Recommended Reading for Children With LD http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61L5QI2bEoL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Bonnie Z. Goldsmith has worked in the field of education throughout her professional life. She has wide experience as a writer, editor and teacher.



Books by, about, and for children with learning disabilities offer elementary-aged kids valuable stories and guidance written especially for them. Check out the following books, a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, when you want to give your child something special to read.

Worst Enemies/Best Friends by Annie Bryant
This is the first of many books in the popular Beacon Street Girls series about five middle-school girls, one of whom, Maeve, has dyslexia. Maeve, who has a math tutor and is consistently disorganized, joins her friends in stories created to help girls build self-esteem and coping skills.

Sparky’s Excellent Misadventures: My ADD Journal by Me, Sparky by Marti Ford and Phyllis Carpenter

Spencer Allen Douglass, known as Sparky, keeps a diary that records his ups and downs as he lives with ADD. This optimistic and fun book includes many valuable insights and ideas for children with ADD and ADHD.

Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key by Jack Gantos
The first book in an award-winning series about a boy with ADHD, this story shows an out-of-control Joey being transferred to a special education classroom in another school. A perceptive teacher recommends further medical evaluation, and Joey returns to his former school. These funny, compassionate books are written from Joey’s point of view in a sharp, worried style that veers out of control when Joey does.

How Dyslexic Benny Became a Star by Joe Griffith
Fifth grader Benny is frustrated and embarrassed about his struggles with reading. When he becomes a star on the football field, and when he is diagnosed with dyslexia, he discovers he has a powerful support system – his own personal team. It’s an inspiring story for the whole family.

The Gift-Giver by Joyce Hansen
This is the first book in the 163^rd Street Trilogy, which features a vibrant inner-city setting and a boy, Yellow Bird, who has dyslexia. His peer tutor, Doris, doesn’t like him at first, but ultimately becomes his advocate and helps his teacher realize both his reading problems and his unique talents.

How Many Days Until Tomorrow by Caroline Janover
2001 Parents' Choice Award winner, this book is about Josh, a twelve-year-old with dyslexia who spends the summer on a remote island in Maine with grandparents he hardly knows and his older brother Simon, who is a terrible tease. In a dramatic and life-threatening situation, Josh learns he is just as smart as his “gifted” older brother. 

Shelley the Hyperactive Turtle by Deborah Moss
Shelley is a turtle who happens to have a very hard time sitting still. During a visit to the doctor, he learns that he is hyperactive, and that he can take medicine to control his wiggly feeling. The colorful illustrations help to explain the physical and emotional aspects of having a disability in a reassuring and positive way.

Thank You, Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco
In this richly illustrated, semi-autobiographical book, Trisha is thrilled to start school and learn to read. But she has dyslexia, and her classmates tease her relentlessly. Finally, Mr. Falker, her fifth grade teacher, recognizes Trisha’s problem and her artistic ability and takes the time to lead her to reading.f

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
Book 1 of the adventure series Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Percy, who has been diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, knows he’s different. When a teacher becomes a deadly monster and his best friend turns out to be a satyr, he learns how different he is: he's the half-blood son of an Olympian god.

The Alphabet War: A Story About Dyslexia by Diane Burton Robb
Once Adam enters school, his love of books becomes a daily battle that he truly believes he cannot win. It isn't until third grade that Adam, now suffering from low self-esteem that leads him to behave aggressively, is tested for a learning disability and receives the specialized help he needs. Adam's experience will inspire and encourage many children who find themselves in similar predicaments.

Many Ways to Learn: A Kid’s Guide to LD by Judith M Stern and Uzi Ben-Ami
This book provides easy-to-use tips, information, and strategies to help children with learning disabilities feel better about themselves. The guide includes information on how to involve counselors and parents as a supportive "climbing team," and ways for children with various kinds of learning disabilities to set goals.

The Survival Guide for Kids with ADD or ADHD by John F. Taylor
Packed with good advice, this guide features clear, kid-friendly writing and cartoon-style illustrations. Chapters cover such topics as medications, getting along at home, making friends, and succeeding at school.

Niagara Falls, or Does It? by Henry Winkler
The first book in a series inspired by the true-life experiences of Henry Winkler. Hank Zipzer has difficulty reading, writing, and spelling, but his imagination is in full working order. Hank is funny and endearing, the books enjoyable and fast-paced.



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Novel Study Reveals How Sleep Reinforces Neuronal Growth After Learning

Sleep | Moya Tyler
Posted on June 8, 2014 at 3:29 pm

The benefits of a good night’s sleep are well established, however, a mechanism for exactly how sleep contributes to learning and memory has recently been detailed in a study by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center.

In the study, published in Science, researchers used genetically engineered mice to examine what was taking place physically during learning. The mice were engineered such that they expressed a glowing fluorescent protein in neurons which could be observed and imaged. With the engineered mice in hand, scientists were able to observe and compare the growth of dendritic spines along branches of dendrites before and after mice learned a skill.
A dendrite is a branched extension of a nerve cell (neuron); impulses received from other cells at synapses are transmitted to the cell along the dendrite. A dendritic spine is a protrusion from a dendrite which receives inputs from excitatory axons. Previous studies have shown that learning leads to spine formation.

“We’ve known for a long time that sleep plays an important role in learning and memory. If you don’t sleep well you won’t learn well,” says senior investigator Wen-Biao Gan, PhD, NYU Langone Medical Center. “But what’s the underlying physical mechanism responsible for this phenomenon?

The mice were taught to balance on a spin rod, which over time spun faster and faster. Researchers first observed the expected growth of new spines along dendritic branches and then set up experiments to determine the effect that sleep had on this growth. Two sets of mice were trained on the rod for an hour and when one group was allowed to rest for 7 hours following training, the other group was kept awake.

Ultimately, researchers found that the sleep deprived mice had less dendritic growth than the rested mice. Also, different branches grew depending on what skill was learned, an observation that Gan likened to a tree growing.

“Imagine a tree that grows leaves (spines) on one branch but not another branch. When we learn something new, it’s like we’re sprouting leaves on a specific branch,” Gan said in a release.
Interestingly, scientists found that the brain cells that were activated during training were reactivated during slow-wave deep sleep. Thus, when sleep was disrupted, dendritic spine growth was prevented.

Though sleeping is often viewed as an opportunity to rest the mind, the authors explain how our mind is actually quite busy. This is evidenced by the sort of replay, or “neuronal reactivation”, observed in neurons during periods of sleep.


“Finding out sleep promotes new connections between neurons is new, nobody knew this before, “professor Gan told the BBC. “We thought sleep helped, but it could have been other causes, and we show it really helps to make connections and that in sleep the brain is not quiet, it is replaying what happened during the day and it seems quite important for making the connections.”

Article retrieved from: http://ht.ly/xWqX0
Image retrieved from: http://www.studycram.com/images/sleep-student.jpg

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A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop

Students who used longhand remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material

Jun 3, 2014 |By Cindi May

“More is better.”  From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American culture.  When it comes to college students, the belief that more is better may underlie their widely-held view that laptops in the classroom enhance their academic performance.  Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes.  Indeed, because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand.  Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor.

Obviously it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date.  Only it isn’t.  New research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more.  Across three experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer had students take notes in a classroom setting and then tested students on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information.  Half of the students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half were instructed to write the notes out by hand.  As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes.  In each study, however, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.

What drives this paradoxical finding?  Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning.  Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture.  Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information.  Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention.  By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.

To evaluate this theory, Mueller and Oppenheimer assessed the content of notes taken by hand versus laptop.  Their studies included hundreds of students from Princeton and UCLA, and the lecture topics ranged from bats, bread, and algorithms to faith, respiration, and economics.  Content analysis of the notes consistently showed that students who used laptops had more verbatim transcription of the lecture material than those who wrote notes by hand.  Moreover, high verbatim note content was associated with lower retention of the lecture material.  It appears that students who use laptops can take notes in a fairly mindless, rote fashion, with little analysis or synthesis by the brain.  This kind of shallow transcription fails to promote a meaningful understanding or application of the information.

If the source of the advantage for longhand notes derives from the conceptual processes they evoke, perhaps instructing laptop users to draft summative rather than verbatim notes will boost performance.  Mueller and Oppenheimer explored this idea by warning laptop note takers against the tendency to transcribe information without thinking, and explicitly instructed them to think about the information and type notes in their own words.  Despite these instructions, students using laptops showed the same level of verbatim content and were no better in synthesizing material than students who received no such warning.  It is possible these direct instructions to improve the quality of laptop notes failed because it is so easy to rely on less demanding, mindless processes when typing.

It’s important to note that most of the studies that have compared note taking by hand versus laptop have used immediate memory tests administered very shortly (typically less than an hour) after the learning session.  In real classroom settings, however, students are often assessed days if not weeks after learning new material.  Thus, although laptop users may not encode as much during the lecture and thus may be disadvantaged on immediate assessments, it seems reasonable to expect that the additional information they record will give them an advantage when reviewing material after a long delay.

Wrong again.  Mueller and Oppenheimer included a study in which participants were asked to take notes by hand or by laptop, and were told they would be tested on the material in a week.  When participants were given an opportunity to study with their notes before the final assessment, once again those who took longhand notes outperformed laptop participants.  Because longhand notes contain students’ own words and handwriting, they may serve as more effective memory cues by recreating the context (e.g., thought processes, emotions, conclusions) as well as content (e.g., individual facts) from the original learning session.

These findings hold important implications for students who use their laptops to access lecture outlines and notes that have been posted by professors before class.  Because students can use these posted materials to access lecture content with a mere click, there is no need to organize, synthesize or summarize in their own words.  Indeed, students may take very minimal notes or not take notes at all, and may consequently forego the opportunity to engage in the mental work that supports learning.

Beyond altering students’ cognitive processes and thereby reducing learning, laptops pose other threats in the classroom.  In the Mueller and Oppenheimer studies, all laptops were disconnected from the internet, thus eliminating any disruption from email, instant messaging, surfing, or other online distractions.  In most typical college settings, however, internet access is available, and evidence suggests that when college students use laptops, they spend 40% of class time using applications unrelated to coursework, are more likely to fall off task, and are less satisfied with their education.  In one study with law school students, nearly 90% of laptop users engaged in online activities unrelated to coursework for at least five minutes, and roughly 60% were distracted for half the class.

Technology offers innovative tools that are shaping educational experiences for students, often in positive and dynamic ways.  The research by Mueller and Oppenheimer serves as a reminder, however, that even when technology allows us to do more in less time, it does not always foster learning.  Learning involves more than the receipt and the regurgitation of information.  If we want students to synthesize material, draw inferences, see new connections, evaluate evidence, and apply concepts in novel situations, we need to encourage the deep, effortful cognitive processes that underlie these abilities.  When it comes to taking notes, students need fewer gigs, more brain power.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Cindi May is a Professor of Psychology at the College of Charleston. She explores mechanisms for optimizing cognitive function in college students, older adults, and individuals with intellectual disabilities. She is also the project director for a TPSID grant from the Department of Education, which promotes the inclusion of students with intellectual disabilities in postsecondary education.

Article retrieved from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/

Image retrieved from: http://g.psychcentral.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/class-notes-laptop-taking.jpg &
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膠帶車車遊戲場

孩子的玩具車已經多到成為「路霸」了嗎？ 只要拿出絕緣膠帶，一切就搞定了！

利用不同顏色的絕緣膠帶，不但可為孩子規劃出停車格，連地上的標線也都能標示地一清二楚，順便教孩子認識交通標線與規則。

用絕緣膠帶規範出孩子的停車區域，下次他如果「越線」，你就可以把車「拖吊」走，保證他再也不敢「違規」。

利用絕緣膠帶規劃停車空間，最大的好處是當你想要「都市重劃」時，立刻就能更換地點，令你的生活完全「服服貼貼」！

如果覺得絕緣膠帶色彩不夠變化多端，也可以選用牢靠一點的紙膠帶。

文章转自：http://www.parenting.com.tw/article/article.action?id=5056117
图片转自：http://lejardindejuliette.blogspot.be/2012/09/washi-tape-car-track.html

(Original resource: http://lejardindejuliette.blogspot.be/2012/09/washi-tape-car-track.html)

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