The learning success blog

The two largest challenges parents may have helping their child with maths homework are:

1. Dealing with their own memories of doing maths at school - or not.
2. A sense of urgency: wanting the child to be better, too quickly.

The parent has an essential role in their child’s learning as the parent’s attitude towards numeracy often rubs off on the student. If the parent did not enjoy or is not interested in numeracy, we often find the child has a similar disinterest. It would be beneficial if parents would focus on thinking about how they communicate maths with their child and changing to a positive conversation around numeracy.

It was clear to Melissa Bowman that her son Hugh was struggling in his first year of school. So she got help from the school psychologist who diagnosed Hugh with Auditory Processing Disorder.

The psychologist suggested that Melissa consider the Fast ForWord program and after researching it, Melissa had Hugh do the online exercises at home for about 6 months. Melissa was delighted with the improvements that Hugh made, including:

• His listening improved
• He is now better organised
• His reading improved from below his age level to about a year above 

“It would really pain me when I used to hear my son read and he’d look at a word and couldn’t for the life of him try and sound it out. He just couldn’t do it”.

That’s how Alice, his mother, told me of her distress when she would try to help her son Ryan, aged 8, practise his reading.  Ryan was falling behind his classmates at school and he started to think he was “dumb”.

People often ask why the 11 & 12 times tables are included in the LearnFast Maths Skills Booster when our number system is based on 10?

This is a good question and the answer has several components: neuroscience influence, practicality, legacy issues, and also some curious factors. 

Nicola Glew was a teacher in Sydney when she saw how the Fast ForWord brain training programs changed the learning capacity of her students.

So last year when she returned to her home town in New Zealand, she established her own learning centre, Fast Learning NZ, to provide local students with the benefits of the neuroscience programs.

“It would really pain me when I used to listen to my son read and he’d look at a word and couldn’t for the life of him try and sound it out. He just couldn’t do it”.

This is how *Alice described her 12 year old son’s reading before he did the Fast ForWord program.

Her son *Ryan was able to go from a reluctant struggling reader, to a determined flourishing student using the neuroscience based exercises in the program.

Alice used to watch on helplessly as Ryan would struggle with reading and spelling. But she saw how the program took Ryan from frustration to fluency.

Over the past few months, over 2,000 subscribers have downloaded the LearnFast Maths Skill Booster to help with maths and the feedback has been very positive. 

Students and parents have found it a light time load - only 10 minutes a day – but especially liked the excitement of plotting progress and regular rewards for improvement that has really helped engage many students.

A pleasing and unexpected result was reported by one parent who noticed that her daughter now does other things, not just maths, faster – she gets the concept of “fast”.

Should they start with the standard or jumbled form?

Will Dr Norman Doidge's new book "The Brain's Way of Healing" have the same dramatic impact as his original best seller " The Brain That Changes Itself", which has sold over 1 million copies?

In "The Brain That Changes Itself" Dr Doidge alerted us to "brain plasticity", our brain's ability to change its structure and capabilities in response to experiences and training. This book increased our understanding of the power and potential of everyone's brains - young or old .

Now seven years later, his second book seeks to extend this theme.

Children today are doing much less handwriting than children did 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Before computers became commonplace, handwriting was much more important for everyone. Back then schools put considerable time and attention on making sure students developed their handwriting. 

I recall entering cursive handwriting competitions when I was a young child (I went to primary school in the 1950s), and the sense of pride for the kids who were judged the neatest writers.

Now, typing on computers and tablets is replacing the act of writing by hand for many students (and adults).

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

A great old maths learning tool......

It's interesting to think about how educators, sports coaches, music teachers and other teachers have always instinctively incorporated the principles of brain training in their teaching activities, without necessarily being aware of them.

The principles of brain training described by neuroscientists from their brain research over the last few decades are: