LD Resources

Brain Training Associates, Inc.
2301 Ohio Drive Suite 130
Plano, TX 75093
972-964-8510
www.braintraining.com

Reading Isn’t Fundamental

Alan E. Kazdin and Carlo Rotella have an excellent piece in Slate on how to help your child learn to read.

Boston Neuropsychological Services, LLC
687 Highland Ave. 2nd Floor
Needham, MA 02494
877-283-7863
www.bostonneuropsych.com

Linda Balsiger, M.S., CCC-SLP
Bend Language & Learning
1011 SW Emkay Dr, Suite 101
Bend, OR 97702
541-385-6002
541-385-6090 fax
www.bendlanguageandlearning.com

Bachman Academy
414 Brymer Creek Rd.
McDonald, TN 37353
423-479-4523
423-472-2718 fax
admissions@bachmanacademy.org
www.bachmanacademy.org

Joan Acocella at The New Yorker has a review of a book on overparenting: “A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting.” Her article is: The Child Trap.

Marano thinks that the infant-stimulation craze was a scandal. She accepts the idea of brain plasticity, but she believes that the sculpting goes on for many years past infancy and that its primary arena should be self-stimulation, as the child ventures out into the world. While Mother was driving the kid nuts with the eight-hundredth iteration of “This Little Piggy,” she should have been letting him play on his own. Marano assembles her own arsenal of neurological research, guaranteed to scare the pants off any hovering parent. As children explore their environment by themselves-making decisions, taking chances, coping with any attendant anxiety or frustration-their neurological equipment becomes increasingly sophisticated, Marano says. “Dendrites sprout. Synapses form.” If, on the other hand, children are protected from such trial-and-error learning, their nervous systems “literally shrink.”

[via kottke.org]

Colleges with Programs for Learning Disabled Students

An extensive list with lots of other resources as well.

John Murphy has a new book in PDF form that you can read an overview of at his web site Learning Disability Dynamics.

Give up Now! You Are a Failure!
A Guide Based in Experience for Overcoming Learning Disabilities
by John Murphy

It’s not Its

Excellent. Now if they expanded it they’d have Confusing Words

[via Coudal Partners Blended Feed]

Paul Smith was an artist who had cerebral palsy and used a typewriter to “draw.” Using a machine like a typewriter makes perfect sense when one has spasticity in one’s hands but thinking about how these drawings were made boggles the mind. Yes, typewriters used monofonts (typefaces where each letter was equal in width) so Paul could count the way a knitter counts columns and rows but still, the detail in his drawings is spectacular given the crudeness of his tools.

He made all of his drawings with these symbols (shifted number keys on a typewriter and computer):

@ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _

Here’s a better gallery of his typewriter art.

[via David Niemeijer]