Jump to content

Menu
Giving You and Your Child a Road Map to the Best Possible Education
The Well-Trained Mind Community

peacefully

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1,123

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by peacefully

    old

    in The Learning Challenges Board

    Posted

    Shari, I am envying you. We are going to school year-round this year. There are some subjects in which we are "ahead," and some texts that I desperately hope that we can finish before September. Besides, ds needs gentle and steady practice. Taking breaks have not been a good thing for us in the past. Smaller steps are okay, quick reviews also work, but breaks usually result in a long period of frustration when we try to get back to the routine. That frustration is so awful, I'd rather not have the break! :tongue_smilie:

    Can you describe Seeing Stars?

    in The Learning Challenges Board

    Posted

    I hear you about the spelling. I had ds spelling "thank you" almost everyday for two weeks before he could do it. Same with the word "think." He supposedly has great phonemic awareness, but for the first, he couldn't hear the "n" when he tries to isolate the phonemes. With "think" he hears a long "e" instead of a short "i" almost every time. The rules didn't help him with these words. :glare: He can finally do it if he concentrates. If he's zipping along, but overloaded because he's worried about handwriting or concentrating on composing or overstimmed by his sister, he'll misspell them again.

     

    But then our SLP was telling me that these language processing kids (and perhaps the auditory processing kids too) go in these waves... Whenever ds's brain seems to adjust to a new level of processing, she tells me to anticipate a period of "disorganization." He'll seem to lose the skills that he has gained. He may be more emotional or spacey. She tells me to picture the brain rewiring itself—there's a point at which it pulls out the wires before it can reroute them in a more efficient way. She always seems to predict these wonky periods accurately. Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks, but then ds can go back to his previous level and then move forward.

     

    All this to say, progress with our kids is not linear.

     

    I have to remind myself of this about a dozen times a day.

    Can you describe Seeing Stars?

    in The Learning Challenges Board

    Posted

    I wrote about it in an old thread.

    OE, I'm looking at some similar issues with my ds. We're finishing up VT and switching up our OT program at the end of January. The next phase of treatment, in my mind, is to work on visual memory, working memory, symbol imagery and visualization. I purchased the Seeing Stars manual to get a sense of the program, and I may end up taking the workshop in April if I cannot make progress on my own.

     

    I was a little surprised by how basic and repetitive the basic process is. Starting with letters, the teacher shows a card for 2 seconds, then the student says and writes the letter in the air (without looking at the card). Then the teacher says the sound of the letter, and the student air writes again.

     

    Then they do the same thing with syllable cards. The teacher also asks the student to recall a specific letter — "What's the third letter that you see?"

     

    Then they start to change specific letters during the recall process and do other exercises that manipulate the "imaged" word. I think it's important to note that so far, all the words are nonsense words, which the student is decoding. I also think it would be very difficult to do these tasks through auditory skills rather than visualization.

     

    Then they do the process with sight words. When they start to teach spelling, the student is supposed to analyze the word (including marking the words a la Spalding, I think), visualize it, and write it.

     

    I'm oversimplifying, obviously, but that's the very basic barebones structure. The repetition of it is going to kill me. I've debated getting the $400+ kit, but the bulk of the cost is for flashcards. Over two hundred dollars worth of flashcards. I'm sure this is against my religion somehow.

    Is there a prepared history-in-reverse curriculum?

    in K-8 Curriculum Board

    Posted

    When I was a high school English teacher, I had a colleague who taught history this way. He began the year with current events, helping his students to identify key themes. He also guided them toward asking essential questions about why certain events happened in a particular place or time. Then they began to unravel history going backward. They didn't always go back in reverse-chronology. Sometimes they skipped around a bit, looking for what were the most direct connections to their questions. Some of my students were in his class, and I can say that while I didn't know this teacher personally, I always heard RAVE reviews of his classes.

     

    I also wish I knew of a prepared curriculum that did this, but I have a feeling that this particular teacher brought his own passionate understanding of history to the table, and it would be very hard for someone like me (with a very shaky grasp of history) to duplicate the experience he created. If I were to go hunting for a such a program though, I'd try looking at Social Studies School Service first. It's an absolutely enormous catalog of social studies/history/geography resources.

     

    I'll be keeping my eye on this thread to see if anything good turns up! :bigear:

    Those who have completed VT, questions -

    in The Learning Challenges Board

    Posted

    Michelle, your experience of VT is actually the most fascinating to me, because you have your three going at the same time, all for different issues.

     

    Our office typically saw patients once a week. We went once every two weeks because we simply could not get to the office more frequently than that. They also had several tiers of VT. Ours was the shortest (only 8 weeks), but other patients went for 16, 24 or more sessions.

     

    The office work was vastly different from our homework. They had ds working with computers, whatever that light-up wall thing is, different prisms, etc. Our homework was actually pretty simple—some paper-based activities, some lens and prism work, pencil push-ups, and a Brock string. It took FOR.EV.ER to do each day, but that was it.

×
×
  • Create New...