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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

Should you do your own summer learning program?

Fact: More than half of the achievement gap present in 9th grade between lower- and higher-income children can be explained by summer learning loss.

Make Learning Stick with learning games and reading fluency training over the summer. There are many things you can do at home to bridge that summer learning gap.

1. Reading Fluency using Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills…and Yes…it only takes 5 minutes to do. Sally Shawitz, author of Overcoming Dyslexia states, “I urge parents to make fluency training their number one priority.”
2. Take a weekly trip …to the zoo, a local park, the pool, the river, a local factory…and afterwards as a family write down what you did and what your favorite part was…using the fill-in-the-blank forms from Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills and create a booklet to keep for all of your weekly trips.
3. Do some nature activities such as listening to outdoor sounds, nature rubbings, shape hike, incher hikes … again use the fill-in-the-blank forms from Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills to describe what you found or did.
4. Activities to do at home like making puppets and putting on a puppet show. Bake cookies together, have a backwards day where you eat dinner in the morning and breakfast in the evening, do add-on-stories. Again write down your favorite things or worse things about the activity.
5. Have a Game Night or a Game Day…choose learning games…they are fun as well as work on skills. Some great ones are The Sentence Zone (play & learn sentence building and grammar while having fun) , The Comprehension Zone (play & learn reading comprehension and listening comprehension), or the Math Zone (play & math calculation practice).
6. Read books together…and write a review or report on it, or have a review night where you all act as book reviewers of the book you read.

Check out the books, games, and guides here:

Reading

Writing

Math

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

Hope you enjoy…
The ABCs of ADHD
December 27, 2009 by 5kidswdisabilities

The ABCs of ADHD/ADD

I’ve read the articles and books on ADHD.  I know the discipline methods, rewards and time outs, the methods of Ross Green (from The Explosive Child) and the medications that work best.  But I also know the realities of ADHD, having 2 children with ADHD and 2 with ADD.  In real life terms, the ABCs of ADHD/ADD are:

Attention! Always on alert for dangerous situations due to impulsive behaviors, such as running across streets without looking, grabbing a butcher knife to cut the end off a banana, running up the down escalator, and grabbing the dog or any other animal roughly and the dog (or other animal) retaliating by biting (or scratching.)

“Be careful!  Be careful!  Be careful” is the parent mantra.

Climbing climbing climbing:  out of the crib at age 15 months, out of the bedroom window when a teenager, on rock walls and curbstones and couches.

Don’t touch that!  Don’t do that! Don’t hit her!  Don’t pull that!  Don’t eat that! Don’t hurt it!  Don’t break it!

Exhausted parents trying their best to keep up.

Friendships are difficult.

Go!  Go!  Go! They’re always on the go!

Helpless parents, unable to control their child’s behavior, especially embarrassing in the grocery store under the staring eyes of others, judging them.

If only he’d…    If only she’d….  Parents dream for a different lifestyle.

Jumping Bean:  he goes here and there from friend to friend to friend, never staying long enough to establish a real friendship.

Kitchen walls are written on, bathroom doors have holes kicked in, curtains are ripped, bedrooms are messy.

LOVE.  Parents give unconditional love, but the behavior doesn’t change because the  ADHD remains…

MEDICATION!  MEDICATION!  MEDICATION! Alleluia when it works!!!!

Not paying attention in school so schoolwork suffers: not paying attention for homework, so it’s a nightly fight: not paying attention to other’s feelings, so no friendships are formed.

Overload happens easily and tantrums result. Keep it quiet.  Keep it simple.  Keep it under stimulated for peace.

Psychiatrists are our best friends!

Questions!  Questions from them all the time! Especially hard to escape when you are stuck riding in the car together.

Rewards for good behaviors; stickers, ice cream, Playstation, tv.

Self-esteem is low, parent  and teacher patience is limited so he’s always the troublemaker and never measures up.

Time-outs in the seat till we’re blue in the face.  All the time spent in time-outs would add up to a year in the life.

Understanding is needed from parents, family, friends and teachers; understanding is often in short supply.

Very draining on all, child and adults.

Whining, whining, whining until their parent’s ears hurt.

X-rays, CAT Scans and emergency room visits:  active behavior results in injuries.

YIKES! What has he done NOW?!?!

Zest for life would be a polite way of putting it…

|………………….

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

Here is what Heather Jackowitz, Staff Writer, The Old Schoolhouse Magazine had to say about it.

“I really love games that reinforce my children’s lessons. I checked out a math game from Bonnie Terry Learning, The Math Zone. In The Math Zone, the object is to make the most points within a set amount of turns. There are three decks of cards: an operations deck (add, subtract, multiply, or divide), a deck of low numbers for younger children, and a deck of higher numbers for older children. Number cards have two numbers on them. Players choose an operation card and a number card and perform the given task. The answer for each operation is given on the back of the number cards, and players check their own work after calculating the answer. If the answer is correct, the player scores that amount of points. If the answer is incorrect, no points are scored. Bonus operation cards mean you double your total, and Sorry operation cards mean you half your answer. About the hardest problem to solve in the low number deck would be 35 x 7. Children would also need to know their basic division facts, and how to add and subtract with regrouping. In the higher number deck, children would need to be able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers like 2457 and 63. I played the game with my third grader, and she beat me a couple of times, because she kept drawing multiplication cards, and I kept getting subtraction! I also noticed that she checked her work more thoroughly than she does with her math lessons! This would be a great game for keeping up skills during summer vacation or whenever you take a break from regular math lessons.”
– Product Review by: Heather Jackowitz, Staff Writer, The Old Schoolhouse Magazine

Get The Math Zone here. Hope this is helpful. Have fun playing games!

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

1. Make paper-bag puppets & put on a puppet show
Make them characters from your favorite nursery rhyme or book �
Use lunch-size bags, crayons, markers, buttons, yarn, & glue

2.  Make grocery sack ‘puppet’ heads you can wear & put on a play or a�
    skit with them – cut holes for eyes & slits for arm holes. 

 e.g.: You can make a cute ladybug costume from a large paper grocery bag.
 You can also make antennae  by wrapping two pipe cleaners onto a plastic headband.

 Supplies needed:

* 1 large paper grocery bag

* Scissors

* Red tempera paint

* Black marker or black tempera paint

 A. Cut a large paper grocery bag open along the seam (this will be the back of the costume).
  Then cut a neck hole in what was the bottom of the bag.�
 B. Cut an arm hole on each side of the bag.
 C. Paint a large red circle (using red tempera paint) on the front on the bag. Let the paint dry.
 D. Draw or paint a black line down the center of the circle and draw black spots on both sides.�
 E. To make cute antennae, wrap two pipe cleaners on a plastic headband. Make loops at the top.

3. Make sock puppets, use old socks, felt pieces for tongue, buttons for eyes,
 cut the plastic rings that hold soda cans together for ‘glasses’, cotton balls,
 etc. Put together a skit or play with several puppets.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

Remember, I work with students from 1st grade through adults. Some have been identified with dyslexia, or a learning disability. Some of my students are falling through the cracks. Some are even gifted. Even my wiggly ADHD students do well with it since it’s hand-on. But, it doesn’t matter. When I can improve a student’s retention with using a color coded game I’m going to do it.

I like to have my students sort out the cards so they start to get a feel for the types of words that are in each category. For instance, they might not realize that the word about is an adverb. When they initially sort out the word cards by color, they get an idea of what types of words are in each part of speech.

Then I have them look at the cover of the box so they see how to set up the game and that  the game strip is just there so they will have an easy reference point for placing the cards. It is NOT a game board, it is not used for making sentences. It is just used as a reference for placing the cards. They know they will be making their sentence in front of themselves while I make mine in front of me.

I use this game with students from 1st grade on up – even high school students and adults. With my advanced students (any age) we do more sophisticated sentences and grammar work. But, back to the basics…

My younger students soon realize they need to have a gray card (capital letter), a blue card (noun), a red card (verb), and a buff card (punctuation) in order to have a sentence.
They learn they can add adjectives, adverbs, or prepositional phrases to their base sentence to make it more interesting, but they need to only have one subject and one verb for the first round of the game.

For example, the following are all legal 1st round sentences.

The dog barks.            The dog barks loudly.               The dog barks loudly at the park.

When a student makes a 3-word sentence I often start asking questions to encourage them to make more interesting sentences. This helps them to see how to improve and expand their sentence.

Example with prompts:

The dog barks.

(What kind of dog is he? Let’s use these adjective cards to find out. How does he bark? Let’s use an adverb to tell us how.)

The big dog barks loudly.

(What color is the dog? Use another adjective to tell us. Where does he bark? Use a preposition, article, and a noun to tell us.)

The big brown dog barks loudly at the park.

This type of conversation helps to equalize the game with more proficient learners and helps that younger student to become proficient more quickly.

(Sometimes making funny sentences makes the game even more fun and sentence writing is no longer work.)

The long hairy dog barks loudly at the tiny ant.

Then the magic happens! I have my students go to their bookwork where they are supposed to underline the subject once and verb twice. Instead I have them use colored pencils (blue and red) and underline their subjects with the blue pencil and underline the verb with the red pencil. (They are able to identify the subjects and verbs more readily because they have been playing with blue nouns and red verbs.)

Nouns and verbs start to almost jump out at them as a result of playing the game. Additionally, they are much better at not confusing the assignment. For example, when the assignment was to underline the subject one and verb twice, I can’t tell you how many times my students used to underline the subjects twice and the verbs once. They say to me, “Well, I underlined them, what more do you want?”

When I have them use a colored pencil it takes that away and impresses on their brains which word is the noun (subject) and which is the verb. We even color code whole sentences according to the colors in The Sentence Zone, identifying the prepositional phrases or dependent and independent clauses.

I find that students who are just beginning to write sentences soon find that they can write more interesting sentences after playing the game because they start to make sentences that are worth more points. They often compete against themselves, keeping a running tally from turn to turn or day to day.

Also, when a student has a writing assignment and his sentences are all about the same length, I just have to say, “You need to have some small point sentences and some big point sentences to be a good writer. Remember, good writers vary the length and type of sentences they write.” They know what I’m talking about because they have seen small point sentences and big point sentences.

Students who are proficient with basic sentences start to learn more complex grammar nuances such as subject – verb agreement, or needing to compose a sentence with a direct object and an indirect object in it etc. In fact I also use it for SAT prep.

Hope this gives you some new ideas for teaching and improving sentence writing and grammar. Learn more about The Sentence Zone.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

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

I’d like to place an order for a product of yours, but I have not been able to locate any age or grade range for any of the items.  Can you tell me for whom the Comprehension Zone is appropriate?

Thanks,

Susan Taber

Hi Susan,

The Comprehension Zone can be used from 2nd grade – 12th grade (reading levels) or when played for listening comprehension, from 1st & up.

The Comprehension Zone comes with 3 sets of cards – 2-3 reading level, 4-6 reading level, and 7-12 reading level. It can be played simultaneously with all levels. Can also be played for listening comprehension at a level that is higher than the students reading level.

All of my products are multi-age/grade level because I primarily taught from 1st – 12th in my classrooms and/or center. I transition my kids that were in kindergarten as soon as I can into using the products, but never had too many that were in kindergarten. I am able to use the products with 1st – 12th.

Hope this helps,

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

Hi Bonnie –

Congratulations! — I have a few questions about the pre-screening tool:

Is the informal assessment tool designed for parents so that they in turn could arrive at a decision for formal evaluation?

Yes, this is for parents as well as teachers so they can understand if their kids actually have a learning problem vs. laziness or behavior issues etc. Often a parent knows there child is struggling but doesn’t know why, they just know that schoolwork is really hard for them. Some parents recognize there is a problem but don’t know what to do about it or even how to describe it.

After going through the informal assessment tool, specific learning difficulties are identified. (Parents will understand why some things are hard and some not for their child.) Parents will also understand how the problems impact classroom performance. The informal assessment tool also lets them know if they should pursue formal testing what kinds of formal testing they should have done.

There is a section in the book that lists in-depth formal testing that is helpful when trying to figure out what kind of additional testing should be done. From the results of the informal assessment tool parents and teachers will have insight into which areas of processing need to be tested more with in-depth formal testing.

For instance, if the Informal Comprehensive Identification Tool shows that your child has a lot of visual processing difficulties, you will want to have an additional test done in that specific area. If it shows that your child has a lot of auditory processing difficulties, you will want to have an additional test done in that specific area. If it shows that your child has tactile/kinestietic difficulties, you will want to have an additional test done in that specific area.

The book lists multiple tests for each area of learning difficulty, which allows the tester to choose which test they prefer or are familiar with.

1. Visual Processing Difficulties [6 assessments to choose from]
2. Visual-Motor (Neuro-Sensory Integration) Assessments & Tactile/Kinesthetic

Assessments [18 assessments to choose from]

1. Visual Memory & Learning Assessments [7 assessments to choose from]
2. Auditory Memory & Learning Assessments [11 assessments to choose from]

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

My next post will cover:

Is the Learning Difficulty/Disability Pre-Screening Tool and Informal Comprehensive Identification Tool designed for school personnel, and if so, how would you recommend it get used as part of pursuing a more formal evaluation?