School was frustrated because Allie had deficits in expressive and receptive language as well as in problem solving. Add these together, and she couldn't learn information from you telling her or from written instruction. So she had to learn from modeling. This will be too difficult for success in middle school, and meanwhile she is falling farther and farther behind.

The first thing I did was to test her. She had retained primitive reflexes, poor auditory processing and some low cognitive skills. She spent 3 months working on integrating the reflexes while getting cranial sacral therapy and listening therapy. These were done as homework with appointments in the office every two weeks. The next 3 months were spent doing cognitive training, an hour a day, 6 days a week. Her cognitive scores, as tested by the Gibson Cognitive Test, are as follows (age-equivalent scores): 

Test Name                             Pre-Test                 Post-Test               Change

Processing Speed             11.3                          14.3                              3 

Visual Processing             18                              10                              -8 

Word Attack                         9.2                             10.7                          1.5 

She had amazing results in most areas!! The auditory analysis subtest is testing phonemic awareness, which she was unable to do in the beginning. Because it was an area that was highly targeted, she did extremely well. Also notice that she went up by almost 5 years growth in logic and reasoning in 6 months.

During 6th grade, Allie's parents did not let her have the IEP or resource room. I continued to work with her, until mid-November 2 times a week for an hour on reading and language. When I went back in January armed with more of the same, Allie said "I don't need that, I have an A in reading!" Wow. So I worked with her until the end of the school year once a week on math. After her mom got her final report card, she called me to say that Allie was on the high honor role. Wow.

In case you think, that is all fine and good, Kathy must be a great teacher, I will share the results from the Lakewood School in Twin Lakes, WI. Ryan is a teacher there who had come to a workshop and asked for exactly what to do. In the Dyslexia, Dyscalculia and Dysgraphia workshop, put on PESI, Inc. I give many examples of what to do. He put these into 3 6-week sessions and gave these lessons to the LD children during an after school program. Following are two different sets of scores from two different times of the year (4/23/14):

"Our team of three trainers began by working for six weeks with a pilot group of two 3rd graders.  We concentrated on the moro and palmar primitive reflexes, and the working memory and processing speed cognitive skills.  

Here are the results of our neediest student after just six short weeks (age-equivalent scores):

Skill                                     Pretest                Post 

Then, from Ryan again (6/29/15):

"I hope this email finds you well.  I have some exciting results to share with you from a test I just completed!  This student is the first one Kassie, Emily, and I started working with.  We worked with him for a total of 60 days in the spring of 2014.  When we started meeting with kids again this year, we made the decision to not work with kids that we already had groups with.  It was a tough decision, but we wanted to reach as many kids as possible.  However, by chance, we had one Gibson screener left unused.  I administered it tonight to our first student, which is approximately 13 months since we stopped working with him, and I think the lasting results speak for themselves.

Boy, 8.65 years old > 9.98 years old (scores are percentile ranks)

Test                                   Pre          Post

Processing speed            0               25

Working Memory             9               36

Long term mem              11            71

Visual proc                      5               4

Audit proc                       21            60

Logic                               10            3

Word attack                    11            64"

If our job as educators and parents is to help our students and children to be successful, to be able to leave school and get a job that is meaningful and up to our potential, it is MANDATORY that we improve the brain's ability to think and learn. The absolute best place for this work is in the schools, as raising children is tough enough for parents. Do the parents have to be responsible for learning how to improve intelligence also? Do they also need to get training so that they can do this work?

In many schools across the US and the world, more and more schools are taking some time each day to improve the brain development of the students they have. The results are amazing. Testing scores are improving. Lives are being saved.

You may be interested in becoming a Brain Advancement Coach, like Kassie from Twin Lakes Elementary School, or the mom who wrote

"My daughter is a senior this year. She was diagnosed with dyslexia last winter, just before I attended your seminar in St. Paul. I think that was in March. I brought home 'Maintaining Brains', and she benefitted greatly from it! The differences are amazing! She is ready to add in the next steps. I'm not exactly sure of the best way to go about that, so I'm looking forward to doing this myself!  As an educator, I've come across so many kids that I wish I could now go back and try this with. My husband is a clinical psychologist in private practice and our plan is to open a tutoring center after Abby is out and on her own. I'm trained in the Orton-Gillingham approach to teaching reading. I'm thinking that this training would be a necessary component, though for kids/families who are feeling hopeless and falling through the cracks, especially."

If so, please take a look at www.brainadvancementteam.com. If you sign up now for the next session which starts October 1, you can save $100. This early bird special will run until July 31. I'd love to get to know you while we work hard training our own brains in preparation for training others!!