Social Stories (search by topic)
https://tp053.k12.sd.us/Following%20Rules%20at%20School.htm
Social Narrative resource (search by topic)
http://www.kansasasd.com/socialnarratives.php
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Friday, October 14, 2016
Kim Levine Shares Sensory Spaces at the Pioneer Program
Kim Levine, OT at Pioneer Program, shared some of the sensory spaces she helped set up. Some of the rooms features include: adjustable lighting, sound effect machine, multiple swings, squeeze machine roller, trampoline, and sit & spin. She was able to fund some of the equipment through a Donors Choose grant.
OT's Share Tools at Staff Training at Pioneer
Gina Barnes and Debbie Angle, from the PPS OT Team and Motor Development Team present strategies on emotional and sensory regulation. They gave an excellent overview of the Zones of Regulation curriculum.
Friday, October 7, 2016
Handwriting and Brainwaves
PENCILS AND BRAINWAVES: AN ANALYSIS ON HANDWRITING AND MEMORY
This week we reached out to our Director of Elementary Development, Freddie Kendrick – you may remember reading about her efforts to transform elementary teaching – and she provided us with a wealth of insight into the benefits of handwriting. There’s a lot more to writing things out than initially meets the eye, but we’ll let Freddie explain it herself:
~*~
[Freddie] Despite the fact that more and more people are communicating through text, and even though technology is making an increasingly significant impact on our classrooms, handwriting is an invaluable skill to teach and master. In fact, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) actually include standards for legible manuscript writing in kindergarten and first grade. However, there is no mention of it elsewhere in the other grade levels that I have found, and this is a travesty that should be reversed.
Current research shows an important relationship between writing by hand and learning. For example, in a Wall Street Journal article, Gwendolyn Bounds linked brain scans and behavioral testing together and found that participants who wrote out new letterforms instead of using a keyboard to type them out actually hadincreased brain activity. In the article, titled “How Handwriting Trains the Brain,” Bounds elaborates on this finding and discusses how information written by hand stimulates the brain and increases the retention of that written information.
Handwriting is much more than learning how to use a pencil. It is a tool with which our students can hone some of the most critical learning skills, skills that they will be using for the rest of their lives! In the book,Teaching with the Brain in Mind, Eric Jensen – a professional colleague of mine – writes that excessive stress and threat in the school environment may be the single greatest contributor to impaired academic learning. A multi-sensory handwriting program relaxes the emotional brain to reduce stress levels in students and improve learning. I also asked him for a little more insight into his thoughts on handwriting, and he provided me with an excellent quote:
“Two generations ago, 95% of people in America used handwriting. Today, most use keyboarding. Yet the skills of handwriting remain important. They are memory, focus, prediction, attention, sequencing, estimation, patience and creativity.”
click below for full article here:
http://nms.org/Blog/TabId/58/PostId/179/pencils-and-brainwaves-an-analysis-on-handwriting-and-memory.aspx
also see: http://www.naesp.org/sites/default/files/MJ12%20Berninger.pdf
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