Articles

Dyslexia: Fact or Fiction?
Megan struggles to read. She is eight years old and everyone in her class seems to read better than her. Megan tries really hard but it never gets easier. She feels silly. Mom thinks Megan has dyslexia. According to popular belief, dyslexia is a disorder which causes kids to struggle with reading, spelling, writing and studying. Many believe that dyslexia is a neurological disorder in the brain that causes information to be processed and interpreted differently. Some people even believe that dyslexia is genetic. Read more...

Dear Diary... A Mother’s Story of Despair, Hope,
Perseverance and Success
Based on real events — this is the mother’s side of story of helping her child with his reading problem as she confided to her diary. Read more...

Early Warning Signs for School Failure
How is your child coping at school? Is he struggling to grasp new concepts and cope with the workload? Three areas of human develop influence a child’s ability to learn. Physical, emotional and cognitive areas are separate and different in many ways, yet similar and connected in others. Your child may present with a problem in one area, but its cause may lie in another. Read more...

The Foundational Skills of Reading
Before building a house, one needs to lay a foundation. Unless there is a strong and solid foundation, cracks will soon appear in the walls, and with no foundations, the walls will collapse. In the same way one needs to lay a proper foundation before it becomes possible for a child to benefit from a course in reading. If this foundation is shaky, learning "cracks" will soon appear. Read more…

Effective Help for Spelling Problems
Children with reading difficulties usually have problems in spelling as well, and oftentimes have more severe deficits in spelling than in reading, according to Hallahan et al. in Introduction to Learning Disabilities. In reading, context and other cues help one to decode a word, but in spelling, one must produce the word after hearing or thinking it. Read more…

Cognitive Skills Determine Learning Ability
Research has shown that cognitive skills are a determining factor of an individual's learning ability. Cognitive skills are mental skills that are used in the process of acquiring knowledge; according to Oxfordlearning.com the skills that "separate the good learners from the so-so learners." In essence, when cognitive skills are strong, learning is fast and easy. When cognitive skills are weak, learning becomes a struggle. Read more…

Memory Fundamental to Reading, Spelling and Learning
Memory is the retention of information over time. Although the word memory may conjure up an image of a singular, "all-or-none" process, it is clear that there are actually many kinds of memory: sensory register, short-term memory, long-term memory, visual memory, auditory memory, and sequential memory, to name but a few. Read more…

Why Is Logical Thinking Essential?
Aside from food, water, and shelter, the one thing that a person will most need in life is an education. Of those four necessities, education is the only one that can help ensure a person’s consistent ability to provide himself or herself with the other three. Unfortunately, the importance of logical thinking skills is underestimated in education, and training in logical thinking skills is therefore grossly neglected. Read more…

Neuroplasticity: An Extraordinary Discovery of the Twentieth Century
In the past few years neurologists have dismantled, piece by piece, the entrenched view that the human brain is fixed and unchanging in adults. It was long believed that once we grow up, our brains have a set number of neurons performing functions in a fixed way. According to the theory of neuroplasticity, thinking, learning, and acting actually change both the brain's functional anatomy from top to bottom, and its physical anatomy. Read more…