The Learning Success Blog

If you have a child with language challenges, reading problems or learning difficulties, and you have sought help from their teacher, speech pathologist or other learning professional, you may have heard some unfamiliar terms.

Words like phonemic awareness, auditory processing, listening comprehension and working memory.

Listen to Episode 96 of The Learning Capacity Podcast for explanations of 16 common terms used in discussions about learning difficulties. Once you understand these, you should be able to have more productive discussions with your child's teacher or therapists.

How would you like your child to hear almost 300,000 more words before they start kindy?

They could, if you read them just one book a day.    

That’s the finding from new research published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

Researchers at Ohio State University estimated the number of words a child would hear from various amounts of being read to, up until the age of 5.

Here's how many words kids would hear by the time they are 5 years old:

Learning support teacher, Moya Gibb-Smith has used most of the well-known remedial reading programs to help her  students who were struggling to learn to read.

While she said they all had merit, there was one program that stood out for her.  "It was like doing it on steroids. It was just so much quicker, so much more effective".

Moya described her journey from a young "reluctant teacher" to a passionate remedial reading teacher in an episode on The Learning Capacity Podcast. Listen to the podcast, or read the transcript of her story, which includes how her husband  was "going a bit blue-mouldy" on the way.

Playing a musical instrument (not just listening to music) improves reading, according to Dr Nina Kraus, in a presentation at Scientific Learning Corporation’s 2017 Visionary Conference.

Dr Kraus is the Director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University, Illinois, USA.

We are indebted to Dr Kraus for the following notes about the connections between music, rhythm and reading. 

Watching your child grow up is exciting and wondrous. You marvel at what they pick up and how they develop.

For Kim Rackemann and her husband, the journey with their son Finn wasn’t quite so straightforward. Finn wasn’t really hitting the usual milestones. He was found to be on the Autism Spectrum, and the main indicator was his language delay.

Despite some scepticism, Finn started the Fast ForWord program, and in what seemed to be a short space of time, the improvements started. I spoke to Kim on The Learning Capacity Podcast where she shared Finn’s story.

Listen to the podcast.

This is a personal story.  It’s about my grandson Dawson.

He’s in grade 4 at school.   Dawson is a bright boy. Intelligence testing has put him in the 90^th percentile in overall cognitive ability. But his language skills were tested as relatively weak.

He had no trouble learning to read, and he was able to understand what he read. But he wasn’t a big reader.  He would read reluctantly and did not seem to get a lot of enjoyment from it.

Earlier this year his teacher reported that Dawson was reading at a level between year 3 and year 4.

So I decided, with his parents’ agreement, that Dawson should do the Fast ForWord Language program.  After all, I’ve been involved in providing Fast ForWord to thousands of students via schools, learning centres and in homes. And I’ve seen the remarkable improvements this brain training has made for those students. So why not have my grandson benefit as well?