“Anyone who has ever owned a pet will readily verify the benefits of associating with furred, feathered, or finned friends. Animals are fun to be with and comforting to hold. Their antics inspire humor and a sense of carefreeness, a return to childhood with its buoyant spirits. Caring for pets encourages nurturance, responsibility, and adherence…
Featured
I’m An Apraxia Person
“I’m an apraxia person” The heartwarming story by a young man from Singapore of his long difficult journey to his discovery that he grew up with and is dealing with apraxia. I received the following private message on Facebook from Lim who has provided a photo and permission to share. If there is any professional…
A Lost Language Can Be Good
There are 6,909 distinct languages. While that may sound like a lot, I believe there are far more. Thousands of Languages We communicate through language, and most of us speak at least one. If you are reading this you probably speak, or least know how to read, English. According to an article in the Linguistic Society of…
Study Finds 3 Year Olds Seek Social Norms Even Inferring Them Where Adults See None
Irrespective of what the children saw: they judged singular, spontaneous, and apparently purposeless behavior as generalizable and absolutely right – provided that it was not unintentional according to their observation. They even expected another person to do exactly the same and protested when this person did something different with the objects, thus violating the “social…
The Time My Nonverbal Son Got Lost
The next moments are a blur. It was a vast place crowded with people, and the sun was starting to set. Being most of it was a field where we just picked grapes I knew it would soon be pitch black. I felt all the blood rush out of my face, I literally thought…
Class Size Matters, And It Matters A Lot
“The evidence suggests that increasing class size will harm not only children’s test scores in the short run, but also their long-run human capital formation. Money saved today by increasing class sizes will result in more substantial social and educational costs in the future.” ~ Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach PhD When we have a special needs children…
Healthy Diet Boosts Children’s Reading Skills
“Another significant observation is that the associations of diet quality with reading skills were also independent of many confounding factors, such as socio-economic status, physical activity, body adiposity, and physical fitness” ~Eero Haapala, PhD What can be better than an educational study out of Finland? One that finds a healthy diet boosts children’s reading skills!…
Dolphins Have Conversations ‘Just like us’
“Humans must take the first step to establish relationships with the first intelligent inhabitants of the planet Earth by creating devices capable of overcoming the barriers that stand in the way of using languages and in the way of communications between dolphins and people,”~Dr Vyacheslav Ryabov Have your children ever swam with dolphins? What about…
Study: Cognitive Ability Can Far Exceed Verbal Ability (shocking)
Regardless of the method used to classify children as minimally verbal, 43 to 52 percent of minimally verbal children have significantly higher nonverbal than verbal intelligence scores. Great news for all of us that care for children with a communication impairment even though it’s something we already knew as parents. Something I’ve been saying for…
The Association Method School Started By A Mom
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead The Association Method The Association Method is a multisensory phonics based method for teaching oral and written language to children with severe communication disorders including apraxia. It was devised originally…