Over a century ago, there was a great piece of scientific wisdom from the Dore Lectures on Mental Science by Thomas Troward, who stated: “The law of flotation will not be determined by the contemplation of the sinking of things but by contemplating the floating of things which floated naturally, and then intelligently asking why they did so.” Moving that same line of thinking into education, a universal wisdom about learning results – “The law of successful learning will not be determined by the contemplation of the failure of things, but by contemplating the learning of things, and then intelligently asking why.” A great deal of successful teaching has to do with what and how teachers “notice” the outcomes of their well planned lessons and carefully chosen words (sometimes not so carefully chosen words). Educators must “notice” and comment on what is “right” more than noticing and commenting on errors and mistakes. This also applies to parents. We must be mind “full” of what “is” . . . and mind “less” of what “isn’t”. Many years ago, research shown that the ratio of negative-to-positive comments in American homes was greater than 10:1, which is 10 negative comments for every positive […]

By Dr. Ann Harvey, Associate Professor of Reading, Western New Mexico University Young children spend much time in front of a screen.  Whether it is a TV screen or a computer screen, there seems to be one result:  the child’s near point vision development suffers.  Even the American Academy of Pediatrics has noticed the problem because they have recommended that no more than one to two hours of quality TV, video, or internet be viewed each day for older children and no screen time should be given to children under the age of two.  Beginning readers need to have all the physical benefits of learning to read with minimal effort.  Since 80% of information gathered is visual, this is an important aspect of learning.  Having both eyes move, align, fixate, and focus as a team enhances the ability to interpret and understand the potential visual information that is available.  Extra effort spent on getting print in focus should be used on comprehension efforts. An emergent reading assessment measures problems with eye movement, as well as cognitive, motor, social-emotion development and concepts of print.  The information that follows will offer simple remediation efforts to correct delay in the eye movement development. […]