I have some thrilling news to share with you! Learning Tools has relocated from the beloved Seattle location to a bright, sunny office in Bothell. This move marks an exciting new chapter for Learning Tools, and I can’t wait to welcome you to the new space.

Why the Move?

Seattle has been a fantastic home for Learning Tools, but I wanted a location that offers even more convenience for my clients. The new Bothell office is just off the 405, making it easily accessible for everyone on the east side and the North End. Whether you’re coming from Bellvue, Redmond, Woodinville or Mill Creek you’ll find that getting to to Learning Tools is now quicker and more straightforward.

The New Office

The new office space is a bright, sunny environment that’s perfect for learning and creativity. This is a positive and vibrant atmosphere which is crucial for effective learning, and the new location offers just that. I am confident that you’ll love the new space as much as I do.

Special Offer: 10% Discount

To celebrate the move, I am offering a special 10% discount on any first or second program you enroll in this summer or fall. Just mention this blog post when you sign up to take advantage of this limited-time offer. Whether you’re looking to enhance your reading or math skills or learning concepts for life, now is the perfect time to reach out and schedule yours or your child’s program.

Looking Forward

I are incredibly excited about this move and the opportunities it brings. My commitment to providing top-quality educational programs remains stronger than ever. The new location allows me to serve clients better and continue offering the exceptional learning experiences you’ve come to expect from a Davis Program.

Thank you for your support. I look forward to seeing you at the new Bothell office soon!

Warm regards,
Sophia Goebel
Owner & Facilitator at Learning Tools

P.S. Don’t forget to mention this blog post to receive your 10% discount on your next program!

The post Learning Tools has Moved to Bothell! appeared first on Learning Tools.

by Jenny Wise

According to Understood.org, one in five children has a learning disability, and if they don’t get the right support, they are three times as likely to drop out of high school and twice as likely to be jobless as adults than kids who don’t. These sobering statistics show that involving these children in engaging activities outside of schoolwork is essential for their intellectual and emotional development, and the answer may be the arts.

“Involving children with learning differences (at Learning Tools, we prefer difference to disability) in the arts can have several benefits, including improved motor skills, concentration and focus, creative expression, and self-esteem. Learning Tools outlines some arts to consider introducing to your child.

Music

For a child with learning disabilities, music works the areas of the brain that are tied to speech, reading, comprehension, problem-solving, focus, and more. Singing and playing an instrument have especially remarkable benefits for children with learning disabilities, but even the act of listening to music can have a wonderful impact.

Health benefits of singing
How to get child interested in playing a musical instrument
How to set up music room at home
If you have a music background and you’ve considered making some money on the side, consider using ZenBusiness to start your own business and teach other kids, perhaps specializing in instructing children with learning disabilities.

Photograph

It takes a steady hand, concentration, and focus to take a good photograph, not to mention the ability to compose a scene before you snap the shutter. Children with learning disabilities can learn photography to develop these same skills and so many more.

Benefits of photography for kids
It’s not all about camera phones; teach kids to use a DSLR camera
Photography-focused activities kids can do

Painting and Drawing

It doesn’t matter if the child uses colored pencils, markers, crayons, or watercolors; the act of moving something colorful across a blank canvas is a creative way to express emotions. At the same time, it can help a child develop patience, concentration, and problem-solving skills.

Different drawing styles kids can try
12 free online painting and drawing lessons for kids
Benefits of painting for children
Teach children about famous paintings

Regardless of the art form your child pursues, make sure there’s always some fun injected into it. Also be sure to help the child realize every day that the fun he or she is having will boost their focus, improve their schoolwork, and greatly enhance their self-confidence.

About the Author: Jenny Wise created Special Home Educator as a forum for sharing her adventures in homeschooling and connecting with other homeschooling families. She has been homeschooling her four children for many years now, including her youngest daughter Anna who is on the autism spectrum.

Learning Tools assists adults and children attain skills, confidence, and motivation needed to achieve their goals. Our programs are offered for learning and correcting multiple struggles of neurodivergent learners. Reach out to us today! 206-451-7102

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com

The post Involving Your Child with Learning Challenges in the Arts appeared first on Learning Tools.

I was recently asked by a parent, “why should I pay for a program for my son?”

She said she made it through school and in life without such a program and she believes she is dyslexic.  She knows grades are not everything….  she knows how smart her child is and that is all that matters.

Here was my answer to her.

1. If your son wants help and wants to improve

   If your son wants help and wants to improve, a program can offer him concrete ways to do that.

2. Helps with self-esteem

   For me, my son’s self-esteem was why I looked into doing a program.  It broke my heart to hear him call himself “stupid” and to see him compare himself with other kids. After the program, this rarely happened.  My son began to see his strengths and was proud of those, this is also what the majority of parents tell me when we do follow-up after the program.

3. Allows your child to be in control of his learning

   Being in control of your own learning so powerful! Students learn and are able to recognize when they are disoriented or confused and need to focus.

   Often students I work with are very good at concentrating, but heavy concentration without the mind focused just causes more confusion, more work, and can be painful. Dyslexics need to ensure they understand the difference of focus and concentration, when they know how to focus and stop just tyring to concentrate hard, learning becomes easier.

4. Possibilities

   When I see a student really embrace what they have learned and learn how their brain works, they get excited by all the possibilities available to them. Some might get excited about acknowledging their creative sides, or that their ability to see things from a different perspective and how this can help solve problems in the world.  They love that their imagination allows them to discover things that others don’t necessarily see and stop seeing themselves as dumb, slow, or challenged.

5. A faster result

   A Davis® program is working with thelearni ng and thinking style of the individual and teaching them to use this style to their advantage.

   With tutoring, often they are just being “retaught” material with the same methods used in school but at a slower pace.  These methods are for those who think with verbal conceptualization and taught with a lot of repetition, drill, and rote memorization.

   When tutors do teach with other methods and use multi-sensory learning it can be positive but also can often take a long time which makes for very slow progress and they end up having years and years of tutoring which ends up costing them close to the same amount or even more than having done the Davis program.

The post Why a Program and not Tutoring appeared first on Learning Tools.

Below is Jamie’s account of the day:

• Start off the morning with a check-in, how we are feeling about being there, did we sleep well, do we need a snack or to do some stretching – make sure we are set up to be successful for the day.
• Then we take time to check and make sure our focusing tools is where it needs to be and do any fine tuning if need be. This is as easy as 1,2,3, balance.
• Then we play around with koosh balls (a type of rubbery stringy ball).   From there we are really focused and ready to do some reading.
• We only read for 5-10 minutes depending on how one is feeling. When we work on reading comprehension it might be longer and a good discussion of “the movie” that we have visualized while reading.
• Next, we would do clay work to master words. We talk about the “trigger words”, look it up in a dictionary (it is amazing to see how many different meaning one of these words can have), make all kinds of sentences until that word is really clear to us, then we get to create a model of the word in clay. Creativity is welcome here, but simple models work great. So for the word “on”, while Sophia modeled a child who rode “on” the camel, I modeled a boy flew “on” the plane. This was a bit more challenging then I had thought it would be – but I was happy with the model in the end. {“on” definition used “used as a function word to indicate means of transport“}
• Then we take a break, maybe a 10 minutes break, maybe 15 – just depends on what we together think is needed. “I love how I get to help make the decisions, ‘it is your program, after all, Sophia says’.
• We end our break with koosh balls or start our work session, however, you prefer to think of it. Koosh balls help to ensure we are focused and ready for the next task at hand.
• When we get back to work, we often do another reading exercise. If not reading, we work on spelling words; we tackle another spelling word that has given me trouble in the past. Using the tools, making the word in clay, and then mastering has me spelling the word in no time! The best part is, I remember the word.
• We continue the day in this pattern. The day goes by fast actually, and while it is work, it doesn’t feel like work. The best part was each day I felt proud of the models I did and surprised by how much working with the word helped me, I don’t have problems with these words anymore when I am reading or trying to write and spell them – weird but true.

Spelling word “apologize” learned during the Dyslexia Reading Program.

Clay model showing the meaning of “always” (at all times) done during the Dyslexia Correction Program.

The post A Typical Day with My Dyslexia Tutor appeared first on Learning Tools.

In school, I had “coping methods” that would at times get me to pass a spelling test. For me, the trick was, don’t study until 5-10 minutes before you walk into class, then cram like crazy.  I couldn’t think of anything before the test, couldn’t talk to anyone, just keep those letter in my head. One problem would be getting interrupted by friends or the teacher before the test; ignoring or pretending to daydream worked pretty well for that.

Another problem was when the teacher wanted you to write a sentence with the word, those teachers were so frustrating, and picky. The sentence piece always got me, I would end up losing the other words that I was trying to keep straight by concentrating on the sentence. I mean really, why can’t I write, “He was tantalized” for the word tantalize? Nope, that was never enough, teachers wanted something more.  For my sentences I would be lucky to get even partial credit.

If I tried to study the words well before the test like at home the night before, that made me more confused then ever. I remember my mom trying to get me to learn how to spell the word February. I would get the “ru” order messed up or forget the “r” altogether.   She would say remember the “r” is for your sister and she was born first, and then “u” came along. When that still didn’t work she added in “a ‘r’ is for right BUT it isn’t on the right side, it is in the same order as the alphabet, ‘r’ comes first before ‘u’”. Well… in theory that seems great, and now that I know how to spell February it seems like something I would remember. Yet, I remember, on numerous occasions being at school at my desk trying to remember what my mom told me. I wasn’t remembering the ‘r’ and ‘u’ in the order of the alphabet because I then thought of ‘r’ on the right. If I tried thinking of my sister, I would end up messing it up with thinking surely she said to think of me first and that is ‘u’. Why would I think of my sister first? I would second guess each thing, and then with my stress of taking to long on that word it would require me to sing the alphabet in order to figure out which was first. I had to sing it out loud, but that would get me in trouble so I would try to whisper it. As you can see from my retelling of the story, my inner dialog had me in much confusion and I would end up missing much of what was happening in the classroom.

Fast forward to being an adult. I stopped thinking of spelling, one of the joys of being out of school. But one day, I remember overhearing an employee talking about how annoying it was when she would get emails from her boss (me) that had words misspelled all the time, she couldn’t figure out how I became the head of the department she worked in. I suddenly felt shame and embarrassment.

I knew I was not a good speller. I thought about a few incidents when I had someone ask me what I meant in my email because they couldn’t understand it. I think I explained to them what I meant and then said, “I was typing so fast I made the errors” but really, I just hadn’t seen them. It was really at that moment, feeling shamed by my inability to spell that I started paying more attention to my emails. I would make sure my spell checker was on, and that helped, but it still didn’t fix the problem.

My training to become a Davis® dyslexia facilitator is what helped me overcome my greatest problems with spelling. When I was “the student” for a dyslexia correction program for a facilitator in training, I started to really see symbols and words for the first time. Wow, it was AMAZING, the focusing tools helped me to see my errors in spelling and then the method of writing the word in clay and taking a mental picture of it was profound. Before I honestly just didn’t know if something was spelled wrong at least half the time. I didn’t see it, sometimes I would have an inkling that it wasn’t right, but most of the time proofreading was a joke to me. I wasn’t focused enough to even find all the errors.

I know I now have the ability to learn how to spell any word I want to.   I have worked on the words that used to cause me so many issues, like character, definitely, and business. At times, I still have to think a moment about them, but if I look inside my mind’s eye and trust my gut, I get it right every time.

The post Confessions of a Bad Speller appeared first on Learning Tools.