Secret # 3 – Is Dyslexia a Sign of Genius? Dyslexia – A Trait of Genius – Secret 3 to Unlock Your Child’s Genius Mind

N Neuroscience

Hi again. Dr. Marianne Cintron here, and I’m here with tip three of how to unlock your child’s genius. Now I use the letter “n” that stands for “neuroscience”.

Dyslexia is neurological in origin, so remember the brain can be retrained. We weren’t born with a reading brain. Reading is a man-made thing, so God gave us the brain parts that’ll work together to help us read. Dyslexia is really the superpower of the genius, so the dyslexic child needs a multi-sensory approach to reading. Let me ask you a question: how do you learn best? Do you need to see something in patterns, shapes, or colors to understand it? Or do you need to listen? Do you need to have someone talk so that you really understand it? Maybe listen to a book on tape. Do you need to have a hands-on approach? Sometimes I wouldn’t learn something until I actually did it. I could read and read but being hands-on helps you learn it.

How many of you ever shared a problem with a friend and you solved your own problem just by speaking? So, we call these the different modalities “kinesthetic visual-auditory”. These are the multi-sensory techniques that help a child learn and while this helps all children because you’re working to a child’s strength and weakness, it definitely needs to be used with a dyslexic child. What we do is help children with writing. One of the indicators of dyslexia is how they write. Typically, dyslexic children will add or omit letters and syllables and they won’t capitalize their sentences. They won’t punctuate their sentences. Some kids will even have what we call “dysgraphia”, which is a component often tied to dyslexia where you can’t read their writing. Often, I’ve had to have kids read to me what they wrote because I couldn’t read it. Sometimes they can’t even read their own writing. With Orton Gillingham, we actually help these kids with their script and how to write letters.

The brain scans and the MRIs show that the non-dyslexic kids are reading from the left side of the brain so the dyslexic child is stronger in the right side of the brain but what’s happening is the right angular gyrus wants to send the words over incorrectly. We don’t want to send “house” instead of “igloo”. It’ll just send the wrong words and it also wants to bypass it. It wants to go over the corpus callosum which we call the “lazy referee”. What we do in my reading program Step-By-Step Reading is we use an app I developed called “Dunking Dyslexia”. We send music in the left ear which crosses over to the right angular gyrus and gives it a job it likes to do.

We know music is in the right side of the brain and the app has spelling exercises in the right ear that cross to the left side of the brain, giving it the strength like Pilates of the brain. By sending the music and the spelling exercises together in a dichotic method of learning, we’re bypassing the corpus callosum, so the auditory processing is improved. This is based on the research of Dr. Roger Sperry. Imagine this in the 1960s, Dr Sperry worked with seizure patients and he severed their corpus callosum. He worked at the left and the right sides of the brain independently and the seizures stopped, and the people were functioning. He said that if educators could take this information into the classroom, we could help kids that had “word blindness”, which is what dyslexia was called in the early 1960s.

We can’t split the brains of kids, but we can send information in a dichotic method, meaning two different inputs at one time. I want to end with this: Dr. Roger Sperry won a Nobel Prize for his split-brain theory in the 1980s. 20 years later, it caught up with him and he won a Nobel Prize. So, that’s tip number three: look at the neuroscience of dyslexia and that’s how we’re going to help your child. Unlocking the genius is dealing with the brain and using our app. Stay tuned for tip number four. Bye-bye now.

How Great is Music to Help Your Child Learn?

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