Esther Nahon

The term Neurodiversity was coined by Judy Singer in the late 1990’s and is used to refer to diversity in the human brain in relation to sociability, learning, attention, mood and other mental functions in a non-pathological sense. For kids with learning and thinking differences, this concept has positive benefits, and helps reduce the feelings that something might be wrong with how they learn and think.It helps them to understand their challenges as differences, rather than as deficits. The objective is to embrace them as part of the mainstream, and provide needed supports so that they can fully participate as members of society.

The IEP or Individualized Education Program helps formulate a child’s educational future. If there is any suspicion or knowledge that a child is having difficulty in school, they are referred for an evaluation through their district for a possible IEP. This document helps provide mandated supports, services, accommodations and modifications to help the child achieve success in school.

Focusing on the social and emotional needs of the child firston their sense of safety, self-worth, and academic confidenceis not controversial, and saddling students with deficit-based labels has predictable outcomes. Decades of research demonstrates that stereotype threat is a real phenomenon, anchoring kids to the self-fulfilling prophecy of lower expectations. Simple gestures like greeting kids at the door, meanwhile, improve academic engagement by 20 percentage points, and the mere presence of images of women in science textbooks moves the needle on inclusion. Ensuring that all kids have at least one adult who cares about them is an effective buffer against adverse experiences like poverty, violence, and neglect. https://www.edutopia.org//too-much-focus-learning-loss-wil

Brain Frames has been a useful tool in helping my students organize their language. It’s versatile with opportunities for language across many domains. I loved learning and working with this wonderful group of people. Thank you Architects For Learning

Why Is Reading So Hard To Learn? Humans are all born to acquire language. Learning to speak and understand language is a natural process that we are biologically born to learn, unless there is a problem in learning to acquire language. We learn how to do this through exposure to our caregivers, parents, siblings, and peers who immerse us with language. Learning to read however, is a more difficult to learn and acquire. It’s a system used to represent language that was cult...urally developed a few thousand years ago, and our brains aren’t innately created to process it. We use areas of the brain used to acquire language known as the left hemisphere when we are learning to read. We begin to build new neural connections to extract words off of a page, in order to make meaning of it and comprehend it. Reading is the result of decoding and comprehension. To learn to decode and read print, children must be aware that spoken words are comprised of individual sound parts called phonemes. Phoneme awareness is a critical period for beginning readers where they learn that written words, constitute spoken sounds. When children figure this out, they have acquired a fundamental skill. However, if beginning readers have difficulty discovering this, this results in deficient reading fluency, poor comprehension, limited learning, and little enjoyment for reading. These children require skilled reading instruction that will address those neurobiological differences in order to teach them how to decode and comprehend. How to Support Children’s Reading Skills Teach phonemic awareness skills Target comprehension of language Expand vocabulary repertoire Teach higher order thinking strategies Direct instruction of reading comprehension skills