Somewhere along the way in education, we've separated the brain from the body. Today students, especially those in secondary school, sit nearly all the time. When what they really need to do is get up and move.

When I was in school, we we're given many opportunities to move around. There was the twice daily recess or a gym class plus a break in the middle of the afternoon so that we could stand up and exercise to Chicken Fat. Then we’d get a drink, head to the restroom, and dive back into our studies.

“It is helpful to think of the brain as a muscle,” Dr. John Ratey recently told colleagues at a conference on “Learning and the Brain” in Boston. Dr. Ratey, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, says the best way to “maximize the brain” is through exercise and movement.

The American Heart Association has devoted an entire website of ideas for promoting a healthy school environment because they know that experiential learning strategies anchor learning up to 90% better.

Now researchers are learning that strenuous exercise, like jumping rope, can prepare the brain for optimal learning. Current brain research supports the need for movement in the learning process.

Here are just a few of the ways that jumping rope may help prepare the body-brain for learning.

• Raising the heart rate gets more blood to the brain, feeding it needed nutrients and oxygen for heightened alertness and mental focus.

• Aerobic exercise grows new brain cells in rodents, and promising research suggests that may also apply to humans. In short, jumping rope is an exercise that allows both brain hemispheres to perform parallel.

• The vestibular system that creates spatial awareness and mental alertness is strengthened through activities such as jumping rope. Balance and jumping activities provide the student with a framework for reading and other academic skills.

• Rhythmic aspects of jumping rope can develop the internal dialogue needed to establish basic reading skills. Beat awareness and beat competency simulate the basic rhythm patterns of our language that need to be established for better language acquisition.

• Physical activity reduces stress. Cardiovascular exercise puts the body-brain into homeostasis, and contributes to balancing the body’s chemistry, electrical, and organ systems. And, of course, exercise can have similar benefits as some anti-depressant medications.

• Exercise also calms students and lets them pay more attention in class. Students who have less pent-up energy are calm and will be in the best possible mental state to start learning classroom material.

Jumping rope is an affordable, fun way to engage students in improved learning. In fact, the Subway and American Heart Association has developed the Jump Rope for Heart program to help students achieve high academic standards. Also, you may want to check out the JAM (Just-a-Minute) school program for more ideas to teach kids healthier lifestyles by dancing.

What do you think? Have you discovered (or rediscovered) the learning-physical activity connection? Share your successes or ideas with us!

Sources: Begley, S. “ Your Child’s Brain”, Newsweek, Feb. 19, 1996; Gage, R. and Van Pragg, H. “New Brain Cells,” Scientific American, May 1999; Hannaford, C. “Smart Moves,” Great Ocean Publishers; Brewer, C., and Campbell, D., “Rhythms of Learning.” 1999; Weikart - presented at AAHPERD Convention, Orlando, 2000; Ratey, J. “A User’s Guide to the Brain”, Pantheon Books, 2001

It’s always a delight to stumble across a blog, website, or organization that supports and sustains reading strategies and excellence in education. Such was the case, Friday afternoon. I was working through a Google search on the term “dyslexia and sight words,” when I found the website, Improve-Education.org.

There is a lot of worthwhile content and strong commentary on this site, like MAX Your Creativity and Leading Boys to Reading, but I decided to choose this essay to share with you today.

You Still Teach Sight Words??!!

A reading coach sent me a letter with this question:
"I also would like to know how you respond to teachers who are married to sight-word drills and describe their rationale as, 'Well, there are just so many words that don't follow any rules.'"

Which prompted the following rumination (excerpts from the original page):

Consider a five-year-old American kid. English-wise, he is many years ahead of [a new ELL immigrant to the United States]. He is what anthropologists call “a native speaker.” He routinely says such things as, “Hey, Dad, how did Brett Favre end up with the Vikings? Is he going to play next year? What’s so great about Minnesota?”

Think how many years it would take us, as intelligent adults, to reach that sophisticated linguistic level in Thai, Czech, or [other foreign language]. Additionally, as Rudolf Flesch reported, this child recognizes about 15,000+ words and names. Probably he uses 5,000 words and names. Surely, he would already know 99% of the words he might encounter in a typical first-grade setting. He uses most of these words on a weekly basis! He already knows all the pronunciations (and is sublimely indifferent to whether they supposedly follow rules or not).

Here we arrive at the fundamental point: the boy has a vast store of knowledge to help him deal with text. All he needs is a little help to connect with the printed versions of all these words already in his head. Phonics is that help.
 
Here’s the remarkable truth. Based on all the anecdotes I’ve read, about half the average first-grade class will eventually figure out how to read, no matter what is [taught] (even sight-words). I suspect you could spend the first year or two singing songs, telling stories, and reciting poetry, with occasional pointing at letters or syllables, and most kids would figure it out.

Phonics programs basically promise to teach kids to read in about 100 days - just three or four months. But it takes years to master just the 300-word Dolch list; and doing this doesn’t produce a reader.

Note: The half of the class that won’t learn almost routinely is exactly the half most damaged by sight-words! These slower kids need systematic instruction in phonics. If they don’t get it, they are likely to become “functional illiterates.”

As you can see for yourself, the author and education activist, Bruce Deitrick Price is very passionate about systematic, explicit phonics. So are we.

Our programs are designed to help every student clearly understand and quickly internalize reading skills and strategies like blends, slides, and more. See for yourself with a free 30-day trial of Reading Horizons v5 for 4th grade – adult students! Let us know what you think about the reading trial - we'd love to hear from you.

Did you miss it? If you didn’t get a chance to go the 2011 CEC Conference in National Harbor, Maryland this year, we’ve got you covered.

Not only did our very own Heidi Hyte, Curriculum Director and ESL Specialist win the Practitioner Presentation Award for the Autism and Developmental Disabilities (DADD) Division, but we have the notes from her extremely popular presentation: A Hands-on Approach for Struggling Readers.

Here is a video of Heidi winning her award:

Heidi reviewed critical decoding strategies with attendees and then offered five entertaining activities to reinforce those skills and improve literacy in the classroom.

If you’re interested in the Eraser Game, Boggle, Slap, and more get Heidi’s presentation!

CEC 2011 presentation handout.pdf (158.83 kb)

Also for additional reading strategies that can help you improve comprehension, see our white paper, What are Reading Strategies?

Play and learn! What activities do you use to improve literacy in the classroom?

I recently watched an interview on dyslexia with Orlando Bloom that was hosted by the Child Mind Institute. This interview was part of the Adam Jeffrey Katz Memorial Lecture Series.

I was impressed with Bloom’s determination to overcome his learning disability and his mother’s lobbying efforts in behalf of her son. But times have changed. Today, educators have more research and reading strategies to help dyslexic students than ever before.

I think that we can all agree that it is vitally important that celebrities like Orlando Bloom and others, speak about their own personal reading struggles as they have worked to overcome dyslexia.

Imagine how other young dyslexic students might feel when they hear Orlando Bloom say, “It’s a gift and don’t let anyone tell you that because you struggle with dyslexia you’ll never make it in life because it’s simply not true. It’s about your determination and desire to overcome. And I think that the obstacles that come with any disability can become the opportunity of your life if you make it that.”

My hope is that you will share this message with the students in your classroom. All obstacles, even reading problems, really can become the opportunity of a lifetime.

Learn how to give your students the right reading strategies and tools by taking advantage of the free Discover Intensive Phonics Online Workshop.

Response to Intervention is designed as an early student intercession to prevent long-term academic failure. In order to be constructive, instruction and interventions must be matched to meet students' needs.

RTI is generally depicted as a three-tiered model. Each tier provides increasingly individualized instruction, continuous monitoring of progress to calculate gains, and criteria for changing interventions. In general, the tiers include:

Tier 1 – High-quality instruction and behavioral supports provided in general education classrooms.

Tier 2 – Small group instruction – intensive, specialized interventions provided with consistency by highly trained teachers.

Tier 3 – More individualized intervention and/or referral for special education.

This post will focus on students classified as Tier II - those who did not respond to Tier 1 instruction and will need to receive more focused researched-based instruction in small groups.

Since students at this level are considered at-risk, they will require intensive, systematic instruction on up to three foundational reading skills. To achieve this objective, it is recommended that these groups meet three to five times a week, for 20 to 40 minutes.

The over-reaching goal of reading instruction in Tier II is for the students to be able to understand and apply the following reading skills:

• Letter name identification and sounds

• Phonemic awareness

• Proficiency with basic phonics skills

• Word reading

• Reading fluency (high frequency words)

• Listening comprehension

• Vocabulary development

Helping students reach these goals sounds good on paper. However, reading specialists need an effective reading program that can play a major role in each of the three RTI tiers. Using the right online reading system can reinforce and strengthen students' skills since students in Tiers II and III will receive the same method and use the same materials as students receiving universal instruction.

Does your reading program offer:
A fully narrated lessons so that students can work independently?

Concepts that are presented in a multisensory way?

A system that allows students to learn at their own pace and practice the skills as much as is necessary?

Or assessments and mastery interim tests to ensure that students learn and retain the skills that are being taught?

Having the proper online reading system is the difference between the continuous status quo or 2-3 grade levels of reading improvement in only months.

The school year is nearly over. How will you help your students graduate from Tier II and improve their reading?