Saturday, November 5, 2011

Right Brained resources

A response to a friend who said they were in the totally frustrating, "my son will never learn to spell and I've probably screwed up his whole life because I haven't figured out how to fix it" season of life.

My oldest (now 15) was at grade 1.4 to 1.6 spelling (Woodcock Johnson) until about 6th grade.  Then we did vision therapy for 40 weeks (a very long, very expensive period but that paid off 100-fold over) and he rose to grade 4.4.  Over the last few years he's slowly increasing and is almost at grade level -- though spelling is grade levels below anything else except for writing fluency (speed) which is about the same as spelling!

We got some great visual spelling techniques when we took vision therapy -- similar to how Dianne Craft approaches math -- each word is written out alone, with pictures around the letters if needed and color coded, and he would hold it up above his head, really picture it, close his eyes and spell it to me forward and backward.  Two or three times of doing that for each word and he had it.  Completely and forever.  Another thing they had us do was take turns coming up with a sentence (3 words or more -- "The black cat sat.") and we'd bounce a ball back and forth -- spelling the sentence forward and backward -- then bouncing the ball once for each letter but not saying the vowels or only verbalizing every other letter forward and backward -- much harder for me than for him!  But it gave him experience visualizing the whole sentence in his head.

His spelling has improved.  However, he depends a lot now on spell check.  And caps/periods he only gets if he's proofing someone else's writing -- can't see his own!

One of the major players in the right-brained/visual learner arena is inda Kreger Silverman. Her website is:
http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/Visual_Spatial_Learner/vsl.htm

Her book: Upside Down Brilliance:  The Visual Spatial Learner is absolutely great but very hard to get.  I got it from Interlibrary Loan.
http://www.amazon.com/Upside-Down-Brilliance-Visual-Spatial-Learner/dp/193218600X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1295024560&sr=1-2

She's got a great 23-page summary of her approach with check lists at:
http://www.euronet.nl/~mjkbeeld/Upside-Down_Brilliance.pdf 

2nd best book with suggestions by topic area (math, reading, etc):
Right Brained Children in a Left Brained World
http://www.amazon.com/Right-Brained-Children-Left-Brained-World-Unlocking/dp/0684847930/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1295024629&sr=1-1

Some other great resources:
http://throwingmarshmallows.homeschooljournal.net/r-b-resources/

A yahoo group by Cindy Gattis from the mountains of NC who has several right-brained learners and is a big proponent of not trying to change our children, but to change the timeline (much easier said than done!):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/homeschoolingcreatively/?yguid=1572768

And here's her blog - dig through it to find some resources like her collaboratively-based learning philosophy by ages, etc.
http://applestars.homeschooljournal.net/an-introduction-to-the-creative-right-brained-learner/

Hope that helps...