Posts Tagged ‘learning difficulties’
The 5 Critical Steps You Need to Help Your Child Improve Their Learning Skills
July 15th, 2010For those of you that missed last Wednesday night's call ... I wanted to pass this along as soon as I could.
Here is the link where you can go to listen to the Mid-Summer Activities to Improve Your Child's Skills Teleseminar.
You will want to listen over the next 3 days as it may not be available after that.
You will hear:
- Case Studies
- A current client talk about her daughter and how this method has changed their lives.
On the call you will learn:
- Why children and adults struggle with learning
- The Cone of Learning
- The 5 critical steps you need to help your child improve their skills
- The 6 activities you can do right now to help them improve their skills and still have fun.
Especially for parents wanting to help their:
- Struggling learners
- Reluctant learners
- Learners that take a long time to complete their work
- Learners that are 'falling through the cracks'
- LD, Dyslexic, ADHD learners
- Gifted learners
These activities work with kids of all ages - and even adults, too! Improve reading skills, writing skills, spelling skills, and math skills in minutes a day.
Listen before the recording is taken down!
Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET
Mid Summer Training – What You Can Do to Prepare Your Kids for School
July 9th, 2010
Mid Summer Training – What You Can Do to Prepare Your Kids for School
I Can Hardly Believe It? Check it out...
The FREE Live Teleseminar is filling up fast – Only 100 68 52 Spots left!
Reserve your spot now.
Mid-Summer Training Call
I have had so many calls from parents recently, wondering how to help their child between now and when school starts back up. They realize it’s not too late to give their child a boost, but they also want to be sure they have an enjoyable rest of the summer. So, I decided to have a teleseminar where I will present information on summer activities to help your child's skills improve as well as activities rich in experiences and family time.
I'm hosting a FREE Live Teleseminar on Wednesday July 14th at 8 pm Eastern, 7 pm Central, 6 pm Mountain, and 5 pm Pacific. Upon registering you will receive a FREE Handbook on the 5 things you can do to help your child over the summer. Those that attend live will receive a surprise FREE gift.
Searching for Mid-Summer Activities to Improve Your Child's Skills and Still Have Fun?
FREE Live Teleseminar on Wednesday June 2nd at at 8 pm EST, 7 pm CST, 6 pm MST, and 5 pm PST.
Space is limited. You can attend via phone or via internet!
Reserve your Teleseminar line now at:
Title: Mid-Summer Activities to Improve Your Child’s Skills and Still Have Fun
Time: Wednesday, July 14th at 5:00pm Pacific
Listening method: Phone + Web Simulcast
To attend, visit:
Mid-Summer Training Call
LD Specialist and Board Certified Educational Therapist Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., is answering your questions about summer activities to help your child improve their skills. The teleseminar will be recorded; if you can't attend, you'll be able to listen later. Plus special surprise bonus just for registering! Those that attend live will receive another surprise FREE gift.
Mid-Summer Training Call
Searching for Mid-Summer Activities to Improve Your Child's Learning Skills and Still Have Fun?
July 8th, 2010
It’s the almost middle of Summer Vacation and as you know, it is the perfect time to give your child a boost in their learning skills, but you still want to have fun…
Join Bonnie Terry’s call and find out what you can do in just 20 minutes a day to boost your child’s reading, writing, and math skills and have fun at the same time.
I'm hosting a FREE Live Teleseminar on Wednesday July 14th at 8 pm Eastern, 7 pm Central, 6 pm Mountain, and 5 pm Pacific. Upon registering you will receive a FREE Handbook on the 5 steps you can take to help your child over the summer even if they have a learning problem, LD, dyslexia. The activities and steps are for all age students - kindergarten through adults.
Those that attend the Live Teleseminar will also receive a surprise FREE gift. And, of course, if you can’t make it live on the call, you will get access to the recording!
Mid-Summer Training Call
FREE Live Teleseminar on Wednesday July 14th at 8 pm Eastern, 7 pm Central, 6 pm Mountain, and 5 pm Pacific.
Space is limited. You can attend via phone or via internet!
Reserve your space for the Teleseminar now at:
Title: Searching for Summer Activities to Improve Your Child’s Learning Skills and Still Have Fun?
Time: Wednesday, July 14th at 5pm Pacific, 6 pm Mountain, 7 pm Central, 8 pm Eastern.
Listening method: Phone + Web Simulcast
To register, visit:
Mid-Summer Training Call
Learn About:
1. How to improve your child's reading, writing, and math skills in just 20 minutes a day
2. 5 steps you can take to help your child
3. Activities to do at home, in the yard, or in your neighborhood
Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET
Back to School Tips for Parents of LD, Dyslexic, or ADHD Kids
August 25th, 2009
Back to School…
What can you do to make your life a lot easier? Anna Weinstein from education.com contacted me earlier this week and asked if she could interview me about what parents of LD children could do to help there kids have a great start to the school year. We recorded the interview, so you can hear it here.
Here are a few of the highlights that you will hear Bonnie talking about:
At 4 min: There is a special tip regarding school supply tips to help your child be more organized.
At 6 min: How do you organize your homework area
At 7:29 min: Specific supplies that help the homework time
At 15:53 min: How much time should kids spend on homework – especially when they have dyslexia or LD?
At 17:30 min: How do you talk to teachers?
At 21:05 min: Specific things to tell the teacher to set your child up to have a great year
At 25:40 min: Can you just contact the teacher via email or does it have to be in person?
At 29:44 min: Isn’t there a system put in place already for me to meet all of my kid’s support team?
At 31:54 min: Doesn’t the teacher already know what my child needs – he was pulled out last year for services?
At 38:45 min: Why you want to have a clear understanding of what is going on with your child
At 40:00 min: Ways to keep track of your child’s assignments
At 42:40 min: Parent self care & support for parents
At 47:30 min: Evening family routine
At 51:27 min: Best way to speak with the teacher or principal
Listen to it here!
Questions to Ask Specialists Who Evaluate for Learning Disabilities or Dyslexia
July 14th, 2009
Whether your child is being evaluated for LD or dyslexia you need to know the type of questions to ask the specialists. I just read this article that was posted on LD Online. It gives a lot of great information and I thought you might be interested...
Written by: Great Schools Editorial Staff (2007)
Hiring a private specialist to conduct a psychoeducational evaluation of your child is a big commitment of time, effort, and money. To find someone competent, ask other parents or school staff for their recommendations. You'll probably want to interview more than one specialist before choosing the person who will work with your child. If you get a recommendation from someone outside the school, make sure the private evaluator has the qualifications and/or credentials your state or district requires.
Before hiring a specialist to conduct psychoeducational testing, you will want to interview her about her professional qualifications, procedures, and fees. The responses will allow you to screen a prospective specialist to see whether you feel comfortable with her, and to discover any potential "mismatches" with your child's needs. The conversation can also help you prepare your child for the evaluation process.
You'll be better prepared to interview an evaluation specialist if you have some background information on evaluation for special education eligibility and/or learning disabilities.
In order to get the most benefit from your initial conversation with a psychoeducational evaluation specialist, you'll want to have a good basic understanding about why and how evaluations for learning disabilities are conducted-and how to understand the results. For the rest of the article, go to LD Online.
..............................
Get the parent friendly LD Dyslexia Screening Tool to help you identify your child's learning problems.
Hope this is helpful.
Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET
Developmental Dyslexia
July 6th, 2009Hi Bonnie,
Thank you for your time the other day. I looked over the report from my son's testing. They diagnosed him with Developmental Dyslexia. There are signs of it as being inherited, but not at the level he has, as far as we know. I am not sure what exactly you mean by "underlying cause". Could you please explain more in depth.
Thank you again,
Angie Taylor
Angie,
All the word dyslexia means is a reading difficulty. Developmental dyslexia is also known as a specific reading disability. This is a disorder in which children with normal intelligence and sensory abilities show learning deficits for reading. Its origins may be inherited. That does not give you the information you really need in order to address the reading difficulty. There are 9 areas of visual perception. There are 9 areas of auditory perception. And there are 9 areas of tactile/kinesthetic perception. Each of these areas affect learning. When one or more of these areas isn't working as efficiently as it should, reading/learning problems occur. The areas that aren't working effectively are the underlying cause of the dyslexia - reading difficulty. Most of these areas of perception are learned and can be improved. The key is to understand which areas are not working as effectively as they should. Then you get materials that address the underlying cause. The materials also should give the specific step-by-step instruction that a student needs to bridge the gap in their learning. To find out what the underlying areas that are causing the dyslexia, use a comprehensive informal assessment. I go into a lot of information about this in the first webinar I did. Go to: http://bonnieterry.com/freevideosignup/
You will want to purchase the complete Dyslexia LD Screening Tool ($37.00). This will give you the whole picture of what is interfering with your son's learning. Go through the assessment checklists. The scoring mechanism will guide you in the areas he needs to work on. Then there are materials suggested that address the different areas of need.
That is how I developed all of my materials - they address the underlying cause of reading, writing, & math problems.
Hope this is helpful.
Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET
Do Odors Help or Hinder Learning?
April 23rd, 2009I've written often about how we learn by seeing, hearing, and doing. But, we also learn through the olfactory system, smell.
In fact, smell actually plays an intricate part of our lives, of our sensory world, in the way we act. The process of recognition of a place is accomplished by our sense of smell. Think about this for a minute. The dentist's office has certain smells related to it, so does the doctor's office. Our homes smell wonderfully inviting when we've been baking or cooking a delicious dinner. We like to be in our homes when they smell good. A movie theater has another smell, as does a candy store. On the other hand, there are places we don't enjoy being at as much, due to the odors. For instance a locker room after a sports event can be full of odors we don't want to be near.
So, what does this have to do with learning? Our sense of smell adds an additional component to learning; it incorporates another sense so the brain is activated with an emotional and biological stimulus. Any time our brain is activated in multiple ways learning is affected, either positively or negatively.
Classrooms can have a variety of odors in them. Most of the time they are good odors. But, sometimes they aren't. For example, when a classroom has just had new carpeting put in, there is usually a pretty noxious odor from the make-up of the carpet. Some severe educational consequences can occur due to this.
When the olfactory system is inundated with noxious odors such as formaldehyde that is out-gassing from carpet, children can suffer health, mood, and behavior problems that undermine school performance and productivity. Children can become allergic to their classrooms from carpet out-gassing.
This actually happened to my daughter when she was in the 4th grade. Her class was moved into a new portable classroom during the second month of the school year. The carpet did not have time to 'outgas'. My daughter came home every day with uncontrollable coughing. She would get some relief at home by morning, and go back to school. By the time she came home again she was worse than when she left in the morning. I took her into the doctor after the 2nd day and then every day for an additional 3 days. We couldn't figure out what was going on. So I went with her to school to see if I could see anything there that was causing the problem. Upon opening the classroom door I almost keeled over. The odor was horrific! And, at that time I was an asthmatic. I immediately started wheezing. I knew what the problem was.
So, we had to educate the school about the problem. We actually gave some solutions to help the carpet odor dissipate quickly. Unfortunately, they didn't quite follow the suggestion [sprinkling the carpet every day after school with baking soda and then vacuuming it up every morning before school]. Instead they placed an open box of baking soda in the classroom. So my daughter ended up wearing a mask whenever she was in the classroom for nine weeks. After nine weeks the carpet odor had finally neutralized and she didn't need to spend her days wearing a max.
The reason I'm sharing this is not so much what happened to my daughter, because she had an extreme reaction to the carpet out-gassing. But the rest of the class was also affected. The absentee rate of students and the teacher in that class due to respiratory problems was higher during that time period than the rest of the school. The behavior of the students in the class during that time frame was also awful. So did maximum learning take place during that time? Of course not.
Other environmental issues that can affect learning
Children can even become allergic their schools when construction is going on from all the molds that are stirred up during the construction. Also classroom pets can create havoc with children. Sometimes children don't even know they have an allergy to pet dander and they end up being stuffed up in the classroom, which affects their ability to hear clearly. Some children respond to pet dander by becoming restless or irritable. So, you want to check and see if the classroom has a pet. Sometimes the behavior problem you child is having is NOT due to their not following directions, but is due to being allergic to pet dander from the class guinea pig.
So, when we are looking to create an optimal learning place for our children, let's keep in mind it's not just the hearing, seeing, and doing. It's also the smells we smell that lead us to places where we feel good and safe and secure. When we feel good, safe, and secure, we learn with ease. So, let's create good smelling classrooms to help our children thrive in learning situations!
Learn about the 3 roadblocks to reading, writing, and math success.
Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET
Confused about ADD & ADHD?
April 7th, 2009There appears to be some confusion about the terms ADD and ADHD. I often use both of the terms to avoid this confusion. However, the terms aren't as expressive as I would like because they don't quite reflect what is actually going on.
In fact, there has been confusion going on for a number of years. In the 90's the DSM IV decided to combine the 'labels' into one - ADHD. Unfortunately many people didn't realize that and still used ADD, which is why I've continued to use both 'labels'. What the DSM IV did when they combined the labels was to put an extension on them that added a description component to the label so everyone would have more clarity. This has helped, but most people don't know what the additional letters stand for when the explanations aren't provided, so when a parent says their child has a diagnosis of ADHD many people automatically assume their child is hyperactive. This is not necessarily the case. To clarify it, the proper terms from the DSM IV are:
ADHD-HI (primarily hyperactive impulsive) ADHD-I (primarily inattentive) ADHD-C (combined) A combined type is someone who has all the diagnostic criteria for both HI type and I type. ADHD-NOS (not otherwise specified) This one is very rarely diagnosed. For more information on the specific criteria, just go to: DSM IV and ADHD. Hope this is helpful, Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCETQuestions regarding the LD Screening Tool
March 25th, 2009The response to the LD Dyslexia Assessment - Screening Tool has been overwhelming. We only have 48 left from this printing, so you may want to get your hands on one before we run out.
Order your LD Screening Tool here.
A little more info for you on the tool as stated by Linda Foster:
In addition to providing the screening tools, this resource offers two valuable sections entitled “Guidelines for Choosing Resources to Address Learning Difficulties” and “More In-Depth Testing”. Both of these sections are designed to offer parents and teachers alternative resources to assess and manage specific types of learning difficulties and learning disabilities.
The LD Dyslexia Assessment - Screening Tool is a concise and comprehensive guide that defines various forms of learning difficulties and learning disabilities and provides clearly written tools for assessment. While it is geared for both classroom use and parent use."
Order your LD Screening Assessment Tool here.
Had a few questions regarding the LD Screening Tool:
Hey Bonnie, what is the age range for this?
Ann
The LD Screening Tool can be used from K - 12th grades.
Hope this is helpful.
Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET
...............
Hi Bonnie,
Do you ship to Canada? Please let me know if this is an option.
Thanks!
Jennie V
Yes, we do ship to Canada. You should be able to enter that into the address section of the shopping cart - enter that info in the city section and enter your zip code (postal code) in the zip code section and you'll be good to go.
Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET