In our continuing interview series our Executive Director, Louise Ukleja, recently sat down with astro-physicist Hugh Ross to discuss Asperger’s Syndrome and how he has coped with his diagnosis, and what advice he has for others. We have 5 short interviews posted on our Opportunity Schools Channe, and we encourage you to view them all. Here is one in the series about Hugh’s advice for adults with Asperger’s.
Our Director of Education & Satellite Support Services, Joanne Foland, recently sat down with Ron Leaf, co-founder and director of Autism Partnership, to discuss autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. Videos are below… and you can also view them and others anytime on our YouTube Channel.
Ever wonder how important your interaction with your student can be? Here’s video from LD Online that quickly recounts a story from Patricia Polacco about her teacher first diagnosing her with dyslexia. All these years later and she is still impacted by that moment.
Find more stories like these at LD Online. A great web resource.
Soundabet is the name of the program started by Dan Gurney in the late 1990′s to help teach his kindergarten class phonemes. Research has shown that successfully teaching children to read requires five areas to be thoroughly taught; and phonemic awareness is the starting point followed by phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension.
Here is a video of one of Dan’s kindergarten classes “performing” the Soundabet song, where they sound out the letters of the alphabet.
Dan has taught kindergarten in Northern California for over 25 years. You can follow him online, both at his Soundabet blog, as well as his Mr. Kindergarten blog for his school.
We are excited to have Dan present Soundabet at our Teacher Training Institute this summer, July 17th.
If you have time you may wish to watch this video of Nanci Bell delivering a lecture at the M.I.N.D. Institute about the nature of reading difficulties. It is not training per se, but rather a discussion about the research behind reading problems and the intervention techniques that are being used to reach these students.
Opportunity Schools uses Lindamood-Bell’s research-based intervention as part of our program’s curricula, so Nanci’s lecture may be especially interesting to our parents and teachers alike. It is a little over an hour long, so be prepared… it’s academic, but well worth the watch.
