Love Learning

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!

The Plastic Brain

One afternoon at a high school where I was teaching, I saw a student speed out of the parking lot going much too fast. Just blocks away, she lost control of her car. It flipped and crashed, and she was terribly injured. For many weeks we waited to hear that she had emerged from the coma, and one day that news came. But like often happens in similar accidents, the girl faced a life that was changed forever. She had sustained serious brain injuries, and we were told she would be in therapy for years.

One tiny ray of hope in tragic situations like these is that while a brain injury can result in loss of movement or capacity, our brains can often find alternate ways of functioning when one area is damaged.

The Brain and Plasticity

I came across an article the other day entitled “Scientists Study the Way the Brain Can Heal Itself.” (http://www.journalstar.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/article_2ae1fa36-dbcd-5831-8bec-f46778086c67.html) The author speaks about the plasticity of the brain: “Plasticity means an injured brain can reroute signals through existing pathways and grow new connections between cells. It means the mind in some cases, and given the right prompting can begin to heal itself.”  

"For years what we have taught people is if you had right-sided weakness, just learn to write with your left hand," says Dr. Ross Zafonte, director of rehabilitation at the University of Pittsburgh. "This was probably the wrong thing to be teaching, because the brain is plastic [so] use facilitates recovery."

In a technique pioneered in stroke victims, patients struggle to use hands rendered nearly useless by brain damage. Many of the stroke patients show marked improvement after just a few weeks, and scans show increased activity in brain regions surrounding areas affected by the stroke.

Researchers believe the physical act of trying to use the weakened limbs can create new connections between existing cells. The training also may prompt the brain to recruit previously unused cells and pathways, a process neuroscientists call "unmasking."

"They're there already!" Bach-y-Rita [Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, a University of Wisconsin rehabilitation specialist] says of the pathways. "The brain is incredibly plastic, but it doesn't happen unless you demand it."

Plasticity and Learning Disabilities

Having taught in schools for several years, I have become very sensitive about the topic of learning disability, about how frequently children are given a label that implies that their brains are not functioning properly.  I’ve worked mostly with children who have been identified as struggling with learning in some way, and while I am passionate about not labeling children, I also understand that there can be serious blocks to learning and functioning for which there are no easy answers. The last thing I would want to do is yell “try harder!” to a parent who already feels that they have knocked on every door and asked every question and tried every known remedy.

On the other hand, I have personally seen too many cases in which children have labels heaped on them – multiple labels – and yet we discovered ways to facilitate learning for them. In those cases, I do  yell, “Try Harder!” And it is children like these that concern me right now.

One student whom I will never forget had the dubious distinction of having the most labels of any child in our school. To put this into perspective, our school was in a very depressed area, and we had multiple classrooms for each grade level. We also had a high number of failing students. So for Rob to have the highest number of labels was quite a distinction indeed. There were some things I did to help Rob, one being keeping him right under my nose when we had instructional time so I could track how he was doing. Another strategy that proved powerful for Rob was using finger-mapping as we studied the structure of words. This simple strategy apparently provided the missing piece in Rob’s understanding because by November, when he was tested (DIBELS), Rob was on grade level for reading. The next student study meeting in which Rob was discussed proved very interesting. Consternation abounded over the fact that while his IEP had recently been updated to reflect his myriad disabilities, he was now testing normal--it  threw a huge spanner into the works.

This experience with Rob and many others like it strengthens my resolve to keep getting the message out by any means possible: we simply must not give up on our children. While we cannot be guaranteed perfect restoration and healing, children do have an amazing capacity to learn and grow, many times far beyond what we would have believed possible. It makes it easier to hold on to hope and to move forward, knowing that we have such an amazing ally in the plastic brain which loves to learn and improve as it is used.

I do feel hopeful. When I read that scientists and doctors are beginning to strive for increased function in cases that seemed hopeless, it energizes me to keep on looking for more ways to stimulate the brain to learn. One thing we just can’t afford to do is stick to the status quo.

Why It Works

Traditional Teaching Methods focus on the minority of students who have certain ways of...

LEARNING

Do I take in information primarily through my senses or do I intuit and make connections? Do I organize information in a sequential manner, or do I prefer to make my own steps for arriving at the goal?
     While there are many children who can succeed in traditional classrooms, there are a vast number of children who learn best through visual and kinesthetic connections made between what is familiar to them, and the new, unknown material. To these children, showing them a string of symbols which makes up a word and asking them to just remember it is a very difficult task. There are too many little bits, and each bit carries information they have to remember in order to correctly utilize it (ie: this symbol is an A and its sound is "a" as in "apple"). If a word is stylized to show instantly what it is, is shaped to show the meaning of the word, a right brained learner may take one look at the word and absorb it whole. Then he is ready to break the word into its parts. Many global children will prefer to learn this way: from whole to part.  
      While we traditionally teach children to read by introducing letter names, then sounds, then various phonetic rules for decoding, these visual and kinesthetic learners would thrive if they understood first that the word they see is a whole, has meaning which they are familiar with. At this point, it will not be difficult to explain the rules of sounds and decoding. Global children often experience difficulty with a learning situation that is largely sequential in nature - a series of steps to be taken - desperately need to know the goal they are aiming for - the whole word. Once they know the word, they can focus on its parts.

REMEMBERING

Can I just hear it, do I  need to see it as it relates to a pattern, or do I need to actually handle it, and do the job myself in order to remember?
     Again, children who are visual, kinesthetic, global learners will need very much to have the opportunity to try their hand at a task in order to make sense of it and thus be able to remember the meaning they have made. Many children will not remember nor make sense of learning unless they can DO it themselves. Many of these children must see isolated bits of information as they relate to whole patterns in order to understand and remember. Example: If you are working on "play," it is not enough to simply say, '"When you see AY it says [long] A." It will make far more sense to the child and he will remember the concept if you take the time to engage him in generating a list of other words that have this spelling pattern. Taking it further, for those visual learners, is to have a yellow crayon with which to color only the letters that have the target spelling. Seeing the word PLAY in a list of words with the same pattern, seeing the target spelling colored, these are simple but powerful means for making sense and remembering.

UNDERSTANDING

Do I prefer to follow directions sequentially, "just because," or do I need to see the whole picture, know the final goal, and understand the "why" behind the task?
     Global learners will not be able to even hear directions until they know what the goal of the exercise is. In the effort to save valuable instruction time, often we quickly spout a series of directions and might even write them on the board. There are always a group of children who are not quick to pick up on the task. Some might look like a deer caught in headlights, some might start chatting, others might act out. It is highly uncomfortable to see others around me starting to follow directions that I can make no sense out of.
     State the end result first, why we are doing the exercise, and then explain that what is following will be the suggested steps for getting there. Global learners and others will now be ready and able to hear, understand and make sense out of the directions.
     Children need very much to be competent. When they feel lost, when they don't understand, behaviors come in. They are not always going to be able to verbalize their confusion or lack of understanding. Working with children from kindergarten to middle school who were struggling taught me that in many cases, the key to improving undesirable behavior was improving competence and confidence in the learning process. Rather than focusing on the behavior, focus on what is behind it. Children need to know they are smart in order to have the motivation to work at learning.

BEING INTELLIGENT

Am I best able to learn through words, through my own logic, or do I need to make mental associations, use "maps" to view relationships to other facts? Do I learn best by doing it myself?

TRADITIONAL vs. NON-TRADITIONAL LEARNERS:     
     Traditional teaching methods are concrete, sequential, auditory, verbal, logical, and mathematical. A huge number of students, in fact, most young children, fall into other learning categories such as abstract, random, visual, kinesthetic, and global. It only makes good sense to adjust our teaching methods and materials to blend seamlessly with children's natural way of interacting with their world.
     In our society in particular, we tend to consider certain types of learners as the smart ones, while the others might fall into the categories of "talented" or "good with his hands." In reality, there are many ways of being smart. In general, our achievement tests measure and celebrate those children who are in the first group described above. Tests cannot show the incredible intelligence of those children who learn, remember, and are smart in other ways. For those children who cannot just memorize facts, symbols, equations, there is hope. Those children may utilize pictures they draw themselves, graphic organizers that make sense to them. It is a great practice to start with kindergarten children asking them, "How did you remember this?" or "How can we remember this word next time we see it?" "What does this look like to you?" "What does this make you think of?" All these questions will be priming the child's own brain to come up with associations he/she can use to learn and remember.

  WHY STYLIZE THE SIGHT WORDS & ALPHABET?
    It was precisely in this manner that our sight words were created. My students were not able to remember from one minute to the next a word they had "learned." They could laboriously decode anything, but reading was not fun. They were working so hard on decoding that they paid no attention to meaning at all. They thought their task was to decode (sound out words), so even though they could decode, they were really not reading.
    In desperation one day in December, I showed the children the word "help" and asked them what it looked like to them. With very little hesitation, one very athletic, artistic boy said "It looks like two arms raised yelling HELP!" "Boing! A light flashed in my brain. I stylized that very first sight word. What followed was several weeks in which the children discussed with me what each sight word looked like to them. I worked after hours stylizing, and when I had finished, the children reviewed the words and let me know which ones simply did not work for them. Those I reworked.
     This process started in December. By March/April, time for formal testing, all the children were reading at a minimum of 2nd grade. They were kindergarteners. They are all smart. They just needed to learn a different way....from whole to part, via visual and kinesthetic modalities.

BUT ... ISN'T THIS JUST A CRUTCH?
     Some adults approach our stylized products and quickly back away. They feel the visuals form a crutch without which the children will flounder. Reality is that without the visual, many children will not quickly learn their sight words. Reality is that the visual is not an illustration without which the child will be lost. The visual is integrated solidly into the word so that when the child sees the plain word, the brain superimposes the visual, making for instant recall. The visual is the link to meaning; the hook that retrieves the word or letter.
     The only thing to which I can liken this process is our brain's ability to imbue one little detail with remembered, associated sights, sounds, smells and emotions. How many of us see a word and suddenly are flooded with associated memories? The brain has an amazing associative capacity. Kinesthetic children who have learned a body motion with a sight word have only to see a plain word, recall the motion and as they start to do the motion, the word pops out of their mouth.

WHAT DOES RESEARCH SAY ABOUT MULTIPLE PATHWAYS TO THE BRAIN?

Research shows us that learning to read is a mostly left-brain function. For children who are not left brained, (left brained learners deal best with symbols, speech, words), but are instead visual learners and tactile learners (need hands-on), learning to read can be a great challenge. For these children, using a variety of pathways to the brain means they have the ability to learn to read in a way that suits their brains better! They actually experience a reshaping of their brains over time when they are taught from multiple directions simultaneously (such as phonemic awareness activities - hearing and manipulating sounds to make words - body movement to teach kinesthetic learners, hands-on tasks for tactile learners, visuals, rhythm, stories) leading to success for these children who might otherwise experience failure. What is wonderful about teaching young children this way is that when we combine left-brain elements such as symbols (letters and words in decodable text books) with visual and tactile elements such as we do in our materials, children are actually being offered a chance to learn in ways that engage BOTH sides of their brains. This practice allows them to develop a strong system for learning, which strengthens their ability to use the less-preferred hemisphere in subsequent learning.

Research shows that the elements of which we speak (visuals, motions, body movement, stories, activities that utilize both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously help with many children who struggle - from dyslexia, autism, aspergers, ADD, children with other "identified learning disabilities." For  children with attention difficulties, using the visuals embedded in symbols allows their brain to record a quick snapshot of the word so that the visual is there to act as a hook for recall. I would like to share here a portion of an article by Laurie Wagner:

"Research confirms that effective, multisensory reading instruction literally remodels the brains of struggling readers. Multisensory learning incorporates a variety of learning channels during instruction, especially utilization of visual, auditory, tactile (touch) and kinesthetic (muscle movement) learning pathways. When struggling learners are taught to read using direct, explicit, systematic, multisensory phonics instruction, research using brain imaging shows us that the impact on the brain is significant!

Dr. Sally Shaywitz, a leader in the field of dyslexia and reading research, has conducted reading research at Yale University's Center for Learning and Attention. Observing brain imaging during the reading process through the use of functional MRIs explicitly shows that good readers consistently use specific portions of the left-brain, with brain activity highly-focused in very specific areas during reading tasks. Brain imaging in poor readers, on the other hand, shows diffused activity scattered throughout the brain; much less efficient for reading.

Furthermore, studies have shown that instruction using direct, explicit, systematic, multisensory phonics actually changes how these poor readers use the pathways in their brains for reading. This kind of instruction, including an early emphasis on phonemic awareness, taught two hours per week for a year, significantly enhances students' overall reading accuracy and fluency. The changes in brain imaging after this kind of intervention show a significant increase in the focused use of the left hemisphere of the brain during reading tasks. The brain activity of the poor readers appears more and more like the brain activity of the good readers! These formerly "poor readers" are developing reading systems in their brains that were not present before the instruction occurred.

Additional studies supporting these results have been conducted in many research facilities, including a team led by Associate Professor of Pediatrics Dr. Guinevere Eden at the General Clinical Research Center at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC, and a study at the Medical College of Wisconsin, with Jeffrey R. Binder, MD, Professor of Neurology and Robert F. Newby, PhD, Associate Professor of Neurology.

Early identification and intervention in kindergarten and grade one using this research-based instruction can prevent many at-risk students from ever struggling with reading. This kind of proven and effective instruction for older students who already struggle with reading skills acquisition can reverse the on-going difficulties, changing those learners into more competent readers. For dyslexic, learning disabled and ADD individuals, these instructional methods give them specific strategies and skills to work with their learning differences, allowing them to become successful readers and spellers, significantly impacting their schoolwork and life-long success.

Excerpts from the article "School Support for Learning Disabled and ADD Learners"

By Laurie Wagner

Reading and Language Arts Centers

800-READ211 (800-732-3211)