Brainjoggers experience a different type of "summer slide" than do those children whose summers pass by with little or no educational stimulation.

Children, parents and teachers often idealize summer as a time for relaxation, creativity and freedom from the rigor of academics.  Too often, however, students end up devoting their summer days to cartoons and video games.  Time magazine’s David von Drehle reported on “The Case Against Summer Vacation,” in which he describes “summer learning loss” or “the summer slide” (36).  Von Drehle primarily makes the case for summer programs’ necessity based on the widening achievement gap between wealthy and low-income students; he neglects to mention that students with learning disabilities lose roughly the same amount of information as low-income students do over extended periods of absence from educational stimulation.  Von Drehle writes that, “children with access to high-quality experiences keep exercising their minds and bodies” over the summer, but that students “students without resources languish … in front of glowing screens” (36).  These are the situations in which children lose ground; yes, a child can be exposed to great things – museums, zoos, aquariums, science centers, etc. – but if that child has a learning disability, he or she may not be able to retain the educational value of those experiences.

Brainjogging is hosting Summer Booster Session, a summer camp in LaGrange, Georgia, from 2 August 2010 through 13 August 2010.  There will be two one-week sessions; parents can register their children for either one or both weeks.   Camp runs from 9 am until 11 am each morning.  Each week is $195.  Campers must have a laptop computer and a current Brainjogging lease, which is an additional $95 total; the Brainjogging lease will be active for four weeks.  Brainjoggers must also own a WhisperPhone, which costs $16. Brainjogging’s Summer Booster Session provides children with an opportunity to attend an educationally-stimulating and socially-invigorating camp!  Students learn through audionyms and songs, through physical calisthenics and mental ones.  Ron Fairchild, CEO of National Summer Learning Association, stated, “We expect that athletes and musicians would see their performance suffer without practice.  Well, the same is true of students” (38).  This is too true; Brainjogging focuses on the principle that “like an athlete tones his body for physical endurance, toning the mind enhances mental endurance and performance.”  Brainjogging’s Summer Booster Session will prepare all learners for the upcoming school year!

Homophones are tricky little words – they’ll trip up typically developing individuals and learning disabled ones alike, but individuals with Language Processing Disorder have a particularly difficult time processing and differentiating between homophones. 

Homophones are words that sound similar but mean different things; often, homophones are not spelled the same, but there are exceptions (“desert,” meaning a dry, arid region and “desert,” to abandon, for example).  Children encounter multiple homophones throughout their education – and into their adult years.  How frequently do you receive a note that reads, “I hope your doing well!” or an email from a colleague that says, “I believe this is relevant to you’re project”?  Knowing how and when to use correct homophones is vital to one’s conveyance of self; college advisors and employers make judgments based on the degree to which they feel the potential student or employee grasps language.  Brainjogging believes on educating students to a point where they function seamlessly in society.  Brainjogging’s desire is that Brainjogging students become self-sustaining, independent and successful individuals.  Understanding homophones, among myriad other nuances of the English language, is tremendously important in helping students function successfully.

Here is a list of some homophones that one might frequently encounter:

Air, heir
Angel, angle
Bare, bear
Break, brake
Cell, sell
Cent, scent
Coarse, course
Complement, compliment*
Dear, deer
Die, dye
Him, hymn
Hole, whole
Principal, principle*
Profit, prophet
Right, write
Their, there and they’re*
To, too and two*
Wear, where*
Your, you’re*

*A star indicates homophones with which I believe students have a particularly difficult time.

Columbus instructor Sellers Cook and a six year old student enjoy a moment outside.

Children thrive with praise.  Human beings desire to feel that they are, at the most basic level, “good.”  Children with learning disabilities may sometimes feel that they are somehow “less” than other children – less smart, less socially compelling, less interesting, less likely to do well in school and, really, in life.  Not doing well in school affects a child’s sense of self, and if that child isn’t doing well because she or he has an untreated or incorrectly treated learning disability, that child, and his or her parents, might feel a heightened sense of pressure to perform and, consequently, a great deal of guilt for not being able to reach certain standards.

It is imperative to build children up with words of praise and affirmation.  Be encouraging.  While your child’s learning disability may be discouraging for you – as it certainly is for the child, at times – he or she looks to you for support and stability.  Having a learning disability doesn’t set a child’s value apart from that of other children, but the LD child may feel that he or she is somehow unworthy.  Perhaps one of my favorite signifiers of a student’s Brainjogging progress is his or her general “warming up” to school and, consequently, to life and interpersonal relationships.  When children begin to do better in school, they begin to feel a bit more confident.  This confidence spills over into the child’s relationships with other individuals.  It is a wonderful thing to feel that you have helped rekindle a child’s spark!

I have always been decent at math, but it has never been a favorite subject of mine.  In the past, I did relatively well on the math sections of standardized tests, but after approximately seven months with Brainjogging, I took the GRE and was absolutely shocked to find that I scored higher on the math section of the test than on the language section.  This was the first time in the history of my life that my math skills have exceeded my language faculties; I was an English major, for Pete’s sake!  While teaching with Brainjogging, I spent several months teaching math to one of my eighth grade students.  We started with simple math – addition, subtraction – and progressed to more difficult operations.

While my math skills improved by leaps and bounds, this child’s math skills would increase and then, after a few days of Brainjogging sporadically, they would regress.  We went through a seemingly endless cycle of the proverbial “one step forward, two steps back.”  And then Shirley Pennebaker, Brainjogging’s author and founder, stumbled across Math U See, a manipulative-based math program created by Steve Demme.  Manipulative tools are absolutely amazing teaching tools, particularly for children with learning disabilities or visual and tactile learners.

I received the Math U See book and manual prior to receiving the manipulatives, and proceeded to work through the first two chapters with this student without using manipulatives.  The chid was very much her same self: some days were stunningly successful, others were frustratingly stalled.  There were days when she mixed up operations and signs, or misread problems and made seemingly careless mistakes – and then the manipulatives arrived.

Math U See's starter block set contains blocks representing the numbers one through ten.

Using the manipulatives, I went back through the first two chapters of the Math U See Pre-Algebra manual with this child.  Her scores improved approximately twofold with the inclusion of Math U See’s manipulative blocks.  She blazed through chapters one, two, three and four.  This child recently took a standardized math exam; her scores placed her as a tenth grade student in her eighth month.   I am immensely proud of this student; she has taken herself to another level, intellectually, and Math U See helped her get there!

Same/different is a concept that many individuals, as children, come to understand simply from living and responding to stimuli in their environment, and that others come to understand only after being explicitly trained in determining similar and differentiating features.  Brainjogging spent many weeks reviewing same/different with one particular child.  We threw questions about things being the same or different into almost every lesson – and then, when the child finally grasped the idea of things being “twins” or looking alike and other things not looking alike, we threw a wrench in the gears: we began showing the child objects of the same color but different shapes, or of the same shapes but in different colors.  This was not initially well-received by the student.

Yesterday, however, she held up two Silly Bandz to me.  “Miss Sellers, are these same, or different?”

I looked at the proffered objects: a yellow dinosaur shape (a brontosaurus, perhaps?) and a yellow (and slightly troglodytic) giraffe.  I chose my words carefully, so as to provide the student with a deliberate and, I hoped, comprehensible answer, “They are different shapes.”

The child laughed, “Silly Miss Sellers!  Same color, different shape!” She gleefully slipped both Silly Bandz onto her wrists and carried on doing her take away math.

This was, for me, the “aha!” moment of the day.