When One Approach Falls Short, Try Something New!

If at first you don't succeed, don't just try, try again!

Several years ago, we had Spanish-speaking friends visiting in our home. While we chatted, my husband, who doesn’t speak Spanish, started making friends with their six-year-old son, Jaime. Jaime spoke to my husband, waited expectantly for a second, then leaned into my husband’s other ear and shouted quite loudly, not realizing that what he was facing was a language barrier, not a hearing impairment.

I’ve recalled that moment so often throughout the years. Each time a child is re-taught a concept when he didn’t get it the first time, I think of Jaime shouting in my husband’s other ear thinking that this time, with a new ear and louder volume, he would be heard. 

When we teach a failing child in the same way we taught when first they failed, we are in essence "shouting in their other ear.”

If the child fails again, they might experience a sense of inadequacy which they will carry with them for the next task. The spiral of failure often deepens because of the impact a negative emotional state has on a child’s ability to think, learn, and remember.

When a child fails, their response might be to try and be invisible, they might act out, mouth off, quit, slump, glaze over, rebel, or any number of other tactics to draw attention away from the pain of failure.

Recently I spoke with a mother who was calling to discuss the Easy-for-Me™ Reading Program. She had a 7 year old who is dyslexic, who, because of repeated failure, had gone from loving to hating books. His mother had searched endlessly for a program that would approach teaching of reading in a way that was different from what had not worked for her son. She found many, many programs, but they were basically the same… until she found Easy-for-Me™ Reading through an online search.

What sets the Easy-for-Me™ approach apart (and in fact, all the Child1st learning resources) is that we are not traditional. We engage multiple modalities so the whole brain is stimulated and combine right and left brain approaches to activate both hemispheres of the brain. This method speaks to the diversity of children's natural wiring and processing strengths.

As a result, children who have been experiencing a voice shouting loudly in their other ear will finally encounter something which they can understand and which will bring them out of the spiral of failure and discouragement in which they have been lost.

All Child1st learning resources have been created to speak the learning languages that reflect the neurodiversity of our children.