Course Description

Learning math can be challenging, especially for students who have specific learning disabilities. Language skills, executive functioning, motor planning, and math-specific visual processing skills all play a role in acquiring math competency. Specific deficits and their resulting impact will be explored.

Chris Woodin has developed innovative, research-based methods for teaching about numbers and learning basic math skills. Methods will be presented that use minimum language demands and whole-to-part, multimodal strategies to help students express, relate, store, and retrieve information efficiently.

Students need multiplication facts to multiply and divide multi-digit numbers and perform fraction operations. These facts need to be available in both multiplication and division format, and organized through a relational context so that they may be ordered and compared. Learn to provide students with a way to store, access, and express multiplication and division facts through multimodal activities that utilize visual and kinesthetic processing. The techniques presented support various learning styles and culminate in the ability to learn, compare, and express math facts in an accurate and fluent manner.

This program utilizes semantic reasoning strengths, and a combination of whole-to-part processing and gross motor kinesthetic therapies to compensate for deficits in working memory, expressive language mechanisms, and executive function. Multiplication concepts and facts are linked to the student's existing knowledge base across a broad spectrum of modalities. By establishing a strong conceptual base, students are able to learn, store, and retrieve facts accurately and efficiently apply them to solve problems. Graphic organizers provide a means to hold information in working memory long enough to formulate fact sentences. Gross motor activities provide students with the ability to interact with these graphic organizers without being constrained by fine motor written output issues. This program is helpful to all, and especially valuable to those students with language-based learning difficulties.

Appropriate for parents and educators of students with language-based learning disabilities such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, etc. This course is available as a 1-2 hour overview, or a full day workshop.