Hot Topics in Dyslexia Research and Advocacy

Today I’d like to share with you all a video panel discussion by Understood.org, which was held on dyslexia and titled “Dyslexia Understood: Research, Instruction and Awareness.” The panel included three experts on dyslexia, who discussed the latest developments in brain research and instructional methods, and addressed how those advances can help children and their families.

The panel featured women who were knowledgeable in three areas of dyslexia: brain research, instruction and advocacy. The panelists include Barbara Wilson, cofounder of Wilson Language Training, mom and former teacher Rachel Vitti, and leading neuroscientist Guinevere Eden. Here are their main points:

1.      Brain imaging is starting to play a role in understanding the strengths of people with dyslexia. Guinevere Eden shed light on cutting-edge brain science and its direction towards using brain imaging. She said that the field of dyslexia research is changing—for the better. “The research is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary,” said Eden. “You’re beginning to see the merging of genetics research with brain imaging research with behavior research.” Scientists with different types of training are coming together and bringing different tools to the table. The result is a more holistic understanding of dyslexia.

2.      Dyslexia laws aren’t always leading to better outcomes for students. Dyslexia laws are a good step toward getting students the support they need. But the laws haven’t always translated into results. There’s a gap in implementation, according to Barbara Wilson, who said, “You fight and get the laws into place. But why is it we don’t necessarily see that transfer to the outcomes that are intended by the law?” Any time a law is passed, in-depth teacher training is critical, according to Wilson.

3.      Policymakers are now taking dyslexia advocates seriously. Panelist Rachel Vitti, a mother whose gifted son has dyslexia and a former teacher, said that she tried to help her students with dyslexia, but she didn’t have the training. She believes that it’s important to raise awareness about dyslexia in schools. With the knowledge gained by research, she has seen a movement for change.

All three panelists agreed that progress is being made, but there is still plenty of work to be done. You can watch the panel discussion here:

https://www.understood.org/en/community-events/blogs/news-about-understood/2015/07/15/from-brain-science-to-teaching-experts-weigh-in-at-dyslexia-understood

When Your Child Has More Than One Diagnosis: 6 Tips for Parents

For us parents, putting a neat label on our children’s symptoms is not only helpful, but also important. We want to find out what’s wrong, because once we do, we feel we can get started on necessary treatments and services. We immediately connect with other parents who are in similar situations. We learn all we can do to support our kids.

But unfortunately, there are keiki who have symptoms that match multiple conditions. Or, he or she has symptoms that don’t really fit into a single category. Is it ADHD? Dyslexia? Dyscalculia? Dysgraphia? You wonder to yourself, how many dys-diagnoses are there? You feel discouraged at the doctor’s, because there isn’t a clear diagnosis. You feel alienated, set apart from other parents. You hope that a test result with come back with “the answer,” only to find that there isn’t just one, but many, many “answers.”

If that’s you, the first thing you need to know is that you aren’t alone. Many children have multiple, overlapping symptoms. 50 percent of children with ADHD also have a learning, language or motor skills disability. Many iof the children who come to us at Learn 2 Focus have 2, 3, or more diagnoses.  It's more common that you might think!  Here are some tips on what you should do:  

1. Connect with other parents who are struggling with similar issues. Yes, you aren’t alone, and other moms and dads have formed groups that can give you emotional support and education.

2. Don’t ditch your pediatrician. Your child’s regular doctor’s job is to keep track of medical discoveries that might help you with a diagnosis. Keep seeing him or her and keep them updated of your child’s symptoms.

3. Find your child’s strengths. Celebrate his or her abilities. When you focus on what your child can do well, your child will see those strengths too.

4. Your child’s diagnosis might change multiple times. Don’t be discouraged. Remember, if you are trying to get health-care, treatment or education services, any diagnosis might be more important than a final, clear-cut diagnosis.

5. Keep an eye out for university or medical center research groups that might be conducting studies on your child’s specific symptoms. Searching online might be helpful, and utilize your parent support group as well as your pediatrician.

6. Meanwhile, do your own research. You know your child better than anyone else, and you might find something your doctor doesn’t know about yet. If you are overwhelmed with information, it’s always okay to take a break and then go back to it.

Three Potential New Treatments For Autism

Earlier this week, I shared an article on new autism discoveries going on in the field, which could potentially help our kids. Although there are no medical tests that we can use to diagnose autism, this article talked about two new potential ways (sniff test and eye-tracking technology) that scientists have found that could be helpful in diagnosing our keiki.

Today, I wanted to share three new autism cures and treatments. While they are still in the research phase, for us parents, these ongoing studies are worth keeping an eye on while progress is being made.  

1. Water pills. These are inexpensive generic drugs used to treat high blood pressure. They may relieve some of the behavioral symptoms of autism, especially in those with milder forms of the condition, according to a study published in the journal Translational Psychiatry.

2. A low-glycemic diet. This means going on a low-sugar diet. In this study, mice prone to autism were fed a high-glycemic or low-glycemic diet and their offspring kept on the same diet after birth. Young mice that ate the high-glycemic diet showed typical symptoms of autism, and their brains showed they were developing fewer neurons than mice fed the low-glycemic diet. Try keeping your kids away from artificial sugars – all that candy, sugary cereals, soda – and see how they improve.

3. Sleeping sickness drug. I shared an article a couple weeks ago about how experts believe that autism is the result of cells not communicating normally. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine found that a drug called suramin restores normal signaling between cells, and reverses autism-like symptoms in mice after a single dose. 

The drug, which is also used to treat sleeping sickness since 1916, has shown promising results for participants with autism in phase 1 trials.  The downside is that it can't be taken long-term because of side effects. But it’s a start! These researchers hope that this study will lead to newer drugs being formed to treat autism.

To read the full article, you can visit: https://www.newsmax.com/Health/Headline/autism-treatments-discoveries-help/2015/09/08/id/678659/

Two New Ways To Test For Autism

This week, I wanted to share with you an article on exciting autism discoveries going on in the field which could potentially help our kids. Scientists and researchers are making further progress on the causes of autism and different types of treatments and tests – probably because the rate of diagnosis has skyrocketed over the past 40 years.

When you look at just the numbers, it is disheartening: autism has been diagnosed in 1 in 68 children, and affects more than 2 million in the United States. For boys, it’s found in 1 out of 42, and 1 in 189 for girls.  Autism is on the rise - the numbers don’t lie.

But the good news is that people are certainly more aware of it, and scientists around the world are placing a lot of effort and attention to finding a cure. Plus, there’s more good news: British psychologists found that while people with high levels of autistic traits tended to produce fewer responses when presented with a problem, the responses they did have were more original and creative than responses from non-autistic individuals.

While there are no current medical tests to diagnose autism, this could soon change:

1. Sniff Test: Normally, when you sniff something unpleasant, you can reduce the airflow in your nose to avoid inhaling it. But researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science discovered that children with autism can't make those adjustments, and sniff the same way regardless of whether the smell is pleasant or unpleasant. 

The scientists created a device which allowed them to deliver odors through the nose and measure a child's nasal airflow in response to pleasant or unpleasant smells. 

Children without autism adjusted their airflow within 305 milliseconds after smelling an odor, but the airflow didn't change at all in children with autism. 

The test was 81 percent accurate in diagnosing autism.

2. Eye-tracking technology: Children who have autism have advanced perceptual skills in infancy before the onset of clinical symptoms, says a study published in the journal Current Biology. Researchers tracked how fast an infant could follow letters that popped up on a screen. Those with enhanced searching ability at 9 months showed more symptoms of autism at 2 years. Children with autism, for instance, had a superior ability to pick out an odd item in a series, such as the letter S in a string of Xs.

Stay tuned for the next post, which will share three new potential cures for autism. You can read the full article here:

https://www.newsmax.com/Health/Headline/autism-treatments-discoveries-help/2015/09/08/id/678659/

Play This Space Mines Patrol Game For Working Memory

I’ve shared about Working Memory before – WM is an important skill that focuses on the ability to remember and apply relevant information while in the middle of an activity, such as cooking, playing games, studying and more.

Children who have ADHD often have Working Memory deficits – not always, but usually. They have a hard time remembering their parents’ or teachers’ instructions on completing homework. Other challenges include recalling rules for a game or a sport, or completely any other tasks that involve calling up important information to complete the task. It’s hard to retain current information while also holding onto new incoming information.

So…are you curious to see how good your WM is? Try out this fun game called “Space Mines Patrol.” It’s an online game developed by one of theprograms we use at Learn 2 Focus, Cogmed. The game is programmed to utilize your working memory capacity to “dismantle” dangerous space mines. This is a neat way for you to understand how it feels like when WM is challenged – share it with friends and have fun!

http://www.cogmed.com/space-mines-patrol

Remember, at Learn 2 Focus, we have multiple programs that can help your child have stronger WM skills, such as Interactive Metronome, Fast ForWord and, as I mentioned, Cogmed. Memory booster tasks and video games targeting WM skills can strengthen and improve WM for almost any child. Feel free to contact me for more info or for an assessment!

Why Your Brain Wants You To Go Outside

We hear it all the time from visitors – “Hawaii is paradise” “You’re so lucky you live in Hawaii!” and “You must go to the beach all the time!” But reality is, so many of us are too busy with school, family and work to spend tons of time frolicking in the great outdoors.

But research shows that spending time in natural environments have real, measurable psychological benefits. Researchers Rachel and Stephen Kaplan found in the ‘80s that exposure to natural environments significantly improved participants’ performance on attention, memory, and cognition tests, especially compared to urban or indoor environments.

There are two kinds of cognitive attention: directed attention and effortless attention. With directed attention, you have to focus on processing specific stimuli, while filtering out others. You also have to suppress physiological or emotional distractions. Examples: avoiding traffic, reading signs, navigating through street grids. For effortless attention, you don’t require any conscious focus or response. It’s the kind of attention you give to a beautiful sunset or gorgeous beach. These natural environments engage our cognitive function in a way that doesn’t drain capacity or cause mental fatigue, which is the case with directed attention.

Going outside also has reduced stress and better mental health outcomes. For example, office workers with windows facing natural scenery have reported higher job satisfaction and less workplace frustration. For children, the variety of objects and patterns found in natural landscapes encourages imaginative play, which is linked to social as well as cognitive development. This article on SciLearn by Kristina Birdsong says:

“A study focusing on inner-city children found that, at least for girls, greener home surroundings correlated with greater impulse control and self-discipline. Likewise, playing in natural spaces was associated with a reduction of symptom severity in children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. In a broader sense, the open and unstructured nature of outdoor natural spaces encourages social cohesion through group activity and cooperative problem-solving. And this benefit of green spaces also extends to adults, especially those belonging to marginalized urban populations.”

You can learn more about the cognitive benefits of going outside with this link.

https://www.scilearn.com/blog/cognitive-benefits-of-nature?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=921406&utm_campaign=On-Demand_2016-06-15_11:34

Keiki Spotlight Success: Wilson Reading System

Keiki Spotlight: “C” and Wilson Reading System

As I announced on Tuesday, we’re certified to offer Wilson Reading System (WRS) at Learn 2 Focus, a proven method that helps children who may have dyslexia, reading fluency, and comprehension issues and similar challenges. For this month’s “Keiki Spotlight” blog, I wanted to introduce everyone to “C,” a keiki who came to Learn 2 Focus with dyslexia. She was adopted from China at 2 years old, and learned to read, write, and speak English with her adoptive family that now lives in Hawaii. As her parents got to know her and began to understand her needs, it was clear that she needed treatment for respiratory, language, behavioral, and attention issues.  This led to doctor’s visits, speech therapy, occupational therapy, medical treatments, multiple prescriptions, and social skills classes. Still, C’s parents strongly felt that more could be done to help her develop better health and skills.

Her parents kept researching and received advice from fellow home school moms, which led to Learn 2 Focus.  Our testing showed that Wilson Reading System would help, and so the new tutoring began. C’s mom says, “I admit I was nervous. I wasn’t sure how it would all turn out.”

After weeks and months of faithfully attending WRS tutoring sessions, C was retested. C went from not being able to visualize or run a movie in her head about what she read to becoming quite proficient and detailed in not only her visualization skills, but retelling skills as well. C also started with weak vocabulary, and went from not knowing unfamiliar words to being able to read for context and figuring out what a word meant or suggested. Strong understanding of syllable types and rules of the English language are fairly tough to follow! Decoding ability increased by 4 years and encoding by 6 and over years, in 6-months’ time. C is now advanced and ahead of her peers.

Her mom says, “These results were amazing. Susi and her patient, loving and thorough teaching had done wonders. We feel happy and blessed to have found her and Learn 2 Focus. The time and financial commitments are so worthwhile. Our children are precious gifts from God, and we want to give them what they need to succeed. Move forward and make the investment in your child. You won’t be disappointed!”

An Exciting Announcement: Now Offering Wilson Reading System

Aloha Learn 2 Focus ohana, I have an exciting announcement to make!

I am thrilled to let you all know that we now have a tutor on staff who is certified in the Wilson Reading System (WRS). This means we’re able to now offer WRS at Learn 2 Focus, for your children who may have language-based learning disabilities such as dyslexia, auditory processing disorder and poor reading fluency and comprehension.

Here are a couple more examples that might help you figure out if your child might need WRS. Does your child have issues with decoding? Does he or she show signs of slow, labored reading? Or, maybe your child knows words by sight, but have a hard time reading unfamiliar words and guesses often at words?  Does your child have poor reading and listening comprehension skills?  Can your child develop and "run a movie" in his or her head about what s/he has just read?

If your child is struggling with any of the above, WRS might be a good solution. Here’s how it works. It uses visual, auditory, kinesthetic and tactile senses to help kids make connections between sounds and words. WRS uses a unique tapping system which helps students segment and blend phonemes. This solution helps children build encoding, decoding and comprehension skills. The cumulative, step-by-step curriculum is broken into short, structured sessions which take up to 60 to 90 minutes depending on the age of the student as well as the amount of training per week.

Students work on phonemic segmentation, alphabetic principles, vocabulary development and more. They learn how to distinguish from sounds to syllables, words to sentences, stories to books, learning the structure of English through constant repetition and review. Each step builds on the one before. Students learn concepts thoroughly, moving through the program at their own pace through one-on-one instruction.

I thought I might share an example of our results, and a comment from a student using WRS at Learn 2 Focus.  One 4th grader who has consistently had WB (Well Below Proficiency) on every report card under the heading of Language Arts, achieved DP (Developing Proficiency) in just 4 months.  Another dyslexic 12 year old's comment after her first WRS lesson: "I feel like I don't want to stop - I know this will help me and  I will be able to read!"

WRS works because the sessions are structured and organized, building upon each learned step, and is a solution that is based on proven methods that have been tried and tested. If you’re interested, please feel free to give me a call! I’d love to answer any questions you might have. 

4 Ways Dads Can Bond With ADHD Kids

With Father’s Day just around the corner on Sunday, June 19, I considered giving ideas on keiki crafts gifts, fun events around Honolulu and ways to celebrate all the dads and father figures in our lives. But then I came across this fantastic article that gives resources for fathers who have children with ADHD, and had to share!

http://www.healthcentral.com/adhd/c/849319/114143/resources-children/

This website shares videos, books, articles and blogs that are geared towards fathers who have a child with ADHD, and one particular article stood out to me. It’s about the relationship between fathers and sons with ADHD. It says:

“Boys learn to be "just like their dad." If dad is critical, not there, or disapproves of the boy's behaviors or activities, how can this son have any healthy image of himself? The adolescent boy learns how to move toward being a man by watching his father and other male authority figures. The role that his father plays is critical to his accepting and respecting himself, and to moving successfully toward adulthood.”

While this article focuses only on the relationship between sons and fathers, I think that the idea of a role model still applies for daughters. Here are some ideas for you dads out there who are looking for ways to be more involved with their sons and daughters!

1. Let your child participate in a physical activity that you can do together. Take him along on your evening jogs or to the pool when you swim laps. Does your child do sports? Cheer him on or take it a step further, and try coaching your child’s team.

2. Understand your child’s ADHD. Let them know that you do "get it", and be supportive of any therapy. Drive them to the therapy sessions and if you’re using virtual programs like IM Home, sit down with them and guide them through each session.

3. After you come home from work, it’s easy to want to take the time to unwind on your own. After you do though, be sure to spend some time unwinding with your kids. Give mom a break and help your child with home. Read, talk or play games together after dinner. On weekends, take your kid shopping together.

4. Do you have a hobby, like fixing up your car, woodworking or playing music? Do you love fishing, golfing or surfing? Let your child be an apprentice on weekend or evening hobbies, and teach him or her basic skills like home or auto repair. Bring your child along on your fun hobbies and give an easy task to do. Sometimes, they might just enjoy watching you work or play.

We tend to think moms as the nurturing, caregivers of our family, but not so much the dads, and of course, that stereotype should be far from the truth in today’s day and age. The influence of a strong male role model has serious benefits to a child’s emotional growth, whether he or she has ADHD or not. Give these ideas a try, and enjoy bonding with your child.

Get Active for Brain Benefits

This hot summer vacation is a great time for kids at home to, well, get out! Get them off the couch and encourage them to start moving around in the sun. With the beautiful weather in Hawaii they can enjoy their time outside – while keeping hydrated, of course. Moving around outside will strengthen their growing muscles, liven their moods and give them plenty of Vitamin D.

But there’s more to physical fitness than actual physical benefits. Multiple studies have suggested that higher levels of physical fitness can encourage the growth of a child’s brain in more ways than one. Think brain structure, brain function, cognition and academic school achievement. According to one scientific article:

“For example, higher fit children have larger brain volumes in the basal ganglia and hippocampus, which relate to superior performance on tasks of cognitive control and memory, respectively, when compared to their lower fit peers. Higher fit children also show superior brain function during tasks of cognitive control, better scores on tests of academic achievement, and higher performance on a real-world street crossing task, compared to lower fit and less active children.”1

Here are some ideas:

1.      Take the family out for a picnic. Kapiolani Park, Ala Moana Beach Park or other local parks are perfect places to enjoy a day in the sun. Pack up easy meals and snacks, a couple Frisbees to throw around, bicycles if you have them and let the kids enjoy themselves.

2.      Go hiking! Makapu’u Lighthouse and Diamond Head Crater are two easy, family-friendly hikes that have beautiful scenery. You can look online or search through a Hawaii hiking book to find more age-appropriate hikes.

3.      Find some tennis rackets, pick up some fresh tennis balls, and try your hand at tennis.

4.      We live in Hawaii, so a beach day is a must! Visit the closest beach, lather on the sun screen and keep hydrated as your kids play in the water. If your kids are old enough, bring a few body boards too or surf boards.

5.      For some of us, the hot sun can tire the kids out a little too much. After an early dinner, gather the kids (and the dog, if you have one!) out for a nice evening stroll and watch the sun set.

1Chaddock-Heyman L, Hillman CH, Cohen NJ, Kramer AF. The importance of physical activity and aerobic fitness for cognitive control and memory in children. Monogr Soc Res Child Dev. 2014 Dec;79(4):25-50.

Developing a Reading Brain

Yesterday I posted five very good reasons why your child should read, and how you could engage in reading together. Besides providing precious bonding time between you and your keiki, encouraging your child to read is scientifically proven to help your child’s brain develop and mature in ways that might surprise you.

So, read on for Part 2 of my reading series this week! Here are five more reasons why your kid should get his or her nose into the pages of a book, starting from number six. For the first five, take a look at Tuesday’s post to catch up.

6. Memory

After your child finishes a book, encourage them to retell the story. “What was the story about?” you can ask. “Who was the main character? How did the story end?” Engaging them in casual memory recall exercises like these can help your child to strengthen his or her brain’s memory – the ability to store information and ideas. This ability is essential for word recognition, comprehension of complex sentences and remembering instructions.

7. Attention

Fluent reading skills require sustained and focused attention. Set aside a time for your child to read. Hopefully, if your child enjoys reading, this should be no problem. But for kids who may dislike reading, try setting easy goals for them. For example, give them a distraction-free room that’s quiet (means no TV or Internet!) and ask them to read for 15 minutes or more. Setting aside this time can increase their attention span, and strengthen their ability to focus on information and tasks, while ignoring distractions.

8. Processing

Processing during reading will help your child distinguish and associate individual speech sounds with their corresponding letter and word forms. Fun and simple listening games, such as identifying sounds in words that sound like something else (e.g., the 's' sounds like a hissing snake), can help your child’s ear to capture and interpret sounds clearly and accurately.

9. Sequencing

During reading, your child needs sequencing skills to maintain the order of letters within words or words within a sentence. Try creating picture stories, where the order of the images is used to tell the story is an effective way. Or, for little ones learning how to spell, mixing up letter tiles and having them unscramble the letters to form a word can be a fun game to play.

10. Early intervention

This is possibly the most important thing for children to develop a reading brain. Despite what many people think, the love of reading is not something that comes automatically – you as the parent have to start early to help your kids have a good, strong reading brain. Start reading to your child even from when he or she is just a couple months old. It’s never too early to start, and the good news is, it’s also never too late to begin either!

5 Reasons Your Child Should Read

We all know that reading is good for our kids, right? But do you know the extent to how much the child’s brain can change and learn from developing reading skills? From superior phonetic awareness to working cognitive memory skills, the ability to read fluently has so many benefits that it’s vastly important to encourage your kid to work through his or her reading list this summer.

In fact, here are five scientifically proven reasons why you should bring up a bookworm. Stay tuned for the next five in the following blog post this week!

1. Phonemic Awareness

By teaching rhymes, songs and short poems and playing simple word games, you can develop your child’s phonemic awareness. That’s the ability to hear, identify and manipulate the sounds of spoken language and to understand that words are made of sequences of phonemes, the smallest units of sound that make a difference in the meaning of words. Students with developed phonemic awareness skills can judge whether two words rhyme, for example, and are able to isolate and substitute the beginning, middle and ending sounds in a word.

2. Phonics

Play games like, “How many words can you make using the letters in ‘spaghetti’?” or practice the alphabet by pointing out letters in every day words. Phonics will help kids realize there is a predictable relationship between phonemes (the sounds of spoken language) and graphemes (the letters and spellings that represent those sounds in written language).

3. Fluency

Read to your child, and help them follow along as they read. Or, turn things around and encourage your child to read aloud to you! This develops your child’s reading fluency, the ability to read accurately and quickly while simultaneously understanding what the words mean.

4. Vocabulary

How strong is your child’s vocabulary – the words that readers need to know to communicate effectively? Teach your child the meaning of important words, and keep a dictionary handy around the home. You can also teach your child how to find clues to figure out unknown words, based on the material’s context, base words and affixes.

5. Comprehension

The best way to enhance your child’s reading comprehension is to get your kids to read for fun. Are there any interesting books that they want to read on their own? Do they show interest in specific genres? Afterwards, try discussing the book together too. This way, your child will be able to derive meaning from the text and understand the deeper purpose of reading.

Dr. Robert Naviaux and a Possible Cure for Autism

If you haven’t known by now, I love surfing the web to keep up to date with all the ongoing research in my field – it’s part of my job! Today, I wanted to share this exciting bit of news about Dr. Robert Naviaux, who is a researcher at the University of California’s San Diego School of Medicine. This guy is someone to watch - not only is he researching chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia - but he is looking into the cellular level of mitochondrial "survival mode" as a reason for autism - and may have found the cure.

Back in 2013, he was able to reverse autism in a mouse model, using a hypothesis that could help explain fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. He believed that autism may be a consequence of abnormal cell communication resulting from abnormal activation of the cell danger response. In other words, cells in autism shut down, stop communicating with other cells and go into hibernation.

He said in a press release:

 “Cells threatened or damaged by microbes, such as viruses or bacteria, or by physical forces or by chemicals, such as pollutants, react defensively, a part of the normal immune response. Their membranes stiffen. Internal metabolic processes are altered – most notably mitochondria, the cells’ critical “power plants” – resulting in activation of the cell danger response and reduced communications between cells.”

In the 2013 mouse experiment, he used a drug called suramin that’s about a century old, known to battle sleeping sickness. He believes that the drug can stop the “cell danger response,” and sure enough, the drug was able to rebuild the mouse’s brain synapses, improve its social behavior and motor coordination, normalize its mitochondrial metabolism and more.

The Phase One clinical trial using suramin for autistic children was completed in April 2016 – the first of its kind. In the trial, suramin was given as a single dose through an intravenous line. Half of the participating children received suramin; half received a placebo (saline infusion). Behavioral and medical tests were conducted before and after treatment, and included some blood and urine analyses.  I have heard through the grapevine that the results were impressive.

Since such a clinical trial using suramin is unprecedented, we all know that there is no guarantee yet for a cure for autism. But it’s a huge step, and if anything, news like this is definitely something for us parents to keep an eye on. It’s exciting to see that researchers like Dr. Naviaux are vigorously conducting research and studies to cure developmental disorders like autism, and I can’t wait to see more progress in this field.

You can read more about the trial here:

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/clinical_trial_launched_to_assess_safety_and_efficacy_of_autism_drug_treatm

Why Brain Training Can Help With Sports

Is your child’s least favorite subject at school PE or gym? Being good at sports means you have to have working rhythm, timing, processing speed, attention and memory – all of which can be a complex combination that is challenging for children even if they spend hours of training. You need quick processing, blocking distractions and a razor-sharp focus.

If you think about it, professional athletes spend countless hours training their body so that they are able to respond to certain stimuli (such as a ball thrown at them, the sound of a starting gun, etc.) as fast and as accurate as possible. The more they practice these specific responses and athletic skills, the better they become. That’s because these learned responses become automatic. It becomes second nature to them.  

It’s the same way with brain training. All of these responses and learning processes are controlled by intricate and complex brain networks, which consist of neurons firing and connecting pathways in your brain. That’s why keiki who struggle with playing active games and sports, can benefit from brain training. Besides physical training, brain training can be the best step to take to enhance their hand-eye coordination and movement. Plus, there’s more perks: brain training can help keiki gain executive and cognitive skills like focus, memory, attention and more.  At Learn 2 Focus we ask the student to repeat targeted sequences to perfect timing to the millisecond range - 0 is the ultimate score.  1000's of repetitions are involved to perfect timing and create automaticity.  Coaches commonly tell us that their players are better engaged and focused during practice and games, and demonstrate improved coordination and speed after 2 intense months of training with us.

When parents come to Learn 2 Focus with concerns about their children’s athletic performance, or a desire to enhance their sports skills, I normally recommend that they start with Interactive Metronome (IM). This program hones in on timing and rhythm, as well as visual and auditory processing, which are all critical factors for sports performance enhancement. After just a couple months of intensive IM training, the results are drastic and evident. I’ve worked with kids who are basketball and football players, tennis players, golfers, swimmers and more.

You can learn more by visiting our IM page, or giving me a call at 352-0116. Happy training!

Sensory Processing Disorder: Intro to Food Play

Remember when we used to be told not to play with food? Our parents always told us, we’re supposed to eat it, not play with it. But for children who have sensory issues, eating may become a particularly challenging obstacle. That’s why food therapy comes in handy as it can help kids overcome their aversion towards certain foods. 

Before you put food into your mouth, you have to be comfortable with touching it. That’s why food therapy incorporates and encourages kids to play with food. We present picky eaters with new foods and help them to touch, before they taste. Touching new foods will help kids learn how the foods feel, smell and explore how they break apart or react to their touch. The more comfortable the kids are with the food, the more likely they are to try them. That’s the theory, and food therapy has been known to work!

Here’s how you can start:                                                  

Try setting aside a 15-30 minute food-play snack time every day at around the same time, whether it’s between breakfast, lunch or dinner, whenever works in your family’s schedule. Make this a snack time, where it is separate from a meal when you want your child to eat a quantity of food for calories or nutrition. This way, this snack time is a stress-free opportunity to explore and play with foods, without giving the child pressure to eat.

And make it fun! You can start by signing up for this free resource library at http://eepurl.com/bTKJe1 which has a useful “Animal Alphabet” e-book that shows how to use different foods like avocado, blueberry, cheese, etc – all the way through the alphabet, to make animal shapes with food. It’s a fun way to start your own food-play snack time!

Sensory Issues and Food

At Learn 2 Focus, I’ve met many children with sensory issues who happen to also have extremely limited diets, eating unhealthy, processed foods such as chicken nuggets, fries, chips and more. Even those children who have been placed on gluten-free or dairy-free diets still tend to eat “kid-friendly” meals that are pretty high on the carb scale and lacking in more a more nutritious, well balanced diet including fruits and vegetables. 

We know kids can be picky eaters, and it’s important for us as parents and caregivers to address problematic feeding behaviors. But how? It’s all too easy to give up and say, “You don’t have to eat it,” when your child makes a fuss at the dinner table and you just want peace and quiet. We certainly can’t force our children to eat something they don’t like the taste, texture, or look of the food. For children with sensory issues, this can be particularly problematic. Sadly, this leads to poor diets lacking in veggies and fruits.

BUT! It is possible for us to teach children about food and help them to grow to love a variety of foods. How? We get creative! Teach them not only how food tastes, but help them explore how our teeth can crunch food, how food can be manipulated with our hands, explore how food smells and more. This is called a sensory approach to feeding, or feeding therapy, and is a great way to help kids with SPD to overcome any fears or dislikes they might have towards certain foods.

For example, let’s take apples. It’s a fruit full of Vitamin C and fiber, a perfect snack alternative to regular Doritos chips. But some children dislike apples because it’s too bland for their tastes, or they don’t like the texture. Explore options like eating apple chips or leaving the apple peel on for extra crunch (and fiber!). This changes the texture of the apple, and might encourage your child to learn to love the fruit. You can also try cutting up apples in non-wedge slices, like cubes or blocks, for children who don’t like the way it looks. Plus, they can have fun by playing with the blocks, stacking them up into shapes.

For kids who might not like chewing crunchy foods, incorporating apples into pies or baking them in the oven are great ways to soften the fruit up and bring out its natural sweetness. Apple sauce is usually the best way to introduce the flavor of the apple too, and helps younger children learn how to use a spoon.

For more tips, visit www.learntolovefood.com and let us know how you can get creative at the kitchen!

4 Reasons Why Students Require a Strong Working Memory

Kids need working memory (WM) to perform a variety of tasks, to do well in class and at home, and to have and maintain acceptable social skills. Often times, children who have ADHD, autism and other developmental disorders find that their WM is also affected. Thankfully, programs like Interactive Metronome, CogMed and Fast ForWord, which are offered at Learn 2 Focus, can help keiki strengthen their WM skills.

1. Remembering Instructions

In order to complete tasks, often times we’re required to remember certain instructions and then follow them. For children who might have weak WM skills, it’s hard to rely on both incoming information and information that’s already been stored. Multi-step directions are particularly challenging, because keiki have trouble keeping in mind what comes next while they’re focusing on what they’re doing now.

2. Paying Attention

Speaking of focus, WM skills can cause problems with staying on the task to get to the end result. It’s happened to all of us – it’s like walking into a different room in your house and forgetting what you went there to do. This is because WM is responsible for maintaining concentration, while remembering what you need to be paying attention to.

3. Learning to Read

We talked about auditory WM skills in our last post. With reading, it helps kids hold onto the sounds letters make, and remember them long enough to sound out new words. Similarly, visual WM skills help kids remember what those words look like. This helps them recognize them throughout the sentence. When working effectively, these two kinds of WM skills keep kids from having to sound out every word they see. This helps them read with less hesitation and become fluent readers.

4. Solving Math Problems

In order to solve math problems, you need to remember math formulas and equations like building blocks. The most important “block” is the one at the bottom of the stack: the ability to recognize and reproduce patterns. This is the foundation that leads to the next block, which is seeing patterns in numbers. This helps you solve and remember basic math facts.  What keeps the blocks from toppling over is the ability to remember, sequence and visualize information—all of which can be difficult for a child with weak WM.

What's Working Memory?

WM is a thinking skill that focuses on the ability to remember and apply relevant information while in the middle of an activity, such as cooking, playing games, studying and more. Children who have ADHD often have deficient Working Memory – not always, but usually.

For children who have problems with WM, they have a hard time remembering their parents’ or teachers’ instructions on completing homework. Other challenges include recalling rules for a game or a sport, or completely any other tasks that involve calling up important information to complete the task.

There are two kinds of WM: auditory memory and visual-spatial memory. The difference lies in hearing vs seeing: auditory memory records what you’re hearing. Visual-spatial memory helps you capture what you’re seeing. In order to access the information that you’ve seen or heard, you have to be able to keep that information in your head, even as new information is arriving and being incorporated.

For children who have WM issues, it’s difficult to grab the current information while also holding onto new incoming information. This means that they have less material to work with when they are performing a task, such as reading and completing a word problem in math. They have to listen for clue words that indicate which operation to use to solve the problem, while also remembering numbers that have to be plugged into the equation.

This is just an example of how WM can affect our children’s day-to-day tasks. Thankfully, there are ways to improve WM issues!

Here at Learn 2 Focus, we have multiple programs that can help your child have stronger WM skills, such as Interactive Metronome, Fast ForWord and Cogmed. Memory booster tasks and video games targeting WM skills can strengthen and improve WM for almost any child. Feel free to contact me if you might have any questions.

5 Reasons to Enroll Your Child in Our Executive Function Boot Camp

We are gearing up for the summer…which means it’s almost time for our Executive Function Bootcamp! Space is limited and reservations are necessary, so I just wanted to give a final shoutout to parents who want their children to improve memory skills and stay on track with everything they learned at school in the spring.

Mark your calendars for the dates below:

·         4th graders: July 11-15

·         5th - 12th graders: June 20-24 (FULL) and July 18-22

·         All classes will be held from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.

I’m excited about having a guest special education teacher, James Street,  teach our bootcamp this year. Street is tailoring the sessions for children who may have ADHD, ADD, working memory deficits,  developmental disorders, as well as those students who need strategies to improve  organization, study, and test taking skills.

Why Your Child Should Take the Bootcamp:

1. Better Memory: Many children who have ADHD or ADD have working memory deficits that make it hard for them to remember information from class. The bootcamp will target improving their working memory so that kids can better remember lessons from different subject areas.

2. Test Smarter: Street will share one-to-one test taking strategies for children so that they are better prepared when they head back to school.

3. Get Organized: One of the biggest culprits of poor academic performance is bad organization skills. Students will learn how to identify their own disorganization, clean out unwanted materials and develop an organization system that works for them.

4. Communicate Well: Being able to communicate well with peers and adults in order to accomplish a goal. Effective communication enhances time management and flexible thinking skills.

5. Free Art: Sign up asap and receive a free week of art classes, held June 13 to 17 and taught by artist and muralist Lynn Speakman. Keiki can enjoy watercolor painting, stone painting, cartoon drawing, portrait drawing, oil pastel and pencil shading and a bonus project of creating a topographic map.

Book your space for Executive Functioning Bootcamp – remember, seats are filling up! – and give me a call at 808-352-0116.

Keiki Success Spotlight: Meet Kainoa

Meet 12-year-old Kainoa, a 6th grader going to a private school who was referred to me for his ADD, dyslexia and working memory deficit. His parents described him as easy going, but to the point where he was “content to sit and let the world pass him by.” He was often lost in his own world at home and school, and would often lose attention or any focus on the task he would be trying to complete. Sometimes, it would even take him 5 hours to finish his homework at night, and need constant parental supervision.

Kainoa’s parents tried medication, but the side effects were causing more problems than helping him with his challenges. A family friend with a daughter who had similar challenges with attention – and had success at Learn 2 Focus – referred Kainoa’s parents to me. Through careful consulting with me and sitting down with him and his parents, we were able to assess that he would benefit the most from Interactive Metronome (IM).

For 4 months, we went through the IM training program. The training included a lot of switching and rotating tasks to keep Kainoa engaged. We went through multiple learning sequences to keep him focused on the tasks, along with an intense program to address his working memory and processing speed.

In less than 4 weeks, Kainoa’s parents noticed several positive changes. He spent less time doing homework – which meant no more 11 p.m. bedtimes to the relief of his parents! – and he was able to work independently without parental supervision on his homework. Not only that, but his quiz scores and homework tasks were much improved.

At the end of 4 months, his parents were so pleased with the vast improvements! Kainoa became more aware of the world and situations around him, which resulted in improved attention in class and at home as well. He was happier and more engaged. In the classroom, he became better at solving math word problems, with higher scores. He also showed improvement in reading and comprehension, showcasing predict, inference, sequence events and memory skills.

If you’d like to learn more about Interactive Metronome and how it might benefit your child, please feel free to contact me and we can chat!