Good Sensory Learning Blog

As an educational therapist and learning specialist, hooking is one of the most valuable memory strategies that I teach my students. In fact, tedious study sessions can be transformed into a memorable and often hilarious task. What is Hooking? Hooking is a memory strategy in which you use the term itself that you are trying to remember to guide you to the answer. In other words, you search for clues in the word. You can "hook" auditorily, to the sound or sounds in the term or visually, to the way the word looks. Occasionally, you might find a hook in...

We all suffer, from time to time, with that feeling that a name or phrase we are trying to recall is on the tip of our tongue, but somehow we just can't access the needed information in the moment. For many students, this happens during stressful moments such as test-taking, but for others, such as most students with dyslexia, this is a pervasive problem that requires intervention. What Exactly is a Wording Finding Problem? Word finding problems, also known as word retrieval difficulties, dysnomia, anomia or semantic dyslexia, result in difficulties recalling names of objects, places, and people, with no impairment...

When I first began my private practice about 20 years ago, my primary focus was remedial reading with Orton Gillingham (OG) methods. With my doctoral training in hand, I continually reviewed reading programs, read books, and went through a number of OG training courses.  Although the suggested materials were purported to be "multisensory," I still found the process, for the most part, dull and boring. In addition, I often had to bribe my students with candy and stickers to read long lists of words and complete tedious drills.  What could I do to make the process fun, exciting, memorable and even more...

I am so pleased to announce my 12th Go Dyslexia video podcast: Dyslexia: Building Vocabulary and Semantic Skills with Infercabulary, featuring Guest Beth Lawrence and Host Dr. Erica Warren.      This blog shares my most recent video podcast, featuring dyslexia expert Beth Lawrence, MA, CCC-SLP. Beth is an Orton Gillingham trained, certified speech-language pathologist, and CEO of Communication Aptitude (dba InferCabulary and WordQuations).  This is the 12th of many free video podcasts for Go Dyslexia! During the video podcast, Beth and I talk about Infercabulary, a fun and multisensory online site that offers vocabulary and semantic reasoning development exercises and...

When studying learning and cognition in graduate school, I was drawn to the theories of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian Psychologist from the early 1900s that presented a sociocultural approach to learning and cognition. He offered a theory that I believe presents optimal classroom instruction for all learners. What is Vygotsky’s Theoretical Lens? At the heart of Vygotsky's theoretical lens is that social interaction plays a key role in the development of learning and cognition. Vygotsky claimed: "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (inner-psychological)...