Category Archives: Brain Fitness

Did You Know Most Kids Lose a Lot of What They Recently Learned in School While on Summer Break? Teachers Call it the “Summer Slide.”

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Did You Know Most Kids Lose a Lot of What They Recently Learned in School While on Summer Break?  Teachers Call it the “Summer Slide.”

Nowhere is the adage: “If you don’t use it, you lose it” more accurate than in the case of young minds and the reason behind the “summer slide.”

In today’s Learning Curve Francie Alexander explains how you can protect your child’s learning and advancement.  Learn how you can easily prevent the “summer slide.”

Francie Alexander is Vice President and Chief Academic Officer for Scholastic Education. Francie has taught at all levels, was a district reading consultant for Pre-K through high school, and has authored professional articles for educators as well as 25 “Books Kids Can Read” for children.

In today’s Learning Curve we reveal:

  • What the “Summer Slide” is.
  • The fact that teachers typically need 4 to 6 weeks in the fall to re-teach material students have forgotten!
  • The importance of “summer reading in beating the summer slide.”
  • The wonderful treasure trove of tools and resources available at the scholastic.com website.

Learn of the many initiatives and tools Scholastic has made available to you so you can beat the “summer learning loss” and also help your child in everyday learning.

  • Scholastic Summer Challenge a program where students can win prizes by logging their reading minutes online or using a new mobile app. called The Scholastic Reading Timer.
  • Scholastic Reading Timer kids can set personal reading goals, using the built-in stopwatch to reach their target number of reading minutes.
  • Storia® is a free eReading app specifically designed to support kids’ reading
  • Sushi Monster, Scholastic‘s newest free math fact fluency game available on the iPad.
  • Summer book packs for all age groups.

Get tips for parents from Francie on how to keep kids learning over the summer

For teachers, the Scholastic website is an equally wonderful resource.  Their website has been set up to serve as the content and e-Commerce hub for everything a teacher needs most for use in the classroom.  Each week, more than 1.6 million visitors to Scholastic.com access over 100,000 pages of free content and teaching resources.

This show is one of the most enjoyable Roger & Virginia has done on the Learning Curve.  And the material it makes available to parents, teachers and students is truly valuable and quite amazing.

Scholastic, Inc., is a publishing and educational industry service company whose mission is stated as:

“The corporate mission of Scholastic is to encourage the intellectual and personal growth of all children, beginning with literacy, the cornerstone of all learning. With more than 90 years of experience supporting the learning lives of children, today Scholastic remains committed to providing quality, engaging educational content in digital and print formats for the next generation of learners, and the families and educators who guide them.”

But the big surprise to Roger is that Scholastic are also the people behind bringing the Harry Potter series to America!  So it’s not all serious academics at Scholastic.

 

Click her to listen to:  June 11, 2012 Francie Alexander

Roger and Virginia at The Learning Curve.

 

Build Brain Fitness and Accelerate Learning for Your Child

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The Learning Curve January 23, 2012  Dr Martha Burns

Build Brain Fitness and Accelerate Learning for Your Child

This works for children and adults!

Just as exercise promotes physical fitness, exercising our brain improves brain fitness in four critical areas.

  • Memory
  • Attention
  • Processing
  • Sequencing

Today’s guest is Dr. Martha S. Burns who has been a practicing speech language pathologist for 45 years. Dr. Burns is on the Faculty of Northwestern University, Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders and who also works with Scientific Learning Corp.

Hear Dr. Burns discuss how one of Scientific Learning’s programs, Fast Forward®, helps learners achieve up to a two year reading gain in as little as three months.

Hear Dr. Burns discuss (in layman’s terms) the architecture of the brain, its “plasticity,” and how it can be knowingly addressed and developed.

In this show we’ll be discussing the types of fun games and exercises you can use with your child (or use yourself) to build and strengthen brain fitness and learning capacity and speed. These are the types of exercises that can be done anywhere: at home, in the car, on walks, at school; anywhere you or your child can interact with the environment or another person.

We’ll also discuss the distinction between video games that only entertain versus those that both entertain and develop brain “muscle.”

Dr. Burns has a wonderful blog listeners should also go to.

And go to Scientific Learning’s website for further information.

 

Click here to listen January 23, 2012 Dr Martha Burns

Roger and Virginia at The Learning Curve

 

 

What Are the Higher Level Abilities of Children (and Adults) Who Are “Right Brain Learners” but Labeled Dyslexic? What Indicators Can Parents Use to Recognize This in Their Children? How Can They Benefit From This Condition Our Guests Reveal Thirty Three Percent of us Have.

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The Learning Curve July 4, 2011

Roger & Virginia interview Mira and Mark Halpert of 3DLearner.com. Mira is a practicing school teacher who has been featured on CBS showing her revolutionary answers to the “learning disabilities” experienced by those labeled as being “dyslexic.” What people see as a disability Mira sees as a learning difference, and she proves it with her success handling students as revealed by the CBS program.  See http://www.3dlearner.com/parents

What we reveal in this show are the extraordinary abilities and true potential these children (and adults) have along with how to best harness and take advantage of what conventional wisdom mislabels as “disability.” We also discuss how these children excel in later life and in business when they are away from the stifling structure of the conventional school system.

These folks (children and adults) are holographic in their thought processes, and learning style, which mode of action actually gives them huge advantages in real life. Listeners will be able to benefit not only from getting a correct understanding of these phenomena, but learn how a correct address to them both in the learning process and in life can yield superior results.

Listeners will learn the symptoms by which they can correctly recognize this phenomenon in their children (or themselves). This is part two of our show with Mira and Mark Halpert of  3DLearner.com.

 

Click here to Listen July 04, 2011

For more information on this important subject, visit Roger & Virginia at our website http://www.howtolearneasily.com.

Send any questions you have to questions@howtolearneasily.com