Tag: kinesthetics

Wow! I can do this automatically!

Wow! I can do this automatically!

by thecindyleafhall ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Sometimes, we really are on autopilot!

Our days are full of things we do without ever thinking about them.  We sign our name.  We cook a familiar recipe.  We drive to an often-visited location. We lock up for the night and get ready for bed.  A part of our brain which knows how these mundane tasks are performed takes over and we slip into automaticity. This is a good thing, because it frees us for other tasks which do require brain power!

Children with dyslexia struggle to put mundane language tasks into the automatic category.  Direct and explicit instruction along with many practice sessions are needed to help the child understand and master a language task.

Dysgraphia

Dysgraphia is confusion with the writing process.  It may be letter formation confusion, inability to write sentences, or a tendency to write sentences out of order so a story does not flow very well.  It is often surprising to read the written work of a dysgraphic child with outstanding storytelling skills, because you are expecting so much more than what you see on paper.

Eric’s story

Eric came to join our second grade small group in January.  This is his writing sample. 

When I look at this writing, I notice the labored letters, the many erasures, the mix of upper and lower case in the alphabet.  My notes tell me the alphabet took Eric three minutes and 23 seconds to complete.  This is a task which probably takes his classmates under 1 minute to correctly complete. We can safely say that writing does not come automatically to Eric.

The path to automaticity

We were making the switch to cursive writing in second grade small group, and Eric tearfully tried his best to form the unfamiliar letters.  A lot of tracing large, tactile letters, airplane writing, tracing in tubs of raw rice and onto bumpy boards helped clarify in his mind the way each letter was to be formed.  Eric is a master story teller, and often made up stories for the group about what was happening to “the guy” whose path our letter traced.  The effort payed off, Eric’s tears dried up and he began to smile as the cursive notebooks were passed out.  Recently, each lower case letter was mastered and we moved to capitals.

Success!

This is a recent writing sample, about three months the first one,  from Eric’s journal.  The alphabet took him 57 seconds to complete, as as you can see, it is legible  and all in cursive lower case letters. There were a couple of errors, but overall, a big improvement!

Below the alphabet are letters I called out in random order for the students to write down.  This mini-quiz shows me which letters are not yet automatic for each child.  Eric wrote all of his with no erasures!  He has hit the automatic gravy train!

The sentence at the bottom of the work is an example of why cursive writing is great for kids with dyslexia.  If you look at his earlier work, all the words crowd together without spaces between.  This is another characteristic of dysgraphia, called word boundary issues.  Cursive writing helps this problem because the letters within the word are connected, but there is a break between each word.  An instant reminder to give it a little space.

After successfully writing the page above, Eric smiled his endearing, crooked smile as he shyly told me, “ Wow! I can do this automatically!” Yup, that is the goal for each child.

This needs a story!

This needs a story!

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One O’clock Letters

The second grade small group is learning to write in cursive. Most of the letters they have learned so far have been formed in similar ways, so they have not been too difficult for the students to master. We have simple stories that keep the letter formation in the student’s minds. For example, the “1:00 letters” are all formed by starting at the line, following an imaginary clock face around to where 1:00 would be, then realizing they “forgot their lunch,” so retrace their arc back, come underneath to “rejoin the class,” then “end with a smile,” because it is lunch time. This little story helps the students remember which direction their pencil should be heading, and where it is going next. It makes them smile, and covers the letters a, c, d, g, o, and q. I get a lot of mileage out of the one o’clock story!

Friday found the second grade small group struggling to master the cursive letter f. It is not really like other letters, and has some new and different curves. We wrote it using big airplane writing movements. Then using fingertips we traced it on the table and on our wrist.  Then it was time to put pencil to paper and write practice rows of the letter.  For most of the group practice paid off, and a few lines into the exercise they had the pencil strokes down and were writing legible letter f’s.

This is hard! It needs a story.

A couple of my students seem to struggle with the task of forming letters correctly, whether it is a printed letter they have been forming for years or a brand new cursive one. Eric is one of those students, and he was frustrated with trying to remember the direction his pencil needed to flow to make the letter f. “We need a story to go along with this letter,” he suggested. “A story to help our pencils know where to go.”

Not having a story for f in mind, I suggested we work on one together. This is our story for helping form the letter f.

You are going out to play, and you come out of your room and up the stairs. Your mom calls to you just as you get at the door to outside. “Please go down to the basement for me before you go to play.”  So you loop around and go back down the stairs and down to the basement. You get what she needed, then loop back up. Your mom meets you at the top of the basement stairs, you hand her what she sent you to get, and you go outside with a smile.

But what does Mom need you to get?

The story has all the elements needed to guide the students to make a letter f. But I work with an intelligent and curious crew of students, and they were not satisfied with the lack of detail in our story. What Mom wanted from the basement seemed to be the crucial detail lacking in our story. Basements are rare in our part of the country, and none of us have one in our houses. I grew up on a midwestern farm with a basement, so I filled in the story by telling them that when I was their age, my mom would send me to the basement to get carrots that were stored in buckets of sand to keep them fresh through the winter. Adding a bit more detail than I intended to, I recalled once when Mom sent me down to get carrots, and while digging around in the sand for carrots, I accidentally grabbed a toad that was hibernating in the sand. My students giggled as I told them I was sure it made me scream to be holding a toad when I expected a carrot.

That detail made the story come alive for Eric. “Cool!” he said. “Now that is a story that will help my pencil make this hard letter!” He softly murmured to himself as his pencil went past the baseline, “This is where Mrs. Hall grabs a toad, she screams, and runs up the stairs and out the door.”

Amazing, the power of a good story.

Fuzzy Boards and Airplane Writing

Fuzzy Boards and Airplane Writing

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Cindy’s manual transmission adventures

When I was a newlywed, we had only one car, and it was my husband’s beloved manual transmission Mustang.  Try though I might, I could not get the awkward timing of feet and hands together in a way that made that car move down the road!  Concern for his Mustang’s clutch coupled with a dislike for the mortal danger I placed us in as I lurched through busy Kansas City traffic motivated my husband to take me places for a few months.  Soon we traded for an automatic transmission car (a beautiful white Trans Am with the gold eagle on the hood – lest you think he suffered too much by losing that Mustang!). Fast forward a few years, and we now parked a brand new Firebird in our Michigan driveway.  The hitch – it was a manual transmission.  But the outcome was much happier this time around.  We went to an empty parking lot, and I practiced shifting until I was confidently moving between gears without bucking and motor stalls.  I successfully drove that and other manual transmission cars.

What made the difference between my early-marriage automotive difficulties and the later success?  Practice in the parking lot.  I needed to practice the basic skills over and over before I tried to put them into use on the traffic filled streets.  I had good instruction in both instances, I had the ability to learn both times, but one outcome ended unsuccessfully, while the other had me triumphantly zooming away from stop signs.  Taking the time to isolate my difficult spots, and practicing those until I mastered the skills made all the difference.

The analogy holds true for dyslexic people and reading.  They need to learn the basics and practice those skills in isolation before motoring off onto the superhighway of reading passages and writing stories.

Kinesthetic methods build brain roads!

Using kinesthetic methods for the practice helps glue a new or shaky skill into the mind of the dyslexic student by bringing as many of the senses into play as possible, creating a very memorable experience surrounding that skill.  This is part of building brain trails between the scattered language centers of a dyslexic person’s brain that I talked about in my previous post.

Fuzzy boards

Fuzzy boards are such a go-to method that I have several varieties on the shelf in my classroom.  A fuzzy board is essentially a piece of foam core covered in furry fabric and hot glued in place.  Mine have been nicknamed “Cookie Monster” and “Teddy Bear” by the students, because of the color and feel of the fabrics with which they are covered.  Students use a pointer finger to trace words that are tricky for them onto the fuzzy board as they say the letters out loud, and finish with a sweep across the board as they name the word they just practiced.

This method puts to work the senses of touch, sight, speaking and hearing, and builds a muscle memory of how to form the letters for the target word.  Although students ask for more, three practices per word is just the right amount, and we practice only a few words at a time.  Bumpy boards (blank plastic canvas for needlepoint) are a variation on fuzzy boards with the advantage that a model of the target letter can be put underneath so that it shows through for working out letter reversals.

The Blue Angels learn cursive writing

Reversing a cursive letter is much harder that twisting around a manuscript one, so cursive writing is a great tool for dyslexic people!  We practice how to form each letter and have fun categories for the letters, which help the students keep the formations in mind.  For example, “1:00 Letters” include c, a, g, q and d because you go to the point on the circle of the letter which would be 1:00 on a clock, then retrace and finish the circle of the letter from underneath.  Airplane writing helps lock the letter formation into the student’s mind, and is silly, so we like it.  Students weight their writing arm with the hand of their other arm, and we go through the motions of making the letters as large as we can reach – our personal impression of Blue Angels making cursive letter moves. After three synchronized fly-overs of the new letter, students go to paper for practice on a smaller scale.

From forming a cursive c to nailing the difference between saw and was, kinesthetic methods make lessons memorable, blaze trails between brain centers, and promote success for the big tasks ahead.  Just like that Michigan parking lot practice which demystified manual transmissions for me.