How Can I Prepare My Special Needs Student To Be Successful In College?
Only a small percentage of students with special learning needs attend college, but parents have the opportunity, from the moment their child is born, to insure that their child is one of the successful college graduates. Read more
My Child Needs What?…What Are Executive Skills And Why Do Students Need Them?
All parents need to know about executive skills. These are the skills that help us monitor and direct our lives. We use our executive skills to plan and organize our behavior, make well-thought-out decisions, overrule immediate desires in favor of longer-term goals, take conscious control of emotions, and monitor our thoughts in order to work more efficiently and effectively.
Kids with ADHD have difficulty with one or more of the executive skills. And other types of learning issues can cause a child to have trouble developing and using their executive skills. Read more
Homework Tips For Kids With Special Learning Needs
The homework routine often becomes an activity that neither parent nor child look forward to. The parent’s role in the homework process is to be sure the work your child brings home is appropriate and to set up the conditions in the home that are necessary for your child to be successful. Read more
Make This a Great School Year!
It is very important for parents of kids with special learning needs to work with their child’s teacher to make the school year as productive as possible.
Learn everything you can about your child’s new teacher by talking to the principal and looking on the website. Try to arrange an informal visit with the teacher before school starts.
Take your child to visit a new school before school begins. Be sure to point out the cafeteria, lockers, gym, classroom, bus stop, play areas, restrooms, and main office. Children need to know how to get around and find all the people and places they need during the day. Read more
Parents Often Ask Me… How Is Educational Therapy Different Than Tutoring?
I’m often asked how my educational therapy approach is different from tutoring. Tutors focus on teaching bodies of facts, and sometimes a small number of study skills. Tutors are basically helpful to students when the student learns relatively easily and has just fallen a little behind for some reason such as being ill.
But tutors are NOT trained in the way the human brain learns so they don’t know how to help students who learn differently or who have complicated learning needs. Read more
Download – Strategies for Great Reading Comprehension
On this episode of Special Kid School Talk Dr. Kari interviews Emily Iland, parent, author, and leader in the autism field about the best strategies for teaching children to understand what they read. Emily’s new book, Drawing a Blank: Improving Comprehension for Readers on the Autism Spectrum, is a wealth of resources for parents and educators. Ms. Iland is also the co-author of Autism Spectrum Disorders from A to Z (2004). Many children with special needs such as autism and learning disabilities have trouble making sense of what they read. What makes it even more confusing is that these kids can have good “decoding” or ability to sound out the words. Parents and teachers want strategies to help these kids!
Click here to see Ms. Iland’s website.
Download- Dr Kari Miller – Does Your Child Have Speech and Language Problems?
Perhaps your toddler has a stutter, or has trouble putting words together to communicate. If your child is having difficulty, you want to know what you can do at home, and how to find trained help. Join us for an expert interview with speech and language therapist, Roberta Tishman. Be sure to call in with your questions, submit questions during the broadcast via the chat room, or email questions before the broadcast to Dr. Kari at klmiller555@sbcglobal.net. If your child has language or speech difficulties, you don’t want to miss this show! Ms. Tishman’s website: http://bhslc.com
Reading Comprehension Strategies That Work: Anchoring Visualizations
Some kids have trouble with reading comprehension. There can be many reasons they have difficulty, but one of the main causes of reading comprehension problems is that students do not create vivid images as they read.
In my educational therapy practice, I often listen to students read. Some students have difficulty with word recognition, but many do not. When your child has little or no difficulty sounding out the words in the passage, but still has comprehension difficulty, the problem may be that he or she is not skillful with visual imagery. And even if your child does have trouble sounding out words, he may still have difficulty with comprehension as well.
Researchers have noticed that students are not as adept at making pictures in their minds of the material they hear or read as they were years ago. Perhaps the explosion of visual images all around us has a lot to do with that. Kids are “fed” visual images from television, movies, magazines, and billboards. They may not be getting as much practice in generating their own images. Read more
Dr. Kari Miller Discusses Dyslexia and Reading Strategies
October is Dyslexia Awareness Month. Kids with reading difficulties or dyslexia have it rough in school. Parents often feel frustrated and helpless as they watch their smart child suffer and lose hope. Parents can ease the burden faced by kids with reading problems. You won’t want to miss the strategies I talk about on this show! You’ll learn lots of ways to help your child who’s dealing with any of these problems: sounding out words, comprehension, reading smoothly, and remembering what he reads.
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