Interview with Sally Smith - Founder of The Lab School - Página 2

NCLD:

Are certain types of creative activities particularly effective for teaching children with specific types of LD? For example, are there certain types of activities that would be effective for teaching a child with dyslexia but that would not work well for teaching a child with auditory-processing problems?

Sally Smith:

Let's take a child that's very non-verbal. In their wordless world, they see shapes and colors and movement and think in terms of textures and shapes. Now, with that type of child, any kind of graphic arts, ceramics, and so on, would be wonderful. But they'd probably hate drama. There are other children who are athletes and dancers, who learn everything kinesthetically. For example, some of them learn telephone numbers by moving through them. We can find ways to teach them history and historical connections and so on, through movement.

The thing is, you can't generalize; some of the students we have here are marvelous athletes and the other half trip over their own feet. The same with math"half are phenomenal at math and the other half see numbers and their eyes glaze over. Sometimes what will work is obvious; a lot of times it's not. Our class sizes are small, however, and the teachers can personalize a lot of the instruction; the teachers also take a lot of notes and there's a lot of sharing of information among the faculty.

Children with LD usually have trouble with order and with sequences; one of the benefits of using the arts to teach is that each art form has its own discipline, and you have to know a certain amount in order to even begin work. There's a recipe, and it lets us teach the very important ideas of beginning, middle and end. These are things someone with LD won't learn naturally.

We teach film animation here and, in order to put together a project, the students really have to analyze what it is they want to put on film. They need to have a main idea"what the film is about"they have to formulate the sequences that will express that idea and then they have to put it together and shoot it. And when they've done this successfully, we'll try and remind them of the process and how they navigated it when they're doing something else, like a paper for a literature class.

NCLD:

It sounds as though there's a great deal of interdisciplinary study at Lab School.

Sally Smith:

There is, and there are a lot of teachers teaching each other. For example, a first class in geography might begin with a teacher bringing in a cake, and at first glance it looks like a whole cake, but it's really been cut into seven pieces and the plate it's sitting on has also been cut into seven pieces. The teacher might say, "There's a theory of how the continents were formed. Can anyone tell me what a theory is?" And they might talk about what a theory is in general, then the teacher will tell them about the original supercontinent of Pangea and how the continent broke up into seven sections and demonstrate that using the cake. Then the class will talk about it.

Afterward, the teachers will talk to each other about the method and how each of the different pupils reacted. They'll share with each other regarding what worked well with which kid. They want to know, "Did he or she make the connection? Did the glue go into their head?" It's a very creative and very multi-sensory approach.

NCLD:

Say I'm the parent of a child with a learning disability. What are some of the types of creative activities that I can engage in with my child to both help them learn and to have fun?

Sally Smith:

For reading, you can take a story or a myth and have the family act it out; it helps the child understand far more about the text. "How bad was that dragon? How could he turn into such a kind creature in the end?" The child can see it happen.

Making up or adapting games that kids already like to play can be very good, too. For example, in our Secret Agents Club, kids earn ribbons for listening carefully, for hearing differences in sounds or when sounds are the same, for seeing differences between pictures, letters and symbols, for smelling, tasting and touching, for using all the senses. What we're doing is taking a game kids like to play"Secret Agent or Detective"and using it to teach readiness skills.

Or if a kid is having trouble with money, a family can play store, where someone buys things and the child has to make change and count it out. And a parent might want to throw in some intentional mistakes"kids love to catch their parents making mistakes, and we encourage parents to make as many mistakes as possible.