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Many teachers are aware of the four basic learning styles: visual, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic.  But did you know that there are eight more common ways that the brain processes information?  Accommodating these 12 ways of processing is a must these days and offering instruction as well as assignments that honor all these modalities helps to prepare our students for a future of life-long learning success. Let’s Review the Four Basic Learning Styles: Visual Learning: incorporates pictures, drawings and even personal visualizations into lessons.  This helps students learn through visual observation. Auditory Learning: involves learning through listening.  This helps students to learn how to focus on and determine the salient information from what they are hearing. Tactile Learning: consists of touching or feeling objects or artifacts.  It also involves the encoding of information when taking notes or drawing things out. Kinesthetic Learning: encompasses learn...

Are you a parent that is trying to get the best support for your child outside of school? Perhaps you are a teacher that wants to consider starting their own private practice. There are a number of professional titles floating out there and understanding the difference between them can be vital in finding the right fit. To help you with the process, this blog defines the commonalities and differences between a tutor, a learning specialist, and an educational therapist. Tutor:  A tutor is a teacher who instructs a child outside of school, especially to provide extra support and review concepts with difficult subject matter or classes. They often help with homework completion and may offer some strategies on study skills or time management. A tutor often holds a degree in the subject(s) tutored, and many have an undergraduate degree or higher. Learning Specialist: A learning specialist is an educator who is skilled and experienced in providing learning strategies to student...

What if you could teach struggling students the vowel combinations or vowel teams by having them complete fun coloring activities, searches, and mazes? In addition, what if embedded memory strategies could help to make the concepts stick?  Vowel combinations or vowel teams are some of the most difficult reading concepts for young readers to master, and m y publication, Vowel Combinations Made Easy is a great OG or phonics base addition to your bag of teaching tricks.  Would you like to download a free sampling of activities?   Click here  to access this freebie. Dr. Erica Warren is the author, illustrator, and publisher of multisensory educational materials at  Good Sensory Learning  and  Dyslexia Materials . She is also the director of  Learning to Learn , in Ossining, NY.  To learn more about her products and services, you can go to  www.GoDyslexia.com ,  www.goodsensorylearning.com ,  www.dyslexiamaterials.com ...

As an educational therapist and learning specialist, hooking is one of the most valuable memory strategies that I teach my students.  In fact, tedious study sessions can be transformed into a memorable and often hilarious task.   What is Hooking? Hooking is a memory strategy in which you use the term itself that you are trying to remember to guide you to the answer.  In other words, you search for clues in the word. You can "hook" auditorily, to the sound or sounds in the term or visually, to the way the word looks.  Occasionally, you might find a hook in the word that does not guide you directly to the answer, but you can often create a story or visualization that will make it work. Image 1 Visual Hooking Example: Take the spanish word ojo.  Ojo means eye, and it is easy to make the word look as though it has eyes. See image 1. Auditory Hooking Example: Image 2 Mesa means table in Spanish.   Mesa sounds like messy and I tell my students to think of a...

Strengthening math skills often requires students to develop quantitive reasoning and spatial skills. Finding activities that build these cognitive processing abilities and are also fun and engaging is tough.  The trick is to motivate students with creative, yet manageable activities. Come get some free samples that develop these crucial skills.   The activities can be used for remedial purposes, morning warm-ups, and math centers too!  Download them by clicking  HERE . If you would like to learn more about this publication CLICK HERE . Dr. Erica Warren is the author, illustrator, and publisher of multisensory educational materials at  Good Sensory Learning  and  Dyslexia Materials . She is also the director of  Learning to Learn , in Ossining, NY.  To learn more about her products and services, you can go to  www.GoDyslexia.com ,  www.goodsensorylearning.com ,  www.dyslexiamaterials.com  &  www.learning...

When studying learning and cognition in graduate school, I was drawn to the theories of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian Psychologist from the early 1900s that presented a sociocultural approach to learning and cognition.  He offered a theory that I believe presents optimal classroom instruction for all learners. What is Vygotsky’s Theoretical Lens? At the heart of Vygotsky's theoretical lens is that social interaction plays a key role in the development of learning and cognition. Vygotsky claimed: "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.”   A second key feature of Vygotsky's theory is that one’s potential for learning depend...