Identifying Blocked Learning Gates Informal Assessment (Download Assessment)
The Dianne Craft “Right Brain” Learning System™
Are you working with a bright, hard -working child or teen who has to work too hard to learn?
Learning disabilities don’t have to be permanent. You can eliminate (or greatly reduce) your child’s learning struggles, whether it is in the form of Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, Dyscalculia, Auditory Processing Issues, Sensory Processing Disorder or ADD/ADHD at home!
The Dianne Craft “Right Brain” Learning System™ uses an inexpensive, successful and holistic “at-home” three pronged approach to correcting learning blocks: 1) Brain Integration Therapy; 2) Right Brain “Healing Teaching” strategies; 3) Targeted Nutritional Interventions.
Depending on the level of your child or teen’s processing problem, he or she may need only the Brain Integration Therapy, OR Brain Integration Therapy plus the Healing Teaching method, OR Brain Integration Therapy, Healing Teaching, and targeted Nutritional Interventions, to make permanent changes in their learning.
- Brain Integration Therapy
Learning glitches (disabilities) can be removed. When some pathways in the hemispheres of the brain become “disconnected” for some reason (early illness, many antibiotics, allergies, injury, etc.) it looks like a learning disability. These disconnections can be “re-connected” using carefully designed physical exercises. God has designed it so that we can use the “body to heal the brain.” It is a marvelous process to watch! We often even call this our “Auditory Processing Glitch Removal System”. At home, the parent will lead the child or teen, or whole family, in a set of specific midline exercises designed to unblock the various learning gates. This takes only 20 minutes a day, 5 days a week. It makes all the difference in the world in ease of learning. You can do this! (See our Testimonies page on our website for the wonderful reports we get from parents every day).
- Right Brain Teaching (“Healing Teaching”)
While we do the daily exercises, we want to show the child/teen how to use his whole brain when learning. (See article, “Use Both Sides of Your Brain” and “Healing Teaching” on our website). We specifically want to train your child’s powerful photographic memory to instantly store learned information into the long-term memory! We teach the same content (reading, phonics, spelling, composition, math) but use an entirely different method of teaching. This teaching method requires no new curriculum…just new teaching strategies. See your child smile for the first time during a math lesson, or when spelling (because they will learn how to spell forwards and backwards in one afternoon!). This will replace your other instruction for now. You can go back to that as soon as the child tests at or above grade level. Follow our Daily Lesson Plans to implement your 45-minute healing teaching sessions for reading, writing, spelling and math! Many of my students who are in college say that they use these easy memory strategies to put “memory hooks” on all the things they need to remember for their courses. They love the way their brain now holds on to information so easily. Healing Teaching: “Don’t just teach a lesson. Show your child how to store that information in his long-term memory at the same time!”
- Targeted Nutritional Strategies
Dr. Sydney Walker, III, MD., pediatrician says that, “Children act how they feel.” In other words, is it “character or chemistry?” Many parents have found that they can change attention and behavior issues quickly with simple nutritional interventions. While you are doing Brain Integration Therapy and Healing Teaching, you can help your children focus easier and have better memory be bothered less by Sensory Integration Issues and mood swings, by following the week by week, step by step 3-month Targeted Nutritional Intervention Guide as found in the Biology of Behavior CD set with its’ 27 page Instructional Booklet. It’s like having a Nutritionist in your home. Many parents report that this 3-month program has been “life changing” for their child, and whole family.
There are various levels of processing problems:
Glitch- Mild
- Child has to work harder, but is not behind
- This does not need intervention, but training the photographic memory will make learning easier
Dysfunction- Moderate
- Child has to work harder and is about one year behind
- Intervention can get this child caught up easily
Severe Blocked Learning Gate
- Child has to work harder and is about two or more years behind
- Intervention is vital to help this child learn
The following will help you to informally diagnose your child’s learning glitches. In Dianne’s Personal Consultations, these characteristics are the red flags we look for to determine the best path to take for a student who is working too hard to learn. You, too, can become your child’s own learning specialist.
(Remember that no child has all the characteristics. However, any time a reversal is checked…visual or in writing, it is a large red flag, alerting us that the child has not yet internalized directionality. This affects learning in so many subtle ways, that we want to address that first.)
| 1. Visual Processing Gate | |
| Reading reversals after age 7 (on=no, was= saw, of=to) | |
| Behind level in reading (how behind? ___________________years) | |
| Oral Reading starts smooth, but becomes labored | |
| Yawning shortly after reading begins | |
| Rubs eyes, blinks, watery eyes while reading | |
| Skips small words and lines when reading | |
| Needs to use finger to track when older | |
| Oral reading has no fluency | |
| Visual Therapy recommended or already doing |
Correction:
- Brain Integration Therapy:
Following the Brain Integration Therapy Manual, you will do an easy, specific daily eye exercise and the powerful once-a-week Visual Brain Training to train your child’s eyes to work together as a team while reading. (Many parents find this completely replaces, or reduces the need for vision therapy as binocularity, eye teaming and tracking are the issue). If your child does not test behind in reading, but only has eye-tracking issues, you will onlyneed to do the Brain Integration Therapy with him. Colored reading transparencies also help take the stress out of the visual system at first. The retina of the eye responds to a printed page better when given the popular supplement, DHA in the form of fish oil. This supplement takes about 6 weeks to see the effect. The most recommended amount is 500 mgs. of DHA.
- Healing Teaching:
If your child is one or more years behind in reading level, it’s best to teach them using the Healing Teaching method during daily reading instruction. If your child tests for reading below the 3rd grade reading level, you will make the most progress by following the Daily Lesson Plans as outlined in the Craft “Right Brain” Learning System Reading Package plus the Craft Right Brain Readers. This is exactly the lesson plan Dianne used in her Resource Room to get a minimum of a 2- year growth in reading…no matter how hard reading was for the student. This gets past the toughest case of Dyslexia. Resource Room teachers around the country, in addition to homeschooling parents and private tutors, find great success using these carefully engineered Craft Right Brain Readers that come with their own illustrated Sight Words with so many “memory hooks” that their students can read them and spell them immediately. The kids love this “zany” way to memorize sight words. Your child will do so well with the Right Brain Phonics Program (included in the package), too. What is the key to this reading program? No writing. No workbooks. No memorization. The built-in “memory hooks” are an awesome tool for learning phonics for a struggling reader. This will replace your present reading instruction curriculum…phonics, spelling, workbooks and student readers. The Reading Package includes all the materials, except for the Craft Right Brain Readers. After you have used the test to find your child’s present reading level, then you will order the appropriate level reader. We call these books the “the boring little books that always work.” This was just again recently proven when a 14 year- old young man with severe Dyslexia, who had been using a “tile” intensive phonics program, and gift of dyslexia method, still could not spell his name, but learned how to read using this entirely different approach. He went on to love reading. He traveled to Colorado from Minnesota to find this method. You don’t have to travel so far!
If you have a struggling reader who tests at 3rd grade level, but still behind in reading, be sure to use the Daily Lesson Plan for the Struggling Reader and have your child use reading transparencies along with the all-important pre-reading step and daily decoding practice from a list with higher-level words. If this is your case, we will send you further information to access both the higher level words for decoding and the highly recommended 3rd grade readers that will continue to help your student become an independent reader soon.
- Targeted Nutritional Interventions:
If your child has had many ear infections or other need for antibiotics in early life, or is a “carbovore” (craves carbs), has melt downs, is moody, or has been diagnosed with Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Sensory Processing Dysfunction, Autism or Asperger’s, check out the Biology of Behavior Nutritional Protocol to learn more about the chemistry upset, and the easy nutritional interventions that can make all the world of difference in your child’s learning day.
| 2. Visual/Motor (Writing) Gate | |
| Frequent or occasional reversals in letters & numbers | |
| Poor spacing in writing | |
| Difficulty lining up numbers in math | |
| Writing is slow and laborious | |
| Tells great stories, but writes very little | |
| Does all math problems mentally to avoid writing down | |
| Writing looks sloppy- considered lazy, sloppy & unmotivated | |
| Can do “journaling”, but can’t write a paragraph | |
| HATES TO WRITE- groans & complains. | |
| Doesn’t finish any written work (any subject) | |
| Switches hands or feet for activities | |
| Copies poorly from book or board |
Correction:
- Brain Integration Therapy:
This is the most dramatic learning gate to correct. When you remove the block between the child’s “head and hand” you see so many parts of schoolwork become easier, including all writing! (Reversals gone; note-taking during lectures easy; able to learn spelling words by writing them; being able to “think and write” at the same time; motor skills like basketball, riding a bike, and catching a ball are impacted also.) To correct this blocked learning gate, you will do a daily exercise and once-a-week Writing Brain Training. The powerful midline exercise, the Writing Eight Exercise was developed and refined for many years. It does an amazing job at getting rid of Dysgraphia or dysgraphic-like symptoms and giving your student an internal gyroscope to make all visual/motor and spatial activities easier and automatic. You will find the instructions for this all-important writing eight exercise and writing brain training in the Brain Integration Therapy Manual or the Dysgraphia Package. Be sure to only get the Dysgraphia Package if this is the only gate your child has blocked. To also watch a demonstration on how to do this amazingly effective exercise with students of all ages and with a group while following the steps in the Brain Integration Therapy Manual, purchase our “Smart Kids Who Hate to Write” Demonstration DVD. Dysgraphia is the most commonly underdiagnosed learning disability that our gifted kids have. Most of our “2-xers” (twice exceptional) children have this undiagnosed dysgraphia or dysgraphic-like symptoms. No need for outside therapy to get rid of this problem. You can do it yourself at home, inexpensively.
- Healing Teaching:
If your child struggles with writing, change your whole method of teaching writing while you use Brain Integration Therapy to get rid of dysgraphia-like symptoms. The “Craft Right Brain Webbing’ uses a whole new technique to take the frustration out of writing and help your child get his thoughts from head to hand. After a year of using this method, a student can easily move on to more classical writing programs. Dianne has created a DVD that teaches you how she used this method to teach writing to her Resource Room students who had to work too hard to learn. In the DVD, she shows you step by step how to work with a white board, and lead even the most incalcitrant child or teen become a writer. She shows you how to work with a total “non-writer” all the way to eighth graders. Her students would always ask her if today was “writing day” because they loved the process. She will show you her “zany corrections” to grade their papers, which makes them want to write more the next day! You can purchase this inexpensive “Right Brain Paragraph & Composition Writing” DVD to learn this successful and easy writing method and follow along with the enclosed instructional booklet. For the combination of brain Integration Therapy and Healing Teaching to remediate a child’s writing, check out our Dysgraphia Package. This is what Dianne used for her entire Writing Language Arts Curriculum for a year. It includes Right Brain Paragraph and Composition Writing; Right Brain Spelling emphasizing the child’s photographic memory; the powerful Writing Eight Exercise to remove the block between head and hand; and Right Brain Vocabulary using Vocabulary Cartoons.
If dysgraphia-like symptoms are also making spelling difficult for your child, train their photographic memory to spell big words forwards and backwards in one teaching session. Purchase our “Teaching the Right Brain Child” DVD (with study guide) and our Dolch Sight Word Cards (Pre-Primer through 3rd grade).
3. Targeted Nutrition:
Check out the Biology of Behavior Nutritional Protocol to learn more about the chemistry behind dysgraphia and a blocked visual/spatial system. Nutritional deficiencies can be a major contributing factor to a child’s learning struggles. Even small nutritional changes can get a student feeling good and improve their ability to retain information they are learning. You can work at getting at the root of these issues through the all-important Nutritional Interventions.
| 3. Auditory Processing Gate | |
| Phonics sounds & rules don’t stick (you’re on your 3rd phonics program) | |
| Sounds out same word over and over in a story | |
| Sight words are hard to memorize (Sounds out all words “what, many”) | |
| Easily misunderstands verbal information | |
| Guesses at long words | |
| Can’t remember multiplication facts | |
| Difficulty saying months in order | |
| Delayed Speech | |
| Articulation issues | |
| Difficulty sequencing events or stories orally | |
| Difficulty remembering names of distant family members or animals | |
| Can’t “sound out” words easily | |
| Poor Reading Comprehension | |
| Poor working memory |
Correction:
- Brain Integration Therapy:
The Auditory Processing Gate is the most involved of all the learning gates. When a child struggles with an Auditory Processing Glitch (or learning disability), many things in life become hard, besides just learning. Even following instructions from a coach, misunderstanding verbal directions can all be problematic. In all my years of working with children with Auditory Processing Glitches, I have never seen anything work as well as Brain Integration Therapy. It is like we can be “miniature mechanics”, going in and re-connecting each channel, one by one. We call this our “Auditory Glitch Removal System” and it is truly remarkable. As you will see in the Brain Integration Therapy manual, there are 10 main Auditory Processing Channels. As your child’s specialist at home, you will find an easy checklist that will help you identify which of those channels are blocked for your child right now, making learning harder. A child with dyslexia, for example, has most of the channels blocked. Others may have fewer channels blocked. But the beauty is, that we can be “channel restorers”. You will see remarkable results, particularly if you pair this with the Healing Teaching method of showing them how to use their powerful right brain hemisphere.
- Healing Teaching:
Children and teens with an Auditory Processing Problem become easily overwhelmed by all the auditory input in a classroom, or using the lecture method. Unfortunately, video learning is often filled with “words” for them to process quickly. They become confused and fall behind when this occurs. Reading and learning from a text independently is also a very auditory teaching method. When a student reads, they need to “hear their voice in their head”, which is an auditory input. Since this process takes so much more “Battery Energy”, they soon become tired and don’t finish the task, or finish it, but did not have the energy to comprehend or remember what they learned because of the energy needed to process this auditory teaching process.
We need to bypass these learning difficulties using a whole new method to make the “learning leaps” to get this child up to grade level. First, we must believe that this can be done. We do not need to just ask for or make accommodations or modifications. (For example, the typical method of working with a child who has great difficulty spelling is to “shorten the spelling list” required. While that may seem like a kind thing to do, we actually are guaranteeing that they will always be poor spellers because they will not learn the words that others are learning. In our “Healing Teaching” approach, we use Right Brain Methods for spelling. We actually ask for the “Bonus Words” along with the regular spelling test. Then, we “jazz up” the letters in the word they misspelled, adding story and emotion. In no time they find they can spell all words forwards and backwards using this method. They are the top spellers. We see this all the time. Our college students tell us they love this technique and use it always in their courses.
We love Healing Teaching methods for our kids with Auditory Processing Problems. They learn so quickly when we use Right Brain Phonics, and all the other Right Brain Reading methods that we have. These methods work so well for math (yes, they can actually like math, using their photographic memory).
You may find that the Foundational Package would be your best purchase to replace the current curriculum you are using, if your child is struggling in all areas of learning: reading; writing; spelling; math. This Foundational Package (which is very inexpensive for any corrective, remedial program),includes the Reading Package plus the Dysgraphia Package, (entire writing/spelling/handwriting curriculum) and Right Brain Math Strategies and the Biology of Behavior 3 month nutritional protocol. It’s a bargain. We have email interaction with all our parents who are using our programs. We’ll keep you successful as your year goes on.
If your child is 1 or more years behind in his reading level, it’s best to implement Healing Teaching. If your student (s) reads at a 3rd grade level or below, use the Dianne Craft “Right Brain” Learning System Reading Package and Craft Right Brain Readers Package. The Reading Package includes all the materials, except for the Craft Right Brain Readers, in the Daily Lesson Plan for the Struggling Reader. To also address math problems that may result for auditory processing issues, you may also greatly benefit from the Foundational Package, which includes the entire Reading Package with additional product for math and writing.
If your child reads above the 3rd grade level, be sure to read through the Daily Lesson Plan for the Struggling Reader and have your child use reading transparencies along with the all-important pre-reading step and decoding from a list with higher-level words.
- Targeted Nutrition:
If your child has had ear infections or is speech delayed or has been diagnosed with APD, check out the Biology of Behavior Nutritional Protocol to learn more about the importance of essential fatty acids and other oils that greatly improve auditory processing in children, teens and adults. For example: the cilia (tiny hairs) of the ear needs Vitamin A to process sounds correctly. The fatty acid, lecithin, creates the neurotransmitter, acetylcholine which is called the “auditory memory” neurotransmitter. This helps so much with word recall. Many children who have articulation issues have an undiagnosed, hidden dairy allergy. They describe it like “hearing under water”. When dairy is replaced with alternatives, often the child can hear sounds more clearly, and articulation subsequently improves. There are so many ways to make learning easier for our children and teens.
| 4. Focus/Attention/Behavior | |
| Inconsistency in performance from one day to another | |
| Needs to have someone sit with them to finish work | |
| Forgets previously learned work much of the time | |
| Impulsive behavior | |
| Easily Upset and angered when things go wrong | |
| Sensory Integration Processing Problems (little things bother them a lot, like tags on shirts, loud noises, transitions, etc.) | |
| Autism/Asperger’s Syndrome | |
| Mood Swings | |
| Trouble Sleeping |
Correction:
- Brain Integration Therapy:Do the daily exercises and once-a-week Brain Trainings found in the Brain Integration Therapy Manual. Brain Integration Therapy has proven to make a difference in children who struggle academically from ADD/ADHD, SPD, ASD, Asperger’s, low working memory, and more. There are so many great benefits for the brain-body chemistry when you make more brain connections.
- Healing Teaching:
If your child is working too hard to learn, we know that they are using too much battery energy to transfer the information they are learning into their long-term memory automatically. These kids, teens and adults make leaps in learning when they start using these zany teaching strategies to train their powerful photographic memory. While doing midline therapy and the nutritional protocol, you can help boost their confidence with energy sparing learning strategies. You will become addicted to their success! The Daily Lesson Plans in the Brain Integration Therapy Manual will guide you through a whole day of Healing Teaching methods for any of the subjects that your child needs help in.
- Targeted Nutrition:
While you are doingBrain Integration Therapy and Healing Teaching, you can help your children focus easier and have better retention by following the week by week, step by step 3 month Targeted Nutritional Intervention Guide as found in the Biology of Behavior CD set. This set comes with the all-important 27 pageprinted Study Booklet that gives you the steps in order, the amounts, best brands, ages, etc. Many parents report huge changes in focusing, mood, attitude, meltdowns, memory and Sensory Processing issues when they implement this easy to use home nutritional program.