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Showing posts from November, 2019

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...

How to Learn The 44 Phonemes And Have Fun

Phonemes are the smallest units of language based sounds that can be paired with graphemes or symbols that represent those sounds. These sound/symbol associations are the foundations to writing and reading text, and teaching them to young learners can help boost learning potential. Why are There 44 Phonemes When the Alphabet has only 26 Letters? There are 44 unique phoneme sounds in the English language for two reasons.  On the one hand,  some letters make more than one sound, while on the other hand, certain letter combinations, such as the vowel teams, make their own unique sounds.   So even though we have 44 sounds that make up our language, we have 250+ graphemes that can make those sounds.  This is one of the reasons that spelling can be difficult to master.  For example, er, ir, and ur, all make the same sound, so learners have to recall what the word looks like. Purple, pirple, or perple  are all pronounced the same way, but only ...

What Fun Writing Games Motivate and Inspire Students?

Writing can be a wonderful and creative activity for students, however, if learners hate the process it can be difficult to teach them this needed skill.  So what can be done to motivate struggling writers? Why Do Kids Hate Writing? There are a number of reasons a student may hate to write. Hand writing is difficult, labored and even painful.  Many of these learners are much more intelligent than their handwriting would indicate, so many will do whatever they can to avoid writing. Multitasking with the many skills needed to write is overwhelming and taxing.  Students can not truly multitask until all the skills needed to write are learned to automaticity.  Therefore, it's often helpful to strengthen any weak skills in handing writing, key boarding, grammar, spelling, sentence formation, as well as the organization and visualization of ideas.  Associating writing with poor grades or discouraging comments can create a sense of learned helplessness. Wr...