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Showing posts from July, 2016

100 Powerful Learning Specialist and Educational Therapy Materials

This week I wanted to tell you about my online store, Good Sensory Learning. I’m Dr. Erica Warren, and I established this site so I could share all the materials that I have created over the last 20+ years as a learning specialist and educational therapist. When I first began my private practice, Learning to Learn, I had great difficulty finding fun and multisensory materials for my students that were effective and engaging. So back in 2005, I made it my mission to design and distribute high-end, remedial products as well as memorable, motivating lessons that bring delight to learning. If you would like to try a free sampling of my activities , CLICK HERE . How Are the Products Organized at Good Sensory Learning? You can download my Free Printable Catalog or you can browse the site using the grey “search all products” bar in the top right of any page with keywords such as dyslexia, working memory, and executive functioning. What’s more, drop down menus in the red banner allow you t...

Rapid Automatic Naming Impacts Reading: Memory Strategies and Games Help

What is Rapid Automatic Naming? Rapid automatic naming (RAN) or rapid naming is the ability to quickly verbalize a series of familiar items including letters, numbers, colors or things. Research purports that RAN tests are highly correlated to one’s reading abilities because the faster and more efficiently one can access information from the memory banks, the easier it is to read and comprehend text. How Does Rapid Automatic Naming Happen in the Brain? Although we know RAN impacts reading, there are three competing viewpoints in the literature. One view indicates that RAN involves how well one can retrieve phonological information and then verbalize a response. The difficulties lie in the brain’s ability to process sounds into language. Another theory indicates that RAN is a “complex set of cognitive processing” areas that work together in concert thus defining one’s reading fluency capabilities. This perspective further suggests that individuals with RAN and phonemic awarenes...

Scrible: Amazing Annotating Writing Tool for Dyslexic and Struggling Writers

Like a complex braid, great writers weave and multitask with sentence rules, spelling, idea formation, content organization and more. And when learners struggle with one or more of these processes, writing can become a frustrating tangle of ideas, an apparent, impossible knot to unsnarl. Research papers can be particularly tricky, because students also have the added obstacles to collect relevant articles, organize the information into a structured layout, paraphrase and manage citations. This week, I am so excited to share with you an assistive technology video blog with Victor Karkar, the CEO of Scrible. Scrible is an amazing online tool that students can use to annotate and color-code online text and simplify the process of writing research papers. This extraordinary technology, that is recognized by the National Science Foundation, can help students to read and write more efficiently. What's more, it offers a step by step process that can be monitored and supported by teac...

Dyslexia and Juvenile Delinquency: A Path of Ashes

It is not uncommon to hear about all the high achievers and entrepreneurs with dyslexia, but did you know that there is also a disproportional number of juvenile offenders and criminals with this learning disability? Although it is true that some individuals with dyslexia are able to succeed in life despite their learning disability, unfortunately, many more have tragic stories to tell. In fact, the United States Department of Education reported that 60 percent of American inmates are illiterate and 85 percent of all juvenile offenders have reading problems. In New Zealand, an estimated 10% of the population is dyslexic, yet percentages climb as high as 90% in their prisons. This week, I’m going to tell you the story of Ash Cousins. Ash has dyslexia, and when he was an adolescent, he followed a path of crime. It was a choice that had a tragic outcome, and Ash asked me to share his story, because he wants to do all that he can to assure that others don’t make the same mistake. ...