While I included a collection of some frequently-asked questions within the Brain Integration Therapy Manual and revised them a bit with the 2012 edition, there is the inevitability of unanswered questions. This blog update serves to answer the first batch of these questions.
I work have a three day school week plan with my kids where they go to an enrichment program on Fridays and take Mondays off. Should I do the daily exercises on Tuesday and Wednesday and the Brain Training on Friday?
The daily exercises should be done four days a week (preferably Monday through Thursday) in the morning. After your kids have learned the exercises, they should not take more than 20 minutes to complete. Brain Training can be done on any of the other days that aren’t occupied by the daily exercises. This plan, of course, does include time off for summer, Christmas, vacations, etc, but the success rate of Brain Integration Therapy was measured off daily exercises four times a week with a weekly Brain Training session, preferably on Fridays.
Do you have to do Brain Training on Fridays as suggested in the Brain Integration Therapy Manual and “Lesson Plans for the Struggling Learner” or can we move this to Friday to accommodate a busy Friday schedule?
You can absolutely do the once per-week brain training session on Saturday instead of Friday.
Should I pre-test my children before we start Brain Integration Therapy?
While it is not essential, I highly recommend pre-testing your children so that you can measure your results throughout the year. Nothing formal is necessary.
After hearing you give your “Identifying and Correcting Blocked Learning Gates” seminar I went to your website to find information about writing reversals. It says to use the Writing Eight Exercise that can be found in the Brain Integration Therapy Manual. I couldn’t get the website to go to the manual and when I looked at online stores the manual was not available. What do I do?
Because of the complexity of the Writing Eight Exercise, I do not offer online instructions for it. The Brain Integration Therapy Manual is available for purchase directly from Child Diagnostics at http://stores.diannecraft.org. To purchase, go to the store, click on “books,” click on “Brain Integration Therapy Manual,” then click “add to cart.”
The manual says to start with visual exercises, then writing exercises, then auditory exercises. Is there a reason for doing them in this order?
I have two children that have processing problems and I want to work them through Brain Integration Therapy together. However, they do not need to work on all of the same things. Is it alright if I work with both children together in the areas that overlap?
Because the Brain Training sessions are done on a one-by-one basis, each child will have his or her own schedule. The children can participate together during the daily exercises even if they don’t necessarily need to do those specific exercises (it won’t hurt them).
The daily exercises and Brain Training sessions appear to be the same things. What differentiates a “Brain Training Session” and an “exercise?”
The daily exercises are components that we will use to construct the Brain Training session at the end of the week. While they will not produce any growth with your child when done individually, they stimulate connections in the brain and keep the neuropathways open during the week, which is an essential building block for what we are going to during the Brain Training session.
Brain Training sessions are done only once a week. They are a collection of multiple exercises from the daily exercises but there is a step called the hemispheric integration process that allows them to promote connectivity between the left and right brain by giving the brain a challenge such as reading or eye tracking. This is the step that is surrounded by a gray box in the Brain Integration Therapy Manual (2010 Edition). These steps tell the brain to send the information to both hemispheres for permanent storage.For more information on the hemispheric integration process, refer to chapter 5.3 “How to Use This Guide” in the Brain Integration Therapy Manual (2010 Edition).
For more information about what activities are included in the hemispheric integration process, refer to the step-by-step Brain Training instructions in the manual. Remember: they are the steps that have a thick gray border around them (in previous editions of the Brain Integration Therapy Manual, the hemispheric integration process steps were bordered by a thin black line instead).