Jason McElwain Autistic Basketball Player

Jason McElwain Autistic Basketball Player - Never under estimate the capabilities of your children.

Marble adding machine - YouTube

Canadian software developer Matthias Wandel enjoys spending his spare time creating wooden contraptions that combine a childlike sense of wonder with an engineer’s knowledge of mechanics. One of his most popular creations so far is this six-bit binary adding machine, which has tallied nearly one and a half million views on YouTube. As Rick Regan explains at Exploring Binary, the machine functions like a low-tech integrated circuit. “It uses wood instead of silicon, gravity instead of voltage, and marbles instead of current,” he writes. “We don’t need no stinkin’ CMOS!”
The idea came to Wandel after he noticed that one of his earlier marble machines incorporated logic-like elements. “It had occurred to me,” he writes on his woodworking site, “that perhaps with an insane amount of perseverance, it might be possible to build a whole computer that runs on marbles.” To illustrate the point Wandel built the adding machine, which stores the binary states of six bits and can add numbers from one to 63. The result may be more cool than practical, writes Regan, “but it certainly is educational. It illustrates basic principles of binary numbers, binary arithmetic, and binary logic.”
You can learn more about the machine on Wandel’s Web page, and about the underlying logic and mathematics at Exploring Binary.

Grandparents: They can damage children during divorces, claim

David Norgrove, the chairman of an official UK review on family justice which is published today, said some couples used their parents as a “weapon” during contested divorce cases.

Check out the Executive Summary from the Family Justice Report

The comments came as Mr Norgrove unveiled plans for parents to go through more “do-it-yourself” divorces to speed up settlements.

He also confirmed plans that divorced fathers would be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children.

He said grandparents could be “extremely important in a child’s life” but some made problems worse during divorces by demanding the right to have contact with the children.

He said: “Grandparents can be used by parents as a way of getting at their ex-partner. Grandparents are not always straightforward in the way they behave and the result can be damage to children.

“There is no evidence that courts unreasonably refuse the ability of a grandparent to bring an application for contact with their grandchildren.”

Mr Norgrove continued: “Not all grandparents are good grandparents. One of the separating parents can use his or her parents as a weapon against the other partner.

“We should not be putting all the emphasis on the rights of the adults. The question is wrong: it should be what is in the best interests of the child, not what is right for the adults.”

Mr Norgrove’s 220-page review did not recommend any legal right for grandparents to see their grandchildren after a couple divorced. Instead they would continue to be able to apply for access through the courts.

More information on this article from the Telegraph

Dyslexia: Teaching Strategies to help Children

There are numerous techniques for teaching dyslexic children. Not all dyslexic children will respond to the same techniques, so it is important to work out what will work with each particular child. Presented here are some of the techniques you could try.

Start with the Child
Dyslexic learners may often have ‘failed’ and it is very important to start by talking to and listening to your pupil. This

• Lets you get to know the pupil as a person and get to know their interests
• allows the pupil to get to know you
• builds up trust and confidence
• helps you to assess oral ability

Learners need to feel confident to ‘have a go’ and often a dyslexic’s self esteem can be low because of previous failure. When trust is established it is much easier to find out the best way to help and support.

Try to use a range of resources and approaches which will ensure success early on which will motivate the student to learn more and to be more confident in his/her ability to learn.

What material should I use?
There are numerous programmes, teaching aids, software packages etc that you can use with students. Whichever you choose, if you are positive about it then the pupil’s confidence is improved there is a far greater chance of success.

Tuition should be multi-sensory involving looking, listening, speaking, touching etc with as much variation as possible but we are all unique and it is good to observe whether the child/adult is predominantly a

VISUAL LEARNER (learns best by seeing)

AUDITORY LEARNING (learns best by listening)

KINESTHETIC LEARNER (learns by doing/feeling)

The following are just a few tips that can be useful for any type of learner. However, the more you get to know your pupil the more you will work together to find the best individual tips.

Visual Learners

• Use pictures and multi-media material
• Stick spelling words anywhere in view
• Look at pictures in a book before reading
• Play games eg ‘pairs’ to improve memory
• Draw mind maps
• Use different colour eg syllables in words
• Use good visual software programmes
• Have an uncluttered work area

Auditory Learners

• Talk about the book to be read or the information to be learned
• Make sure instructions are orally clear
• Get the student to record the information so it can be listened to again
• Use software which has good auditory input.

Kinesthetic Learners

• Trace letters in sand or in the air
• Use concrete objects which can be handled eg wooden letters, numbers etc
• Memorise facts while moving about

Tips for Numbers Work

• Talk about numbers eg TV channels, dates, house numbers
• Count eg climbing stairs, skipping, etc
• Handle real coins
• Discuss time – day/night, early/late
• Sequence days, months, birthdays
• Use board games, dominoes, dice
• Use maths words eg how many, the same
• Discuss symbols and signs
• It is very important for a dyslexic to feel confident using a calculator.

Good organisation needs to be encouraged as dyslexics often jump to the answer. They need to be taught how to set down ‘working’.

Tips for Written Work

• use lined paper
• use spell checker
• use word bank
• cloze procedure (handouts with blanks)
• use Co-writer or Texthelp (if available)
• whenever possible give praise for content

Tips for Reading

• limit reading demands
• ensure appropriate reading level/material
• paired reading
• prepare a subject word list
• if the child has Meares Irlen Syndrome use coloured overlays/glasses
• try out computer software eg wordshark
• listen to taped books

Classroom Assistants
The classroom assistant can be

• crucial in helping a pupil achieve success
• of important help to the class teacher

The classroom assistant often knows a pupil far better than most of the other staff in the school because of the close daily contact in a variety of situations. The assistant can

• break down instructions and tasks
• keep a pupil on task
• organise work materials
• read and/or scribe
• note down homework
• help with practical tasks

For a dyslexic this support is invaluable.

The classroom assistant can sometimes help the class teacher to prepare individual work material. In addition the assistant can let the class teacher know

• which tasks are causing difficulty
• where the pupil’s strengths lie
• if homework is causing excessive stress
• if there are problems relating to peers

Difficulties with processing information mean that lack of time is often a problem for a dyslexic child.

He/she will feel a failure if work is consistently left incomplete.

The individual support of a classroom assistant can allow a pupil to finish a task before moving on.

For more information visit the www.dyslexiasw.com/ website: 

Advert for a Reading Focus Card for ADD, ADHD & Dyslexia - YouTube

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I will let you make up your own mind on this product. We do not promote products or services and recommend that you check out all product claims for yourself.

NB: Take the normal financial precautions when buying products over the internet to protect your money and financial accounts.

The term "Sound Drawings" helps Dyslexic Children - YouTube

Diana Vogel has been on a mission for over 6 years now. A mission to learn the most she can about dyslexia and learning difficulties. From this knowledge she feels she is puting together the best resource of information and experts.

The next step is to make this information and resource accessible to as many parents, teachers and children as is possible.

She believes she has found so many incredibly successful and generous parenting and dyslexic experts.

She shares their stories and strategies with the community on her website at www.kinalearn.com

Brain Scans Reveal Lucid Dreaming's 'Sleep Cinema'

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany were recently singing their own sweet ode to lucid dreaming, albeit to the tune of the scientific method.

Led by Dr. Micael Czisch, for the first time ever, researchers were able to compare brain activity of lucid dreamers as they consciously entertained the same thoughts while sleeping and while awake.

Lucid dreamers are those who, besides being actively aware of their dream state while sleeping, can also deliberately manipulate their dreams -- a learned skill that is very useful in dream research.

"The main obstacle in studying specific dream content is that spontaneous dream activity cannot be experimentally controlled, as subjects typically cannot perform pre-decided mental actions during sleep," study researcher Michael Czisch said according to LiveScience. "Employing the skill of lucid dreaming can help to overcome these obstacles."

For the study, six lucid dreamers were asked to sleep in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine so blood flow to regions of their brain could be monitored. Once asleep, subjects were asked to confirm their lucid dream-state with a series of of eye movements. They were then asked to purposely "dream" that they were clenching their fists.

Researchers found that brain activity during the lucid dreaming of this task was similar to brain activity of the same task performed while subjects were awake. However, brain activity during sleep was weaker.

The team, which also included scientists from the Charite hospital in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, also found increased activity in parts of the brain that play a vital role in the planning of movements.

“Our dreams are therefore not a ‘sleep cinema’ in which we merely observe an event passively, but involve activity in the regions of the brain that are relevant to the dream content,” explained Czisch

Maternal separation stresses the baby too

A woman goes into labor, and gives birth. The newborn is swaddled and placed to sleep in a nearby bassinet, or taken to the hospital nursery so that the mother can rest. Despite this common practice, new research published in Biological Psychiatry provides new evidence that separating infants from their mothers is stressful to the baby.

It is standard practice in a hospital setting, particularly among Western cultures, to separate mothers and their newborns. Separation is also common for babies under medical distress or premature babies, who may be placed in an incubator. In addition, the American Academy of Pediatrics specifically recommends against co-sleeping with an infant, due to its association with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS.

Humans are the only mammals who practice such maternal-neonate separation, but its physiological impact on the baby has been unknown until now. Researchers measured heart rate variability in 2-day-old sleeping babies for one hour each during skin-to-skin contact with mother and alone in a cot next to mother’s bed. Neonatal autonomic activity was 176% higher and quiet sleep 86% lower during maternal separation compared to skin-to-skin contact.

Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, commented on the study’s findings: “This paper highlights the profound impact of maternal separation on the infant. We knew that this was stressful, but the current study suggests that this is major physiologic stressor for the infant.”

This research addresses a strange contradiction: In animal research, separation from mother is a common way of creating stress in order to study its damaging effects on the developing newborn brain. At the same time, separation of human newborns is common practice, particularly when specialized medical care is required (e.g. incubator care). “Skin-to-skin contact with mother removes this contradiction, and our results are a first step towards understanding exactly why babies do better when nursed in skin-to-skin contact with mother, compared to incubator care,” explained study author Dr. Barak Morgan.

More research is necessary to further understand the newborn response to separation, including whether it is sustained response and whether it has any long-term neurodevelopmental effects.

However, skin-to-skin contact has known benefits, and certainly, most would agree that unnecessarily stressing a newborn is unacceptable. Thus, as further evidence emerges, the challenge to doctors will be to incorporate skin-to-skin contact into routine treatment whilst still safely providing the other elements of newborn medical care.

World of Dyslexia - November Newsletter

Autism: Airway abnormality

A researcher has found an abnormality in the airways of children with autism that she says may be the first anatomical marker for the neurodevelopmental disorder.

While examining children with autism who came in for a persistent cough, Dr. Barbara Stewart used a bronchoscope -- which can see down into the windpipe and the airways that branch into the lungs -- and noticed something different about those branches.

In a typical lung, the windpipe, or trachea, branches into two main stems. From there, airways branch off the stems much like tree branches in a random, asymmetrical pattern, said Stewart, a pediatric pulmonologist at Nemours Children's Clinic in Pensacola, Fla.

But in the autistic children, those branches were instead doubled up and symmetrical. And the branches were smaller -- whereas in a normal lung you might have one large branch jutting off, in the autistic child, she'd see two, smaller branches instead.

Stewart went back and looked at the bronchoscopy results of 49 children with autism spectrum disorder and more than 300 kids without the condition. She found that all of the kids with autism had what she calls symmetrical "doublets" in their airways, while none of the normally developing kids did.

"I don't know what the significance of that is … But it looks like they have more of everything," Stewart said, adding that all of the autistic children had normal lung function and the anatomical difference may or may not explain the cough.

The research is scheduled to be presented Monday at CHEST 2011, the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians, in Honolulu. Because this study was presented at a medical meeting, the data and conclusions should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Dr. Daniel Coury, medical director for the Autism Treatment Network of Autism Speaks, said he wasn't sure what to make of the findings, since there aren't reports of children with autism having any particular issues with their lungs.

And yet, he said the findings warrant more research, particularly whether there might be some gene or region of a chromosome that plays a role in both brain and lung development and is associated with autism.

"I've never heard of anything like this before and certainly, your first thought is, 'If autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, why would we be finding problems in the lungs?'" Coury said. "The fact is we are thinking more and more that autism is a whole-body disorder.

We are seeing some people with autism that have lower gastrointestinal problems and immune problems. So, once you toss aside the idea that this is strictly a brain problem and think of it as a whole-body problem, this becomes possible."

Airway structures begin to develop in utero during the first trimester and continue until about 20 weeks, Stewart noted. The difference in lung structure among children with autism spectrum disorder was difficult to spot at first, she added.