Providing Support for Different Learners [Show]

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Gretchen Roe: 00:00:05.480
Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. Our mission here is to help families stay in the learning journey, wherever it takes them. This bonus episode was previously recorded as a webinar and was not created with the audio listener in mind. We hope you will find value in today’s episode. Hi, everyone. Welcome. My name is Gretchen Rowe and it’s my very great pleasure to welcome my very dear friend, Kathy Kuhl, today to talk to you about working with kids who learned differently. This is going to be a terrific conversation. We have planned well, but of course, this is like eating an elephant. So there’s a lot of things to talk about and a lot of things that we need to discuss. Kathy, I’m going to let you introduce yourself and then we’ll get into the meat of our conversation today.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:00:53.403
Well, thanks for having me. And not only because of the opportunity to help folks but also for the pleasure of talking with Gretchen, who I’ve known through homeschool conferences for years. I started out not intending to homeschool. I had taught middle school math and sent my kids off to school, and it was a fabulous school, and I thought, “Okay, I’m done with my teaching.” That was wrong. My son started coming home from kindergarten complaining that the work was too hard and could he have a friend over. So that seemed to be an unlikely place to find a homeschooler. But he was coming home from school emotionally exhausted, said the work was too hard, was struggling– by third grade, he couldn’t even count to 100 or read. So I started working with him over the summers. I had friends who homeschooled who were giving me resources and encouragement. We called it Kuhl school because our last name is pronounced Kuhl, K-U-H-L. And after three years of that, we decided, “Okay, fourth grade’s coming up.” And they lift the bar for fourth grade. They’re expected to know how to read and just use it. So we decided to try homeschooling. And we took it a year at a time. By the time he was in high school, people were starting to ask me questions about how I did it with this guy who had trouble learning. His neuropsychologist said homeschooling was the best thing I could do for him and I should write a book. But what worked for him might not work for your kids, so I interviewed 64 families across North America, homeschooling kids with diagnosed learning disabilities.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:02:31.207
And with those interviews and all the reading I’ve been doing the last few years, that became the core of this handbook I wrote for parents, Homeschooling Your Struggling Learner, handbook style, so people can just jump in and grab the piece they need. And with that, I started speaking at homeschool conferences and connecting with folks over the internet, like I am now, by email and Skype and FaceTime. So it’s really grown over the years. It’s not where I expected to be and I absolutely love what I’m doing.

Gretchen Roe: 00:03:04.697
I have to tell you, it has been a tremendous experience to know Kathy, to read her materials, to know what a valuable resource she is to families who learn differently. Kathy, where do you want to begin?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:03:17.138
Oh my. So many interesting questions. And I’ll just say, if we don’t get to yours, another way you can get help is you can contact me at LearnDifferently.com. Lower right, there’s a little bubble that says Got questions. You can drop me a note. We can even set up a time to talk. One of the questions I liked was how to best engage my son regarding his curriculum because there’s so many ways we can go with that. The first one is to make sure you’ve got an appropriate curriculum for this child, not just, is it not too hard and not too easy, but does it suit the child’s learning preferences lot of our kids who are struggling learners need hands-on materials. And those of us who don’t need it, that can sound like a waste of time and expensive luxury, expensive in the terms of time it takes. But for some of our struggling learners, it’s really essential not just to build things, but to then sketch them. For instance, if you were trying to teach the concept of three-fourths, you could show someone – let’s see, over here is the best place to – if that’s a square, then this is three-fourths of a square. So you’d have them build it, and maybe they’d also build it this way, and maybe they built it with triangles. But then you’d also have them draw pictures of three-fourths of a square in all the different orientations and with the different shapes, and then write the fraction. If you do all those on the same piece of paper, that syncs things in.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:04:54.592
I went to a webinar, excuse me, a workshop at the learning disabilities association on medical students with dyslexia. Isn’t that an exciting topic to think about our struggling learners go into medical school? And one of the examples that struck me in that workshop was they showed a series of cartoons that these medical students had drawn, one of them had drawn to illustrate different– a group of related diseases. And they had Fred Flintstone with the rash and Wilma with the sore knee and Barney– and if I had looked at that ten years before, I would have thought, what a waste of time. It’d be much more efficient just to write the list. Well, yeah, for me, it would, but for this guy, this is going to stick in his head. And now it’s been more than ten years, and I still remember that picture. And that, well, they had the– Bernie had the red– well, whatever I just said. [laughter] So that much is stuck, and I wasn’t even in the class. So a lot of these things that seem like a waste of time for our kids are actually helpful.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:56.155
So one of the things one of the questions that parents frequently ask is, what do you do when you have a child who is not an emerging reader at the level that all of us expect a student to emerge as a reader? So– and I know that you have experience with this. So can you talk a little bit about ways parents can be supported in that process for our students?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:06:20.134
Certainly, to borrow two words from Special Ed, you want to remediate and accommodate. To remediate is to strengthen the area of weakness and the accommodation is the workaround. It’s like when I was 16, I broke my elbow. The remediation when the cast came off was the elastic band, learning to stretch out my arm again. But the accommodation was, I didn’t carry books with that arm for a while. I put off learning to drive a stick shift because this arm wasn’t going to be shifting so well for a while. So we want to look at kids who are behind. I would say, go to a dyslexia specialist. I’ve got an article on this on my website for a screening. There’s some online screenings where you can just find their reading level and see where you are. You want to look at their phonemic awareness. I know Demme Learning has some resources in this area. There’s other resources I recommend on my website to try and see if this is just learning more slowly, or if it’s actually dyslexia. And dyslexia has got a huge range within it. Some people are very slightly dyslexic and some people need an in-person tutor who has been trained in teaching dyslexics, not just in reading, but in dyslexia and breaking down all the rules into simple specific chunks and teaching them very slowly and discreetly so that they stick. So that’s the remediation piece.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:07:47.180
The accommodation is you read aloud to them. You use audiobooks. You do things that play to their strengths so that they don’t go around saying, oh, always me, I’m the person who can’t read. I must be dumb. Because they’re not. Being dyslexic doesn’t mean you’re dumb. It just means you have trouble with the decoding and the processing of the complex process that reading is. It turns out reading actually is rocket science. We’re not designed originally for reading and it uses just about every part of our brain – multiple sections – maybe not every part, but three or four different parts of the brain are involved. So if there is a glitch anywhere, then it can complicate things. But we’ve got to try to work around it. If you read aloud to a child who is dyslexic, even a teenager who is dyslexic– I read Lord of the Rings, all three books, to my son when he was 15 or 16, and my voice has barely recovered, but it was great. He got the movies, and he got the references. He enjoyed geeking out with all his friends because he’d been through it that way. And that’s one accommodation.

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:01.370
You had said something when we were talking – and maybe this was something I captured from watching one of your videos – that your child is a person, not a diagnosis. And I thought that was such an important point to make. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that, because I think sometimes we encounter parents that once they have a diagnosis, it sort of paralyzes them, “Okay, now I have a diagnosis. What do I do?”

Kathy Kuhl: 00:09:27.363
Right. Thank you. Well, if your child was diagnosed with strep throat, you’d know what to do. You’d get the antibiotics and you’d take it easy for a while. And if your child has a diagnosed learning disability, that’s just one small part of who they are. They’re still the same person with the same sense of humor, the same talents, the same passions. Maybe they’re crazy about geckos or horses or rocks or music or elaborate drawings they’re doing. So we don’t want to just say, “Oh my gosh, my kid has autism or dyslexia,” or whatever it is, because there’s so much more than that one thing. If we focus on just that area of weakness, we do several things that hurt them. First of all, it can be discouraging. If all Gretchen ever said about me was that I’m bad at throwing and catching balls, it would hinder our friendship and it would not help us work well together. It would not help me make progress. Now, maybe she’ll do some ball-tossing and try to help me get better on the way, but we don’t build the whole school around the weakness. We address the weaknesses, but we also build on the strengths. We build on those interests. When you don’t know what the strengths are – and I didn’t when my son was ten, I will admit – you just keep trying different things until something sticks. If you’d asked me when–

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:55.367
And I think you make a really good observation here, is you didn’t know what the strengths were, so you became the ardent observer of your child to know where his strengths lay. And that becomes a process, a collaborative process, doesn’t it? You said something about that when we spoke last week. So can you talk about how parents can collaborate with their children to discover what their strengths are?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:11:23.044
Well, as you said, Gretchen, it begins with observing, and also little discrete comments on what you observe. And when they’re grinning all over themselves because they’re delighted that something went well, we can say, “Hmm, seems like you have a talent for that.” Or better yet, “You really worked hard at that.” We don’t want our kids to think, “Oh, I can only do things I’m talented at.” But we can observe that good piece of work they did, that perseverance they showed. So we encourage it that way. We also engage them. If you’ve got a choice of reading two different books for the language arts part of your homeschool curriculum, maybe you let them pick. Maybe you observe that they’ve been reading a whole lot about motorcycles– or bicycles lately, and so you build on that. I loved when I taught at our local homeschool group. And I taught composition. I love to let the kids pick the topics and do research on things. I’ve had kids submit papers on skateboards. And instead of just doing a regular compare-and-contrast essay on something they didn’t care about, I’d say, “Okay, compare your two favorite brands of skateboard,” or if you want to require a persuasive essay, why I should be allowed to have a guinea pig as a pet instead of something they don’t care about. I actually did that with my daughter. We made her write an essay on what would be required to take care of a guinea pig. And after she wrote that, it involved doing some scary things like calling a pet store and asking– which she really hated doing. But after she wrote those paragraphs, we looked it over and said, “Okay, good research. We think we can do this. You can get your guinea pig.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:13:12.884
[laughter] I always tell parents to be careful what you bring into a child’s life. I had that child at 11 who said she wanted a pet rat, and my first thought was over my dead body. Long story short, I set her the task of reading every book on pocket pets in the library, and she did it. And now she’s a research biologist, so we set her on a path. Sometimes we don’t realize what kind of seeds we sow as parents. And I know that– when you interviewed families, tell me some of the serendipities that came out of those interviews. What are some things that you learned from the families that you interviewed that surprised you and delighted you?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:13:53.799
One of the interesting things was how families with kids with different learning challenges faced some of the same issues. For many of them, movement breaks helped. For many of them, the parents needed to make time to connect with other parents one way or another– other parents who had kids with learning challenges, and there’s many ways to do that. I’ve written a book about staying sane as you homeschool. And it includes some stuff on finding support. I’ve blogged about that at Learn Differently, and I think it’s important to do that. Because if you’re going to homeschool a child with learning differences, it’s not easy. You can’t just say, “Oh, I’ll go to the homeschool convention and buy brand X curriculum box for 5th grade, and take it home and open it up, and then I can go read my magazine while my kid walks through it or the online version of that.” You’re going to have to pick what you choose, maybe from different publishers, maybe different grade levels. You’re going to need to observe what works. You’re going to need to find an appropriate schedule that works for this child. Maybe you’re breaking a lesson in chunks and having an exercise break in the middle or a drawing lesson in the middle or something else.

Gretchen Roe: 00:15:20.169
So you said movement breaks. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? I know what you mean, but parents who are watching this may not know what you mean, so.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:15:29.984
I was just getting ready to record a session on this for my new course on homeschooling kids with attention deficit disorder, but the principles are the same for lots of kids. I’m staring down at my chair because I’m about to take my hands and grab the seat of my chair and straighten my elbows. This is a kind of movement you can do during a lesson. If you do it slowly enough, you can even do it in church or community meetings, [laughter] but it gets the weight off your butt. And it gets the wiggles out. So we can do things like that during a lesson, but also, you could just go to YouTube and put in “movement breaks”. There are many videos that classroom teachers use for a two-minute break. Maybe it’s a little dancing in your chair kind of thing. Maybe it’s this. Maybe they’re standing up, and I’m not going to do that because I want to stay on camera, but standing and lifting elbows to alternate knees, just for a couple of minutes. We don’t want to go start a soccer game because then we won’t want to stop, or whatever sport your child’s into. We can also have movement breaks as a part of a lesson, for instance, spelling. One of my son’s spelling lessons included my giving him a choice of three activities that are somewhat physical, and one of his favorites was to write the spelling words on the driveway in chalk. Sidewalk also works. Drawing in a box filled with cornmeal, tracing the letters in that. So those are movements that can change up a lesson. We’d spend more than an hour every day on math, but we never spent more than ten minutes on the same part of math, and there were different kinds of movements through the day.

Gretchen Roe: 00:17:25.283
I think that’s always important for parents to understand is your child has an attention span of their age plus two to three minutes, even without a learning challenge notwithstanding. So being able to break up a lesson that needs to be longer into smaller chunks so your child can attend can be a huge benefit to every student as they learn. Kathy, you had said another thing that I thought was really important, and that is don’t overfocus on your child’s deficits. So can you elaborate a little bit on how does a parent who is now panicked because they have a diagnosis not focus on the diagnosis but focus on the child instead?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:18:12.722
Yeah. I should first say that I empathize with those parents, and I’m sure you do too. If your child’s got a broken leg, you want to get him to the emergency room. And if their child is struggling, say, with a communication disorder, you want to help them learn to make eye contact and develop those social skills. We all desperately want our kids to develop what they need to grow up, but if we obsess about it, if our kids think that’s all we care about, then it’s going to discourage them, and it’s not going to make us effective if we will come across as anxious and our kids will start thinking, “Oh, I’ve disappointed Mom and Dad.” I read a survey a few years ago – it might have been The Washington Post – that said they asked teens what they thought their parents were most concerned about, and the top thing for many of these kids was grades. They also interviewed the parents, and the parents were concerned about things like not doing drugs and developing to be happy, productive adults and all, but in the kids’ minds, it was just grades. So you’ve got to think about not only what’s important to you but what you’re communicating. So how do you do that? You see your child being kind; you comment on it. Maybe you mention it at dinner. You see them looking out for someone who is in greater need than they are; you appreciate that. You see an unexpected insight: “I asked you to write a paper on this character in the book, and you went a completely different angle than I was expecting, and that was cool. I appreciate your creativity.” So we want to look for little ways to encourage them to illustrate that we think more broadly about them than just their test scores or what their reading level is or whatever.

Gretchen Roe: 00:20:07.437
And I think, to me, that’s so fascinating because even if your child doesn’t have a learning challenge, sometimes we can mis-convey that as parents. I recently read a survey, an article that was talking about when we say to our children, “Just do your best.” That can sometimes put an inordinate amount of pressure on students because they don’t know what the target is. Do your best means different things to different people, and when you say, “Just do your best,” you mean what you think as my parent is my best or what I think is my best. And so sometimes we need to be careful to illustrate information correctly for kids. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the support options that you offer to families.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:20:58.765
Yes, I can do that. As I mentioned earlier, if you go to LearnDifferently.com in the lower right, there’s a bubble that says, “Got questions?” And you can tap on that and send me a question, or you can set up a time to talk with me. I give free 15-minute consultations. Some parents want more of my time, and I’ve got a sliding rates about that on my website and a sliding scale for families with financial needs. So that’s one piece. There’s a whole lot of stuff on my website. Somebody told me the other day that she thought I ought to download all my blog posts and publish it as a book. So that’s an interesting thought. On teaching math to the kids struggling learners, writing some on getting help for reading on support for mom and dad so we don’t go crazy, dealing with our families– there’s a ton of stuff there on the blog. So I’ll say that. I’ve written three books. I mentioned Homeschooling Your Struggling Learner, aka, The Brick. But I’ve written it handbook style with big fat margins so you can make notes because I know you don’t have time and you want to just dive in and read the 3rd section, the 14th chapter and get some help. I wrote two other little books that are expansions of chapters in that. They are Staying Sane as You Homeschool, although I didn’t ask the kids if I actually had managed to stay sane, and then the most recent one is Encouraging Your Child using– sometimes our kids– all kids need encouragement, but especially our struggling learners. The world is telling them, “Well, I thought you’d be able to have your math facts down called by fourth grade. And here you are 13. What’s wrong with you?” Or whatever other issue our kids are facing, it can demoralize them. So in this book, I talk about using encouragement more efficiently and correctly, how to help them develop good habits, the wrong and right kinds of praise, and a bunch of other topics. So that’s Encouraging Your Child, my newest one. So let’s see. And when I speak at conferences, I’ve cut back on that sum, but there are some videos on my website, few of them on YouTube. So you can connect with me, and I’m happy to point you in the right direction. I know some of you don’t have time to look through all this stuff and just say, “Kathy, get me with this,” and I can say, “Here’s a link.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:23.055
Absolutely. And one of the things that I enjoyed thoroughly in preparing for this conversation today was getting the chance to go through your website and take a look at all the resources that are there. And in those resources, I did watch a couple of your webinars. And I wanted to ask if you could talk about– you had said something, let me see if I can quote you appropriately. We were talking about developing a homeschool mindset and how that’s different from a school mindset. So I would love for you to go into that just a little bit today.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:24:00.015
Okay. When I was interviewing families for the first book one of the moms, this one, one of the moms said that this is really important to avoid the school mindset. And by that, she meant– and I mean, thinking that homeschool needs to look just like school. Some of us have bought desks, school desks for our first day of school. A friend of mine got a globe and a flag and had her kids stand for the pledge. And I’m all in favor of having desk the right size for your kid nobody should learn to write like this. But we’ve got so much flexibility. Anyway, what this mom said was if you’re trying to replicate school at home, keep in mind that it didn’t work in the first place at school that’s why you’re at home. And trying to make your homeschool look just like school could bring about negative connotations, negative feelings for this child. So we got some flexibility. Now, I do think a schedule is really helpful. Otherwise will just keep getting up later and later and later until we’re getting up in the afternoon since school was never done, and we’re all annoyed. So a schedule is helpful. It’s helpful if you’ve got a mom who is a little distractible my son does to have that schedule out because then he could say, “Actually, mom, it’s time for our break now,” and then I quit enthusing about the literature book we were studying and let him go get his break. Schedules are helpful but we can be flexible about it. We can also use location in our home. We started home school on the sofa in the morning. We’re Christians. We’ve looked at Bible verses, prayed together. And we did our– began our language and arts on the sofa with read-alouds. I could say more about how we manage those. But we move through the day. Different subjects we did in different places. My son liked to do his math independent work lying on his stomach under the dining room table in fourth grade. He didn’t do this when he was 16. But when he was 9, he thought– and ten, he thought that was really fun. At the deep pressure on his stomach that’s soothing for some of our kids, I had him working on a whiteboard. It’s right over there. A huge one, so he could pick his color. And if he made a mistake, he wasn’t getting mad and tearing a hole in the paper with that eraser he just swiped and the mistake was gone and he could recover. So there’s lots of flexibility we have as homeschoolers, and it’s too easy to think homeschool needs to look like what I did back when I had to do when I was in school.

Gretchen Roe: 00:26:37.678
And I think all of us have to reprogram brains a little as we begin the homeschooling to recognize that we’re not experiencing– if our expectations are the same, then why did we begin homeschooling in the first place? We wanted something different. So we should expect that our expectations should be different as well. Speaking of expectations, I wonder if you could talk a little bit– one of your blogs talked about getting kids off the computer, and we had such an interesting conversation about this in our planning. I wonder if you would revisit that a little bit. About what happens when the computer environment sort of invades the learning space, if you will.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:27:23.640
Right. No, I know some of us have got kids taking one or two classes online, and that’s a little different. I do think it needs to be limited. First of all, our eyes are focused on something that’s what? 18 inches away for hours at a time. That causes eye strain. And so we need to have our posture correct. And I got this from an optometrist who works with kids with learning challenges. And she explained that the lighting needs to be good. So on the computer, there’s a temptation to be slumped over, curled up and our backs get tired. And when you’re a kid, you don’t say, “Oh, my back is hurting and I have a headache from eye strain.” You just get grumpy because you’re probably not self-aware to realize that I’m not always self-aware enough to realize it. So there’s those physical things with your back, with your posture, with your eye strain, with insufficient lighting, with trying to write when your elbow is resting on the floor. And that’s going to hinder your writing so you’re going to write less. So those physical things, but also there’s a pair of occupational therapists, the Gutmans, Robin and Evelyn Gutman, hands-on OT therapy is an interesting website. And they had an article about what sections of the brain are involved when your child is playing a video game. Actually, the vestibular system, I think it is– I’ll check on this and I’ll send you the link afterwards, Gretchen, so you can share it with our listeners because I meant to do that beforehand. The part of your brain that’s engaged when you’re running down a corridor and turning right and turning left, that’s getting activated visually.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:29:04.229
And that’s part of why our kids hyper-focus and zoom in on the computer and seem kind of dazed or bouncy when they get off the computer. That part of their brain is going crazy, but the rest of your body actually isn’t moving. So your mind and your body are out of sync. So there’s several things your kid can do to recover from that. And one great thing is getting out on a swing and swinging. Dancing can help, other large full-body movement maybe. One of my friends had her kid run around the house between subjects for a couple of minutes. But large body movement can help. Trampoline if you’ve got netting or mini tramp or something. Trampolines make me a little nervous, especially with our impulsive kids, I don’t really want to go to the emergency room again, thanks. They already know me, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:53.609
I have to tell you, we had a trampoline in our house for years. And it did have a net around it. And it was probably one of our most valuable educational tools. And my kids frequented the emergency room. We should have had a plaque on the door that said, “This room from funded by Klan Roe.” But it was never because of the trampoline, ever. So [laughter] I can say that that was a terrific enterprise. And we had that for almost 20 years. And when a tree fell over in a snowstorm and took it out, we were very sad. Kathy Kuhl: 00:30:30.450 Well, for those who–

Gretchen Roe: 00:30:30.740
So it was a wonderful learning tool for us.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:30:33.665
For those who don’t have a backyard, a many-tramp is pretty good, only three feet across. You can jog on it when it’s slick outside and avoid the black ice. And we practice math facts while my son was bouncing on the trampoline. So there’s lots of other ways to incorporate movement because I realized not all of us have a place where our kids can run our bounce.

Gretchen Roe: 00:30:55.198
Right. Exactly. The other thing I think that’s important as an observation for parents is to recognize that neural input on a keyboard is exactly the same. Your brain has the same amount of energy for an A as it does for an L. And that’s a very different enterprise than it is in putting information in another environment. I’m always fascinated by a study that was done at Stanford University where they took a freshman psychology class and they split it in half and half the students took notes digitally and half of them were required to take notes by hand. And then at every measure throughout the semester when they tested the kids, they found that the kids who took handwritten notes had better outcomes than the kids who took digital notes because your brain doesn’t remember that information the same way.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:31:52.047
Yes. I was just going to bring up a similar study. And in my own experience, I’ve noticed if I’m typing, I tend to transcribe what the instructor is saying and not listen so much. It’s just kind of, “Get it all down as fast as I can.” But if I’m handwriting, then I will tend to paraphrase. There’s a little bit of brain work involved in thinking, “Okay, I’m going to use this abbreviation, maybe I use symbols.” I think a lot of people develop symbols in their notes. I always used an arrow pointing right to show cause and effect and put stars by the important things. So my brain is doing all this other work while I’m listening. “That’s important. I’ll put a star by it. Oh, this has come up a lot. I need an abbreviation for this person,” or whatever. So it’s not a surprise to me that we remember better when we take notes by hand.

Gretchen Roe: 00:32:44.636
And I think sometimes parents feel like, particularly if you have a child who is struggling with dysgraphia and really struggling, one of the things that we can do is facilitated note-taking or guided note-taking. And that makes such a difference for kids, to be able to help them put that information into their brains in their long-term memory, where they could actually retrieve it later.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:33:11.374
For older kids, there are pens that will record the audio and have a tiny camera that records the writing on special paper; Livescribe makes one. And my son took one to his community college classes because he’s not going to write down everything. He’d lose it if he did that. And I want to recognize there are kids and adults with dysgraphia, for whom scribbling notes like I do isn’t a good strategy. But if you’ve got something that’s recording it and you just tap, “Okay, at 10 minutes, the professor said what was going to be on the exam.” Or, “My teacher and my homeschool co-op summarized the last chapter in the first three minutes of this talk, and then I can go play it back.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:33:53.975
I think that’s a very helpful change of mindset, too, for us as parents. So I want to make sure we get to some of the questions that parents ask because they were so terrific. And I know I shared those questions with you. So maybe what I should do is to say, what ones did you find most fascinating, and which ones would you like for us to talk about in a little bit more depth?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:34:19.436
There were quite a few about math, and I know Math-U-See is a fabulous resource, and also I’ll mention a couple of things that can go along with that. First of all, I asked Steve Demme once about this very question, and he said, “Go to the Facebook group for the Math-U-See users. And if you post a question,” he said, “20 moms will jump on there with ideas to help you.” You could also just search and see what other people have posted before. There’s two people I know who are specialists in teaching folks with dyscalculia, folks with diagnosed learning disabilities in math. And I’d recommend both of them. You can find them on my website, just go to LearnDifferently.com and search math. One of them is Maryland Zucker, who goes around the country teaching math teachers how to teach kids with dyscalculia. And I took a couple of weeks training with her at the Atlantic Seaboard Dyslexia Education Center. And she’s got some classes online, very helpful. Now, these are not classes for students; they’re classes to help you teach better. And that business I was showing you with modeling, three dimensional and then drawing, is just five minutes of one of the many hours I’ve had with her. Also, Christopher Woodin teaches at the Landmark School for students with learning disabilities. He’s the chair of the Math Department. He’s got a bunch of good stuff. And, again, you can find links to Mr. Woodin’s stuff in a description on my website. Woodin is spelled with an I, W-O-O-D-I-N. So those are two resources specifically for folks that are really struggling with dyscalculia. And neither of those are curriculum. They are stuff that you can apply to any curriculum So you could fit that into what you’re using.

Gretchen Roe: 00:36:07.063
Terrific. That’s a wonderful advice. And so one of the questions, Kathy, I think that you might have some information to help a parent is, how do you report progress in your state for a student with special needs? And I know it varies by state. So we’re not going to talk about all 50 states, but I want to maybe you to give a parent some insight into what are the things they’re looking for in that affirmative context that they can report as progress.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:36:36.883
Okay. First, if your child has already been in a public school and had an IEP that’s Individualized Education Plan, if there’s a public school system that has said, “Yes, this child needs extra help,” then never, ever, ever throw that away, first of all, because if your child isn’t showing evidence of progress according to what you would expect for a neurotypical child, this is your evidence to say, “Yes, but this is where we were.” In some states, like my own, which is Virginia, you have several options to show evidence of progress. So I’ll just run through them and how they might apply and you probably have different situations in other states. In my state, you can submit a standardized test result and as long as it’s above the fifth [inaudible] 9, you’re good. So that was what we always tried first. Happily, my son made it. It was the average, not a resection was as high as we’d like. But that’s the easiest thing to do because there are some tests, some of those standardized tests you can give at home. Some of those standardized tests, if your student had an Individualized Education Plan and qualified for extended time, some of those testing organizations will let you apply that at home. That’s the easiest thing; A standardized test. A portfolio is another option. I always stuck a few samples from each subject into a notebook through the year. Maybe the September ones were not so stellar, but it showed while we were making progress. And I stuck that in a big three binder with sections for each subject. Because if my son’s test scores weren’t that good, then I could take this portfolio. I wouldn’t necessarily submit it to the state because then you’re kind of at the mercy of the person evaluating it, whether they were being objective and whether or not maybe they were going to like it or not, but instead you can take that to a private evaluator. There are special Ed consultants who work with homeschoolers all over the country. The homeschool legal defense association has a list of them that’s one reason I’m happy to be a member of that outfit because they have a wonderful special needs department and a ton of resources. So those are three ways to show progress.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:38:50.996
In general, I try not to give my local government more information than I have to. Just because I’ve worked in bureaucracies, I know we all want to gather more information and learn more. And it may be with the best of intentions, but it’s still my kids privacy and my privacy. So I submit the minimum requirement.

Gretchen Roe: 00:39:14.237
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about learning preferences and how we can help tailor our curriculum. Sometimes I think we become so absorbed in defining our child’s learning preferences that we pretzel ourselves as the parent in trying to meet those preferences. And I think it’s also practical to realize that an employer when they reach adulthood is not going to say, so how do you like to learn and then tailor all of that learning? So how do we strike a balance as parents in a learning preference environment?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:39:53.226
Part of why I like talking to you, Gretchen, is you already said about half of what I was going to say, we’re on the same wavelength. So this is great. Yes, there used to be a trend a few years ago to say, oh my gosh, we got to figure out our kids’ learning style, they’d call it. You can only teach an auditory learner auditorily.” Yeah. Well, okay, so I’m giving a lesson on forts in colonial America. And I’m only going to do it auditorily. A sketch or a drawing would really help or if you’re tactile, it goes on that way. You’ve got to teach material according to the best method for that material. If I can teach you about opera, unless I put on some music, you’re not going to have much of an idea of what it’s really about. So the content dictates some of that. Our kids and adults do have preferences, though. Some people would rather listen to an audiobook and would retain it better. Some people just want to be left alone with the book and read through it. So what we do with our kids is we try to identify what works for them and we present multimodally as much as we can because whatever your preference is, things will stick in your head better if it’s presented through multiple senses. We store memories in different parts of our brain. Visual and auditory and tactile are stored in different sections. And what strengthens memory is connections. It’s like Velcro. If we have visual and auditory and sensory and– I mean, tactile, kinesthetic, those will stay better in our heads. So we build with that. And as you said, Gretchen, we say to them occasionally, “Well, I know you learn better auditorily, but here’s some strategies for taking notes and looking at lists and highlighting because the chances are, at some point, you’re going to have a boss who’s going to send you a memo, and you’ve got to be able to get something out of it.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:53.117
So as a parent, what would be the best way for you to evaluate maybe a child who has a lack of focus and to be able to help find their strengths for focus and maybe help play to those strengths? I know that more and more kids today are diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, focusing issues. So how can we as parents set our kids up to be successful in the focus game?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:42:26.894
Okay. First of all, I can’t diagnose a kid with ADHD or attention deficit and neither can you. You need to have a medical degree for that. And I know everybody thinks they can do it at the playground, “Oh, that kid is really distractible.” And yeah, we can see the symptoms, but it could be lots of things going on. Maybe they didn’t sleep well. And maybe they’re allergies. Maybe there’s other things going on. So I have to say that because my only degree is a BA in English. So I’m not qualified to diagnose anything, except a badly written paragraph. And I just got to begin there. Okay. But we can observe– one of the things we can observe is whether our child is distracted in more than one setting. If you’re an adult and you’re only distractible at work, that’s not ADHD. That’s maybe you may need to find a different job if you can. So it’s got to occur in more than one setting. It has to occur over– I think the official description for these issues involves it lasting over a period of at least six months. If you’re depressed because your beloved dog died and you’re down and can’t focus for a while, that’s not necessarily a long-term problem. As far as strategies, I’m working on this online course I’m planning to launch next month to help parents teach kids who are distractible. One thing you can do is give them an appropriate fidget. Now, fidget spinners mesmerize. They are no good for helping people pay attention better. A good fidget is just something you fiddle with to help you focus. So maybe it’s just a little block or maybe it’s an eraser or a squeeze ball, a lacrosse ball works pretty well, or a hacky sack one of those little crocheted balls. There’s many different things our kids can use. And maybe after a week or two, the one thing doesn’t work and they need to try something else. I’ve known adults who played with a chain of paper clips and fiddled with that. And when you’re an adult you can still do it. You just do it under the conference table down here out of the way. This is what one dad told a group where I was speaking in Washington state. One of the moms said, but my kid can’t do this as an adult. And a guy in the back said, excuse me I do. So we learned to do it better. I’ve known people who jingled the coins in their pocket and I wish they were doing something quieter. But so that’s something with your hands, another thing is seating. Maybe instead of sitting on a chair, your child would do better sitting on an exercise ball because then they’d have to engage their core. And for some of us just sitting still and listening is exhausting and we really need to be doing something else at the same time. So maybe it’s a fidget, maybe you can also take a little bungee cord or a stretch band and run it across the front legs of the chair and then you can press your calves into it. Pressing your legs back towards the center of the chair puts pressure on the back on your calves. That can soothe some people, those chair push-ups like I was talking about doing these. Those are little things we can do to help our kids focus. And breaks, as I said before, the physical breaks, multisensory learning. Those are all ways to help distractable kids.

Gretchen Roe: 00:45:51.490
You had said that you’re building a course for parents. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:45:57.159
Yes. It’s going to be five sections. Probably two or three hours total, but the videos are no more than twelve minutes long because I know what your schedule is like. I’ve been there. So I will include handouts to help you listen if you like. I will include a ton of resources. I’m going to address the environment using movement, planning your schedule to help a child with attention problems. And I’ve labeled it ADHD, but it’s really for any distractible kid whether they have a label or not. Impulsive kids, some of us don’t want to go get our kids tested. I get that. But I’ll have resources to help you. And the last two sections will be dealing on how your own attitudes might be accidentally hijacking your homeschool and how you can help your child with their attitudes about themselves and about the work to help them keep going.

Gretchen Roe: 00:46:51.718
I’m so glad that you said that about attitude because I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the thing that we often hear from parents and that is behind. And so can you talk a little bit about how maybe we should change our perspective about where our children are academically?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:47:12.228
You mean the child who’s discouraged because they’re feeling like they’re behind?

Gretchen Roe: 00:47:17.027
Either the child who’s discouraged or the parent who is labeling their child as behind. And I think those are two separate–

Kathy Kuhl: 00:47:25.190
Yes, they are.

Gretchen Roe: 00:47:25.620
–pieces of the puzzle.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:47:26.572
Well to address the parent first since you’re the ones I’m talking to. I assume. We really need to take our kids where they are. And that doesn’t mean we leave them there. It doesn’t mean we lower the bar or say, oh well you’ve got a learning problem, you’re never going to amount to much. God forbid. Our kids are all beautifully made and have talents and strengths and the struggles they’re going through may equip them for wonderful things later on. So we’ve got to encourage them to not look poorly at themselves. If we are bitter because our child is struggling, if we are jealous, if we are miserable, then we’re communicating that to our kids. You can’t really hide your attitude from your child. So I’m a Christian. I’d say pray for a good view of this kid. I realize not everyone on the call has my perspective. But just recognize whatever your worldview is about God, just think your being discouraging, and telling your child they’re down or they’re behind or they’re lacking is not going to promote progress for them. It’s not going to help their health esteem. And it doesn’t help you help them either. Your handcuffing both of you. So that’s regarding the parents’ attitude. For the child who is discouraged, sometimes that’s because you’ve just changed situations. Maybe you’ve just started homeschooling, or you’ve just realized your curriculum wasn’t working at all and you’re starting over. Our kids can really feel down on themselves. You may need to take a little time, two weeks, four weeks, if a child’s coming out of school in particular, to deschool them, to give them time where there’s cool educational and art stuff around the house and you’re taking them cool places to learn and you’re going to the library a lot and you’re reading aloud and you’re getting audiobooks on stuff they’re interested in. So it’s a very learning-rich environment that’s focused on what they’re interested in and you’re insisting that they’re doing some help around the house, there’s some chores, there are no free rides. Granted, it would all be easier if we did the chores ourselves, but that’s not what we’re doing here. We’re training. And if a child is doing chores and contributing to the family, that’s going to help their self-esteem because then they’re going to see that they’re a needed part of the family. I mean, even my three-year-old grandchildren want to help, “Let me do it, Mommy.” We all want to be part of communities that we can contribute to.

Gretchen Roe: 00:50:09.439
I think it makes such a difference. And I think it’s also, we as parents need to be careful what we receive from the experts and our environment and those kinds of things. I know I have a 23-year-old son who when he was diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of nine, the well-meaning educators who diagnosed him said he wasn’t college material, probably should find him a good trade school. And he has a degree in computer science. He’s a cybersecurity administrator now. And I think it makes a tremendous amount of difference, making sure that we don’t receive everything that’s doled out to us by people who don’t know our children as well as we do. I think it makes all the difference in the world.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:50:55.598
And if your child is only good at one thing right now, make sure you leave time for that one thing. Dr– let’s see. I’m looking over there where the book is. And I can’t quite see it from here, I think it’s Robert Brooks talked about having islands of competence. Think if you’re lost at sea in the Pacific Ocean and there’s that one island there you’re swimming to. And maybe I’m only good at– I know two homeschool kids who are good at yo-yos. And they both went to the international yo-yo competitions. If all your kid is good at at yo-yo is– you encourage that, and you help them find good videos to learn new tricks and you drive them to competitions and you help them save up to buy the better yo-yo. But whatever thing it is, even if it sounds crazy, don’t say, “Oh, well, you’ll never make a living at that,” encourage it– unless it’s computer games. And then we’ll talk about that. Encourage it because they’re learning skills of perseverance. They’re learning research. They’re learning that they can succeed at something. So there’s a lot of lessons even in stuff that seems useless. I collected shells a lot when I was nine years old and learned a ton about them. And the knowledge has done me virtually no good. But it gave me satisfaction. It helped me practice some study skills. I learned that I could study something my parents didn’t care about and learn some cool stuff. And they were beautiful. So let your kids pursue that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:52:27.010
That’s terrific. I like your perspective. Islands of confidence. I think that is a really good piece of wisdom for us to take away and hold to our hearts when we’re struggling to find where those islands reside in our children. You said something about computer games. So can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:52:46.927
Yes. Computer games, like shopping on the Internet, they’re designed to be addictive. And so they can eat our time. As I said earlier, when I mentioned Miss Gutman’s piece on what it does to the vestibular system and getting your brain out of whack, it’s an artificial environment. Those rewards are– what’s the word for that? They’re not real life. Real-life rewards you struggle, and your hands get dirty, and it takes you a while. Let’s say you’re making a batch of biscuits. And the first ones come out terrible, and you think, “Oh, I’m no good at this.” Computer games, you get little stars and smiley faces and fireworks or whatever you get. So it’s immediate superficial feedback. But you work on the biscuits. You get good at making good biscuits. And you enjoy the taste of them. They’re real. People thank you for them. You learned that when you’re getting together with friends, you can offer to bring biscuits because you’re the person that’s good at that. So do you want to develop real-world skills because we got to live in the real world? We don’t want to live glued to screens. It’s not good for our eyes or our heads, or our hearts.

Gretchen Roe: 00:53:55.436
Absolutely. I think that that is really good wisdom. And one of the things that I think is always important to recognize is for– I have a daughter who’s an occupational therapist, and one of the things she says is for every half hour that you are in front of a screen, you should have an hour outside in the greater or wider world to balance what happens in your brain. And I think that makes a tremendous amount of difference for our kids.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:54:26.662
Yeah, it’s good for our mental health and our kids’ mental health to be outdoors.

Gretchen Roe: 00:54:32.375
Absolutely. And vitamin D is a thing. It’s important, isn’t it? So, Kathy, we’re coming to the top of the hour, so we’re almost done with our time. And I have so enjoyed our conversation. What have I failed to ask you that is something that you think is important that parents should know?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:54:50.094
Oh, thank you. It’s been delightful, and I’m looking forward to hearing from folks afterwards. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you, Gretchen. Let me look over my notes and see. I didn’t mention that I– yeah, I did mention that, never mind.

Gretchen Roe: 00:55:10.789
Because I have one more question for you that I think is really good, and this came out of our conversation last week, and I don’t think we’ve touched on it briefly. But I would like to you to talk about the difference between pushing a student and supporting a student.

Kathy Kuhl: 00:55:27.568
Okay. Well, that’s about having realistic expectations for this student. And I’ve had people text me and say, how do I know? Well, I don’t know. I don’t even know your kid. I am a hundred miles away. So I can’t give super general advice, but I would say test results, evaluations, maybe from an occupational therapist or other specialist, can give you an idea of where your child is. You want to be encouraging them to always go a little harder, and you want to be praising the perseverance that they’re showing even when they don’t succeed. Don’t just praise success, praise perseverance, praise success. Some of our kids, when they keep going and going even though they’re not succeeding, that’s such an important skill. That perseverance will serve them well in lots of areas. So I think we’ve got to try and always be pushing them a little, but also cheering for them. And when they succeed–

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:32.340
[crosstalk] just words.
Kathy Kuhl: 00:56:34.182
Thank you. And when they succeed, don’t just immediately raise the bar. You finish the homework early, good. Here are some bonus problems. Thanks, mom. I was really hoping for extra– no. You celebrate with them. Go take a walk. Maybe since you’ve finished all your work this week, we’re going to knock off early Friday and have a picnic, or do something else. I’d say more about that in the book on Encouraging Your Child. But it’s tricky, and I don’t think I can be more specific than that unless I’m talking with the family individually.

Gretchen Roe: 00:57:09.091
Right. I think we have to tailor our expectations to the child who sits in front of us. But I think it’s also really important that as parents, we are the best student of our students. If we understand where our child’s strengths are, where their weaknesses are, we can turn those weaknesses into strength. I have the privilege of knowing Dr. Karen Holinga who often speaks about children who learn differently. And she says, never teach to your child’s weakness. Teach to your child’s strengths, and their weaknesses will become strengths. And I think that’s a very valuable piece of advice. I’ve so enjoyed this time together with you, Kathy. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. In closing, can you give everybody your website again so that they can find it and know how to connect with you?

Kathy Kuhl: 00:58:01.490
Thank you, Gretchen. It’s LearnDifferently.com. I’m also on Facebook, Kathy Kuhl, that’s K-U-H-L. You can find me on Instagram. Occasionally, I wonder over to Twitter and LinkedIn. But the website’s the best way to reach me. Lower right hand corner, there’s a got questions button.

Gretchen Roe: 00:58:19.802
Absolutely. I would encourage you all to reach out to Kathy. She’s a wonderful source of encouragement. We’ve known each other for years. I had an advanced copy of her Encouraging Your Child book years ago and it was a tremendous blessing to me. Her materials are solid and on point, and I think that you’ll find them to be helpful ones as you continue your homeschool journey. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thanks for joining us. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at DemmeLearning.com/Show or go on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it.

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