	P
R	S	T	V	W	X
Y	Z	I	E	A	O
U	Sh	Ch	Th	Ck	Qu
Ce	Ai	Ou	Ea	Oa	Ow
Igh	Eigh	Ay	Ie	Aw	Ee
Ey	Ue	Ew	Au	Oo	Ui
Oy	Oi

By the end of the kindergarten year, I could give the children a sheet of lined paper containing the sound spellings above, and they could all supply me with a word that contained each spelling. They could also see a sound spelling and tell me the sound or sounds it made. It was pretty cool. I believed they were brilliant.

Children do what we teach them to do

The downside, however, was that while the children were amazing decoders, they were terrible at reading. They could not view a word and just say what it was. In addition, they would often sound a word out and then in the very next line see the same word and rather than remembering what they had done in the previous line, they would sound it out again. Over time, my frustration began to mount. I knew I was missing something pretty important in how I was teaching these obviously bright children. Much later I figured out that the children were dutifully doing exactly what I had taught them to do: they were sounding out words using all the little pieces I had taught them. But were they really reading? I don’t think so. They were not recognizing words nor were they absorbing the meaning of the words they were sounding out. This is my biggest beef with focusing solely on explicit phonics as the only way to teach reading. It is just not enough in many cases.

When we focus so much on teaching all the little pieces of words, it is so easy to neglect to teach children to read. We assume they will grasp the point of learning all those little pieces, but far too many children don’t make that connection for themselves. Some children never learn to read because they don’t know what to do with all the little pieces, while others are perennially stuck in the sounding out stage and yet others are able to recognize and name words, but have no clue what they are reading. They don’t comprehend because they have not grasped the fact that the whole point of reading is to receive communication.

Going beyond Orton Gillingham and explicit phonics instruction--why do it?

Remember that I had figured out that my students were predominantly visual and kinesthetic learners. So, one day when the lesson for the day was the word HELP, I heard the children sound it out just fine. But ten minutes later when we returned to the word, they had apparently never seen it before. They sounded it out again.

Adding the visual element

Oh my. So in desperation, I asked the group of children, “What does this word look like to you?” I am not sure where that came from apart from being fresh out of ideas and desperate to try something. One little boy immediately raised his hand and said “It looks like someone raising two arms and yelling ‘HELP!’”

My eyebrows went up and some lights began to dawn over marble head. Following his lead, I sketched a rough drawing on my whiteboard that looked a bit like this:

I shared with the children that the e is the head of the person who is in the water and the reason he’s yelling HELP is because the fish is swimming towards him and just might nibble his toes! In a very simple way, we added two right-brained elements: visual and story.

This drawing worked like magic. First of all, it showed the children that the letters they knew sounds for when put together made a word they could recognize over and over again. Secondly, they understood that the word conveys a story or part of a story. From that day on, we talked about each word we came to and as I asked the children what the words looked like, I began to design the earliest versions of the SnapWords™ images.

Adding the kinesthetic element

We encountered a new issue shortly. Several days later when I showed a little girl the plain word for HELP, she looked at it quizzically, but couldn’t for the life of her say what it was. I reached over and grasped her hands, and as I raised them up over her head, the word HELP popped out of her mouth as though drawn out by the raising of her hands. Another light began to flicker in my mind. The fact that we taught explicit phonics was super great. We were covering all the bases. The fact we added a visual to the whole words was an amazing addition, but now we needed to complete the multisensory learning package by adding physical movement that mimicked the meaning of the word. So the body motion for help was raising two arms as the child said the word.

Getting back to the original question about how Orton Gillingham compares to Child1st

I suspect Orton Gillingham might be happy with me for taking his advice about teaching in a way that encourages the child to SEE, SAY, and DO and also to use explicit phonics instruction. But I have learned to go so much further than having the children SEE themselves writing the word as they say it. That process is technically multisensory, but the matter of fact is that if the children are writing symbols, they are in a purely left-brained function. Symbols are left-brained elements. When you add a visual that is embedded in the symbols, you are taking the left-brained symbols and adding to them the right-brained image, creating a connection in the brain between the hemispheres. Then when you add to that a related body motion that mimics the shape of the word, you are involving also the cerebellum. This creates a connection between hemispheres in the brain, forming a lasting learning experience.

Who will benefit from Child1st materials?

Any beginner is in a stage where the right hemisphere in the brain is elaborating and developing and so will find the Easy-for-Me™ Reading materials fun and effective. For beginners and any child who struggles with the wholly left-brained approach to teaching (explicit phonics), including right-brained elements and body movement will involve multiple regions in the brain and will result in a far higher rate of success for those who struggle. The Easy-for-Me™ Reading Program details in each lesson exactly what to do to utilize the various regions in the brain. All materials are provided for you.

If you are using Orton Gillingham’s most excellent approach to teaching reading, please pay close attention to how each individual child is responding. As with any approach to teaching, if it is not fully meeting the needs of every child, it is our responsibility as teachers to add elements that will result in success for every child. No one program will meet the needs of every learner. No one program, no matter how excellent, will meet the need of every single dyslexic learner, for example.

It is true what they say: A picture is worth a thousand words. I have surely found this to be true in my experiences with brand new and with struggling or non-readers.

Sight Words and Reading Programs

Orton Gillingham has his list of red words: words that cannot be decoded. He also designates some high frequency words as green words, or those you can go ahead and decode. You can find upwards of 400 words in our inventory which are colorfully stylized to make learning them easy for your children.

See samples of the stylized sight words.

See the list of words available (not including SnapWords™ Nouns)

See the list of “coming soon” words: Download New words sept 2011.

In addition, our Easy-for-Me™ Reading Program beautifully leads any parent or teacher through the steps for teaching non-readers (be they the very young, or those who have not learned to read using other approaches) in a wholly multisensory way. The program goes beyond “see, say, do” to include fully integrated approaches that trigger responses in multiple regions in the brain at one time.

If you have specific questions or concerns about your particular situation or about a specific student, please contact us at 1-800-881-0912 or info@child-1st.com. We are happy to talk with you.

Vito Perrone and Moving away from Test-Focused Education

We’ve recently lost an advocate for effective education for our children.

“Vito Perrone Sr., a leading advocate for humanistic, regimentation-free public education and a mentor to several generations of liberal reformers who fought the tide of standardized testing, died on Aug. 24 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 78.

Among progressive reformers, Dr. Perrone’s commitment to flexible teaching methods and his opposition to standardized tests made him the conscience of the profession in the modern era, when financially stressed schools nationwide embraced standardized tests as a way to improve academic performance and streamline the teaching process.

In Dr. Perrone’s view, which he disseminated for 40 years as a professor of education, first at the University of North Dakota and later at Harvard, the excessive use of such tests warped the education process, inhibited children’s natural interest in learning, caused teachers stress and prevented them from carrying out their real jobs: instilling in children a love of learning and teaching them the principles of citizenship in a democracy.”

~excerpt from a recent New York Times article

 Because I am a former teacher, the third paragraph evoked strong feelings in me. I have experienced what Dr. Perrone describes. When I taught school, so much of our time in the classroom was taken up with preparing for tests, drawing up reports on test results, setting goals for each child, and making plans for how to make every child score better on upcoming tests. As we became more and more rigidly scripted, finding time for the strategies I felt would be helpful for a specific child became increasingly more difficult. Soon, they had to be crammed in between the required lessons, if at all.

I have also never understood how testing was going to improve learning. What I experienced as a teacher was how much more our teaching time was seriously interrupted by testing. And too often, because I was teaching young children, testing results didn’t accurately reflect a child’s ability. For instance, my 1^st and 2^nd graders were tested using DIBELS. Part of this test requires them to sound out nonsense patterns of letters. Non-words. Some children could handle this, but I had some students that were excellent readers who simply could not sound out nonsense “words” and so their overall score fell. Similarly, some children who were more deliberate readers, or who were shy and uncomfortable with a stranger testing them, did not perform as well as they normally would. Again, their scores did not reflect their abilities. Essentially, testing did not help them learn nor did it help them love learning.

Having to watch students be put into special education due to the results of tests broke my heart. It did not matter that the children were completely capable of learning. And when I was asked to provide anecdotal material to support their inclusion in special education, I just couldn’t do it. I left the system believing it would be more likely I could help children than if I remained in the classroom. In 2006, I founded Child1st—my way of continuing to work for children, their parents, and for those educators that continue to find a way to reach children, one at a time.

I believe that educators like Dr. Perrone and thousands of teachers who remain in the public school system, passionate to really teach children, don’t have a voice that is heard. Policies are implemented by politicians; people who are far away from the classroom. No Child Left Behind has cut a deep swath through our public education system so that the “river” is now flowing in a direction many of us have come to lament. Certainly our children are losing out the most.

What I suspect will happen is that the more schools frantically try to raise scores and the more rigid public education becomes, the more effectively educating children will fall to parents. Parents can teach without the restrictions that exist in public schools today. They have the liberty of discovering the giftedness of each of their children, and are then free to choose an approach and a pace that works best for each one.

The article on Dr. Perrone ends like this:

“What if our children and young people learn to read and write but don’t like to and don’t?” he said. “What if they don’t read the newspapers and magazines, or can’t find beauty in a poem or love story? What if they don’t go as adults to artistic events, don’t listen to a broad range of music, aren’t optimistic about the world and their place in it, don’t notice the trees and the sunset, are indifferent to older citizens, don’t participate in politics or community life?”

With a teacher’s rhetorical urgency, he added, “Should any of this worry us?”

What's Behind the Child1st Name?

We believe it's essential to look at each child first to identify his/her natural learning preference and then to select materials which will ensure his/her learning success.

Because so many children learn most naturally through story, images, body movement and hands-on activities, Child1st is dedicated to creating reading and math materials which rely on these methods and prevent those bright children from discouragement and failure.

Q: What is the research behind Child1st materials?

A: The experiential evidence behind Child1st materials includes results from tests taken after children worked with the materials. The results come from several kindergarten classes, small group and whole group, as well as Title 1, special education, and regular (immersion) classroom settings.

Read more about the evidence base, including specifics from the testing results.

“Bottom-up Learning” and Building Strong Foundations for Abstract Ideas

I just read an interesting article in the New York Times called "Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas". Here are two quotes from the article that stood out to me:

"For years school curriculums have emphasized top-down instruction, especially for topics like math and science. Learn the rules first—the theorems, the order of operations, Newton’s laws—then make a run at the problem list at the end of the chapter."

"Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of … [the] bottom-up ability, called perceptual learning. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, after all, and when focused properly, it can quickly deepen a person’s grasp of a principle, new studies suggest."

This article really hit home with me for a few reasons. One point the article made is that the brain is attracted to pattern discovery; it begins scanning for patterns before we’re even aware of it happening. The brain is not necessarily attracted to rules or theorems or lists of steps and procedures. The second principle that jumped out at me is the value of giving children real materials to work with as they discover for themselves the workings of a problem or as they distill the rules we wanted to teach them in the beginning.

As I read the part of the article about the value in letting students explore the basics of a new concept before giving them the rules and theory behind it, I started thinking about what this might look like on a practical level. Following are some examples I came up with.

 

An example of how to create a bottom-up lesson for early computation:

For the most part, young children are taught to count objects on the page in order to add them up. Some kids are still counting on their fingers in senior high math classes. Giving children plenty of practice with counters and dot patterns will over time give their brains visual snapshots of what numbers mean—the “how many” of them—and they will be able to do computation quickly in their heads. Their instincts for how many will be sharply developed.

Here is an example of homemade dot cards that show 5s in various arrays:

And here is a game to practice knowing how many:

Make a stack of dot cards (with 1-5 dots per card). Throw one down on the table and have the child quickly guess how many dots are on the card. Have him do all this without counting the dots…just guessing. The ones he guesses right, he gets to keep.

The cards above all show 5 in different arrangements. They not only show “how many” five is, but they imply various number combos that make a 5, such as 1+4 and 2+3. They also show what an odd number looks like.

Next, try tossing three cards down—two 5s and a 4 or 2 5s and a 6. Have the child guess very quickly which card doesn’t belong.

OR 

 

An example of how to create a bottom-up lesson for phonics/sound spellings:

Use cards like these:

Note they are four different sound spellings—words with AY, with AI, OY, and OI. If you spread them out on a table, ask the child to figure out a great way to group them. He can group them however he wants. Give him time to play around with the cards. Once he’s decided how to classify the cards, ask him to tell you why he grouped them the way he did. (He may come up with four groups (AI, AY, OY, and OI). Or he may choose two groups (AY with AI, etc.)

Read through the words casually…pointing out that the red letters signify something special. You have two sounds in red: OY and long sound of A. Give the child time to see if there is a pattern he notices in where the letters are placed in the words. He may figure out that the spellings with an I are found inside the words while the sounds that end in Y (AY and OY) are at the end of the word or syllable (such as in loy-al or may-be).

Once he’s played this game, chances are good he will run into some of these word spellings as he’s reading, and having sorted and classified for himself, he will remember the sounds, their letters, and where they come in the word far better than if he’d just heard a rule.

 

An example of how to create a bottom-up lesson for multiplication:

I love showing children the answers to multiplication tables in 5-grids because the most wonderful patterns emerge. I also love seeing how children are drawn to the grids because they do see patterns in the numbers.

One of my favs is the 9x table. And my immediate reaction to seeing this times table is to start pointing out patterns. (Okay, I will just start. In the 10s place, you count up 0-9, then because it is the 9s table, you say 9 twice, then keep on going counting up until you get to 13. Rows 1-2 use the same numbers but with their digits reversed. Rows 1 and 3 have some similarities in the 1s place. If there were a 4th row, it would look similar to row 2 in the 1s place as well. Notice patterns in the #x and the answers.)

Once the child has looked for patterns and shared them with you, see if he notices the “rules” for 9s, which is that the numbers in each answer have to add up to a 9, that the number in the 10s place in rows 1-2 is one digit less than the #x. In row 3, the ##x is 2 digits larger than the first two digits of the answer and the number in the 1s is whatever you need to make the whole thing add up to a 9. For instance, with 13 x 9, the answer will start with 11 because it is the number 2 numbers smaller than a 9. Then you put a 7 in the 1s place because 1 + 1 + 7 =9. Don’t you just love it? We have a book on multiplication and division coming out by the end of June 2011 that will encourage pattern discovery, will use stories, visuals, and hands-on activities to make learning multiplication and division a blast (and avoid memorization in the process). We’ll keep you posted!

Those are just a few ideas for helping children learn from the bottom up so that the ideas sink in deeply and create a strong and lasting foundation for future learning. What about you all? What have you done with your students to build a strong visual and hands-on base for abstract ideas?

SnapLetters: What Makes Them Unique Is What Makes Them Effective

A Traditional, Illustrated Alphabet

Children learn "A says a for apple."

So children have three facts to learn: letter name, letter sound, and representative illustration. Because the apple does not mimic the shape of the associated letter, some children are confused by the illustration and it keeps them from learning the essential facts.

Child1st SnapLetters™

What makes them unique:

• The all-important visual is embedded in the letter symbol 

• The visual reflects the shape of the letter

• The jingle provides both long and short vowel sounds

• SnapLetters™ are taught through stories, making them unforgettable

• Only letter sounds are taught initially

• Body motion mimics the shape of the letter and provides another pathway into the child's brain--critically important for tactile, kinesthetic learners

Testimonial: Kyle had repeated first grade and still was struggling tremendously with reading. During our summer tutoring sessions, I noted that as he sounded out words, he was not comfortable with basic sounds. For example, when he sounded out "sand," he had no problem with the sound for S, but for A he said "Aye (letter name), aah (short A sound), apple" in rapid succession. Once he used the SnapLetters™ cards, complete with body motion, his confusion ended.

Today Is International Literacy Day

This morning I was scanning several websites dealing with the subject of literacy, and stumbled on a list of countries ranked according to reported literacy rate. My eyebrows went up as I saw that the United States reported 99% literacy. Of course literacy has many definitions. If we call someone literate who can recognize a handful of basic sight words, then the rate of literacy in our country soars (but really, 99%?). If, on the other hand, we believe that a literate adult is one who can read and understand all printed material he or she might encounter on the job, and can use that information and communicate it to others, then the percent of literate adults in America drops sharply. And shouldn’t literacy include a person’s ability to use math in daily life?

Studies commissioned by the U.S. government in 1993 and then again in 2006 revealed the true state of literacy in our country. “These studies assert that 46% to 51% of U.S. adults read so poorly that they earn 'significantly' below the threshold poverty level for an individual.” 

When we talk about teaching children to read, frequently we focus on their ability to pass a test, to move on to the next grade, or even to be able to read textbooks for science, math, history, etc. But if we take a much longer view, we will consider the future when those children become adults and need to be literate in order to succeed on the job and in life.

In spite of programs such as No Child Left Behind, in spite of enormous sums of money allocated to improve reading levels in our schools, we're not seeing significant gains in literacy in America. Sadly, growing numbers of children are failing. We can blame decreasing interaction with parents, increase in media as entertainment, stress at home and at school, reduction in outdoor free play, poor diet, or many other factors. But the bottom line is that a huge percent of children struggle with reading, and the fact that they are failing to learn to read adequately brings with it another whole set of problems.

Child1st exists because of our concern for our children’s future. We desire to partner with parents and teachers to prevent failure in the first place and also to bring success to children who have already experienced failure. The design of Child1st products is purposeful; we utilize all the knowledge we have acquired about how children learn most naturally and include elements that will make the learning experience new and engaging. In answer to the need for materials that will successfully bring even an adult to success in reading, we’ve just published a new book, many years in the making. The Illustrated Book of Sounds and Their Spelling Patterns is the quickest way to bring about competence in the structure of English words – this book is a help where traditional phonics fails. The icing on the cake is that the book is funny and simple to use, and the cartoon illustrations effectively take the sting out of the process of learning to read well.

Combine this book with our stylized SnapWords™ and The Reading Teacher’s Encyclopedia, and you will have covered all your bases: acquisition of basic high frequency words, the structure of words (“phonics” but better), and all the multiple facets of the reading process including phonemic awareness, comprehension, vocabulary, writing, fluency, and phonics.

The Creativity Crisis

Newsweek published an article a few days ago discussing The Creativity Crisis in the U.S. The tagline reads "For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong--and how we can fix it."

A quote from the article about possible causes for the decline:

"It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools....When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing."

The article is a little on the long side, but definitely worth reading.

What do you think? How have you seen creativity decline (or not), in recent decades? What have you done to encourage creativity in your children/ students?

ADHD vs. Pseudo-ADD and How to Spot the Difference

The number of children diagnosed with ADHD has risen sharply in the past decade. The trend these days is to label, label, label and yet I will be quick to say two things. One is that I understand perfectly how comforting it is to be able to put a name to “what ails her.” However, I will also say that the habit of labeling kids has run amok and is now out of control. Some children that now carry the label of ADHD are the kids who announce to the substitute teacher (as they race wildly about the classroom) “I have ADD and I can’t sit still!” [Which translated is: I have an excuse handed down to me by my parents and my doctor which gives me permission to be out of control!]

Jeffrey Freed, M.A.T., in his book Right-Brained Children in a Left-Brained World states, “I believe the majority of children who are now labeled ADD actually have what Hallowell and Ratey [authors of Driven to Distraction and Answers to Distraction] term pseudo-ADD. They weren’t born this way; we made them the way they are. These children are a product of our fast-paced, visual, over-stimulating culture. Drs. Hallowell and Ratey address the pseudo-ADD phenomenon in their book Answers to Distraction.

‘ADD is like life these days. I [Hallowell] don’t want to sound too high-flown in my claims, but I do believe that this medical syndrome meshes with the gears of current American culture. The fast pace of everyday life, the search for the sound bite, the love of fast food and instant gratification, the proliferation of fax machines, cellular telephones, computer networks, bulletin boards, and E-mail systems, our appetite for violence and action and adventure, our rush to get to the bottom line, our widespread impatience, the boom in gambling, our love of extremes and danger – all these very American traits are also very ADD-like.’ (p 27)"

So it seems that the environment in which these children have been raised has encouraged the development of these ADD-like symptoms.

Because I am not an expert on ADD, I will quote Jeffrey Freed again – an expert who has worked with children diagnosed with ADD for years. Here is what to look at in determining whether or not your child truly has ADD:

• The degree of severity: is the child’s behavior so extreme that it consistently gets in the way of his ability to do well in school, complete tasks, and form normal bonds with family and peers? [I believe a key word in this question is "consistently"]

• Whether the behavior is pronounced both inside and outside the classroom: This is a key point. If you’re taken aback when your child’s teacher suggests he be evaluated for ADD, it could be that ADD-like behavior is only observable in the classroom. Your child may be acting out because of boredom and faulty teaching, not because of an underlying disorder. [The key question here is if the behavior is consistent no matter where the child is.]

Given the fact that our kids are growing up in a very ADD-like culture, it might be worth looking hard at the two points made by Freed before jumping the gun on getting any child evaluated for ADD. Remember, a truly ADD child will go at two speeds: hyperactive or collapse.  I would have a few questions in mind when observing a specific child:

1.    Is he ALWAYS hyperimpulsive, hypersensitive, hypervisual, hyperactive, and hyperdistractible? Or are there situations in which he can focus intensely on an activity?

2.    If there are situations in which she is able to sustain focus on what is she doing? Does it happen to be a game or toy that she especially likes to play with?

3.    Is the behavior the same no matter who he is with or what he is doing? In other words, does he have the same activity level and distractibility whether he’s playing a game or doing homework? Is he worse at some times, and if so, where is he when things get worse?

4.    Is it possible that her actions stem from frustration or stress? Is she responding negatively to criticism by acting out?

5.    Is he in a situation in which he feels destined to fail?

If you do discover that there are times in which the child is able to sustain focus, it is possible that it is not truly ADD at play, but something else. If that is the case and you suspect the child needs some help with behavior issues, the good news is that there are things you can do to help your child work through this pseudo-ADD. It will take some time and creativity, but you can make a big difference in your child's life and behavior. Read a past blog post for some ideas for activities to get your kids off the couch and outside learning this summer.