This Boy's Life from Real Simple April 2011

I love the opening:
"When a child suffers from ADHD, everyone around him suffers, too."
This story was written by Stephanie Booth.

What do you think of when you hear 'ADHD'?  Many think, my kid has that too.  He has trouble focusing.  Or my daughter just can't sit still.  I am sure she has ADHD.  But in reality, ADHD is "a debilitating inability to concentrate or to control impulses." But many children have more than just ADHD.  Children may want to learn and want to have friends but this disability makes it impossible.

Possible others diagnosis with can complicate life include:
SPD a neurological dysfunction in which the brain has difficulty integrating the information gathered from the five senses.
Expressive developmental language disorder - difficulty putting together complex sentences.
Dyslexia

After learning about these many parents opt for medication to control behavior.  The next problems is finding out what one works.  Medication levels take time.  Some parents find taking them off medication during the summer is helpful.

Once a parent finds out medication work then therapy is an option but an expensive one.

So join a parent group and find out what is working for others.  Work with your pediatrician to see what other things can be helpful.  Sometimes exercise is helpful.

And don't forget:
"When a child suffers from ADHD, everyone around him suffers, too."

Why Does Music Aid Memorization?

This is from an article from the Wall Street Journal written by Heidi Mitchel 12/31/2013

Does your child have trouble remembering things?  Last week I was at a 'rap' concert.  I could not believe all the words these three guys were saying.  It was amazing.

The brain scientists agree that 'information set to music is among the easiest to remember.'

So before spending lots of time trying to invent a song for everything your child needs to remember check out You Tube and do a search.  You can also check teacher tube.  They have raps already produced to remember many math formulas.  But now to the 'facts'.

"The hippocampus and the frontal cortex are two areas in the brain associated with memory."   They process lots of information daily.  It is easy to put information in the problem is when we want to take the information out.

Dr. Roediger from the memory Lab at Washington University in St. Louis says, Music provides a rhythm, a rhyme and often, alliteration.  All that structure is what helps retrieve the information from the brain.

Patients with dementia are still able to sing along with a familiar song.  Think about the alphabet song, I still sing it in my mind when I am filing.

So if your child is having trouble memorizing the science or math formula check out the web..

Photosynthesis Equation Song - Biology Lesson

Math Rap - Area Formulas 

Of course there are many more so keep searching until you find the one that works for your child.

 

 

Better Sleep - Better Math and Language Scores

Most parents try to have their children go to bed at a reasonable time and feel their children should be getting enough sleep.  Now parents need to worry about.the quality of their child's sleep.  According to researchers from Douglas Mental Health Institute in Montreal and McGill University sleep quality and duration are link to better performance in math and languages.

Wow, now parents have a scientific reason why their students should not have hours of homework. Their children need to sleep and sleep well to improve their math and language scores.  The unusual finding was that science and art were not affected.

So the researchers feel that the mental skills involving planning, paying attention, and multitasking are affected by the lack of a good sleep.  So if you feel your child might be ADHD their sleep patterns could be impacting this problem.

Solution?  I wear an UP band on my wrist which motiors my sleep.  I would find someones to borrow, if you don't already own one and use it for five days.  Bring the data to your doctor to determine if your child is having problems getting a deep sleep.

This material is from Sleep Quantity + Sleep Quality = Better Math/Langauge Scores by Rick Nauert  from psychcentral.com

Sleep - How Important it is for Your Child to Learn

There have been studies done in the Sleep Medicine journal  The finding:  The greater sleep efficiency, the children did better in math and languages.  Science and Art are not affected by the type of sleep a child has.

Analyze how your child seems to be sleeping.  Are they waking up often in the night?  You might need to let they borrow your "Jawbone Up", or fitbit, or other devise that can measure the mvoements of their sleep.

If you find an issue with their sleep, contract your child's doctor.  "Short or poor sleep is a significant risk factor for poor academic performance that is frequently ignored," per Gruber.  Again this was a very small study of just 75 students.

Valuable Lessons in Learning

This article found in the New York TImes, October 7, 2014 show how a detailed exploration of the brain can review exactly how we learn and how we can maximize that potential.  Tara Parker-Pope explains how study sessions and cramming does not leave the brain much energy for learning.

So, as a parent, making your child study at one place in the house may not be the best way to actually learn all the material.  When a child is young I do feel they should be doing their homework in a location near an adult for supervision and quick help.

Below is the list Benedict Carey and science reporter for the New York Times wrote about in his book "How We Learn:  The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens".

Study sessions seem logical where we focus and study for a long period of time but in reality are not the best use of time as the brain is using  a lot of effort to maintain concentration.

1.  Change your environment. Move to different parts of the house. Try studying in a coffee house.  Use the library and change locations through out.  The new locations create new associations in your brain and can actually make it easier to recall information later.   The quote is for all those who feel somewhat ADD at times.  "The brain wants variation.  It wants to move, it wants to take periodic breaks." said Mr. Carey.

2. Talk about it.  When you cram material in your head all at once, you aren't telling the brain it is really important to remember all of it.  So read you notes out loud.  Type them and say the words out loud.  This is giving the brain two ways for information to be retained.  Writing flashcards and testing yourself is another great method of helping you remember facts.

3.  Spacing out the time learning the new materials.  Only looking at material once might help for a quick test but you have to review very hard to remember it for the final.  But if you review the material one or two days after learning or first studying it, it is a signal to the brain that you really want to learn it.

If your test is one week away study in two sessions at least one or two days apart.  It would mean study on Monday, review on Thursday to take the test on Friday.  If the test is a month away begin studying in one week segments. (For a hard class in college, I took notes every day.  Then I went home and highlighted what I thought was really important.  I talked out loud about what the graphs meant.  I reviewed after each class session.  By the end of the class, I did not need to study for the final because I remembered everything.  I always review each test that was returned to me and made sure I knew all the correct answers.)

4. Another important aspect to studying is sleep.  Who would have thought of that?  There are two sleep scycles.  "The first half of the sleep  cycle helps with retaining facts; the second half is important for math skills.  So a student with a foreign language test should go to bed early to get the most retention from sleep, and then review in the mroning.  For math students, the second half of the sleep cycle is most important -- better to review before going to bed and the sleep in to let the brain process the information."

So as parents, think about this article and how you can help your child study better for test and to really learn the material.

Read This as Slowly as You Can

This article from the Wall Street Journal on September 10, 2014 written by Jeanne Whalen states we need to slow down and read.  She finds people were reading fewer books.  Reading habits have changed with constant dings for new emails, and facebook posts.  These interruptions interfer with our comprehension.

Slow readers state:

* it improves abilty to concentrate

* it reduces stress

* It deepens our ability to think

* it improves our listening skills

* it helps us empathize better

"A study published last year in Science showed reading literary fiction helps people understand others' mental states and beliefs"

There is also proof that books with interactive options such as links and sounds and video result in lower comprehension levels.  What?  Experts state that real books are the best and underlining or writing notes while you read improves your comprehension levels. 

So think about reading in front of you children: showing them a good example.  Share items that you find in your books.  Writing down interesting words. (This helps their vocabulary grow as well as shows another example of how to learn words.) Share interesting passages with them.  If the story takes place in an interesting city or country, show where it is on a map or globe.

When children see a parent reading, they might want to imitate it and then you have grown a slow reader.

How Students With Autism Are Graduating Into Jobs

This article was found in the Wall Street Journal and was written by Carolyn T. Geer.  I forgot to include the date it was published but you can reach the author at reports@wjs.com if you have any more questions or want more details.

She starts that schools teach students what they don't know.  But she feels the focus for students with autism is to focus on what they can do.

Usually only 10% of children with autism find jobs.  This is a very sad statistic.  When I work with special needs students I hear them say they want to be a doctor.  I know they can't be that specific occupation but I think about what they can do in a medical environment.  Perhaps they can file, transport files, move lab samples around...  They can do something in a field that interests them.

In Virginia, a school took a control group of high school seniors  with autism and they received their education per their IEP.  But the other group spent the year 'in an intensive custom-designed study and job-training program at a suburban hospital."

The beginning and end of each day the hospital group men in on-site classrooms where they learn practical  skills like:

*how to get to work and get back home

*how to get around the hospital

*how to ask for help 

*how to use feedback from supervisors and co workers.

These students went through three internships.  After graduation 87% landed hospital jobs such as pharmacy assistant and teacher's aide.

Only 6% of the control group found jobs. 

At the hospital training they discovered what jobs worked for certain students.  One students loved restocking isolation carts.  He liked repetitive tasks that required intense focus and attention to details.

A company in Denmark found people with autism are hired and trained to work as software testers, programmers, etc. Specialisterne launched a goal of creating 100,000 jobs in the US for people with autism and similar disorders.  They stated they have to teach those working with those with autism need to 'say what you mean and mean what you say, as those with autism have trouble interpreting sarcasm and body language.

So there is hope.  The IEP transition program may need to be modified to help students with autism transfer what they are good at to a job in the real world.