What should you do this summer? The answer depends a lot on you and your students. Summertime is a great time for families because it usually means getting out and about and getting together with friends and families. For students who may have been spending so much of...
Ready, Set… Go! From High School to College [Premium]
Whether you’re a student who is just starting high school or preparing to transition to college, there are three important skills to cultivate: SELF-KNOWLEDGE First, there is self-knowledge. – What do you know about how you learn best? – What interests you the most? It may not be the class where you’re doing the best. Performance may be related to factors like the capabilities of the teacher or how knowledge is tested. – Looking back on your time in school, have there been any things that stand out? Classes or activities outside of class that you loved? – Are there any role models in your life? What do you like about what they do and how they live their lives? – What are your strengths […]
Paul Stankard: Glass Artist
“I loved being innovative and I loved discovering new ways to interpret the flowers…you have to solve one technical problem after the other….pay attention…and follow what is interesting to you…” — Paul Stankard, Master Glass Artist Paul Stankard is a pioneer in glass art and his works can be found at the Smithsonian, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, and Corning Museum of Glass among others. When he struggled in school with unrecognized dyslexia, he just thought he was stupid. It wasn’t until he was around the age of 27 that he heard then decathlon winner Bruce Jenner talk about his struggles in school that Paul recognized that he was dyslexic too.
Paul’s father was a chemist and he and his mother […]Question: How Do You Help Stealth Dyslexia?
Stealth dyslexia is a term we coined almost 20 years ago to describe dyslexic students who could "fly under the radar" of detection because of compensatory strengths. These students may be "stealth" because they can silently read passages, and comprehend the essential...
Math Difficulties Common with Dyslexia
Although the pace of research into dyslexia beyond reading proceeds very slowly, there is some welcome recent research into some of the math challenges that are associated with dyslexia from the University of California. Some of the key findings of the study: -...
Common Irregular Words [Premium]
There are many common irregular words in the English language – and although some teachers and curricula may choose to postpone learning those tricky words until later, it is good, whether you’re a parent, tutor, or teacher, to have an approach to teach students how to distinguish similar words rather than simply saying that the spellings are “exceptions.” Some students are very logical – and may learn better if they are taught exceptions whenever these situations arise. Here is an example of a tutor who uses picture associations – doodles and colors and boxes to make the different meanings and spellings of “wood” and “would” distinct: The book series Words Their Way is one popular and fairly inexpensive approach to spelling that […]
A Day in the Life of a Creative Director: Guy Cornet
“It was my dyslexia that made me who I am today.” — Guy Cornet, Creative DIrector Free Partners Creative director Guy Cornet recently reflected on his dyslexia in a recent post on Creative Bloq. It made me listen It made me relate It made me hungry It made me fair It made me think It made me understand people It made me passionate It made me have doctors handwriting It made me a creative From the interview: “A lot of neurodivergent individuals have found solace in the creative space. This is a place that has been built for people who think differently. And the industry needs fresh outlooks to stay ahead of the curve…
Being dyslexic, I found it extremely stressful working […]Sensory Processing and Dyslexia [Premium]
What about Sensory Processing and Dyslexia? We recently received a question about this in regard to a young child who is dyslexic. Sensory Processing Disorder or Sensory Integration Disorder (an older term) is a term originally coined by a developmental psychologist and occupational therapist, Dr. Jean Ayres in the early 1960s. It described difficulties in sensory regulation that involved the five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touch) as well as balance (proprioception – spatial orientation and movement).
Sensory Processing Disorder came to greater awareness after Carol Kranowitz published the book, The Out-of-Sync Child. Though not a formal medical diagnostic term, sensory processing disorder or SPD often presented in the toddler or early elementary school years when children were noted to be a […]Managing Forgetfulness and Recognizing Its Benefits [Premium]
Can there be any benefits to forgetting? Not all types of memory are alike – and forgetting also takes on many different forms. STRANGE INSIGHTS INTO MEMORY FROM AI A funny thing happened when AI researchers tried to teach machines to learn many languages. Having a perfect memory – it seems, whether in machines or people – isn’t a good thing for flexible and generalizable learning. To really be super flexible learner, you have to forget. From Quanta Magazine’ How Selective Forgetting Can Help AI Learn Better: “A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must periodically forget what it knows… A few years ago, Artetxe and others trained a neural network in one […]
