Doing Everything In Her Power

“As a kid, I had a harder time reading,” says Leah, a veteran educator currently with the Eau Claire, WI school district and a long-time S.M.A.R.T. advocate, whose passion for teaching and love for her students are palpable.  “And I want to do everything in my power to prevent others from struggling.”

Her first teaching experiences with 4th and 5th grade bi-lingual students, convinced her that early education was where she belonged: “My highest reader was at a 2nd grade level and the rest of the students were at pre-primer. I needed to be somewhere where I could make a difference before these kids even start to learn how to read. So, I moved to kindergarten the following year, which was perfect because then I could give them a solid foundation.”

After several years in the classroom, Leah found herself in a position to support other teachers – as an educational consultant, instructional coach, literacy coach, Title I teacher, among other roles. While teachers were telling her that student behavior was their biggest problem, as a literacy coach and Title I teacher, she noticed that many children were having reading issues. “I had several kids, I could actually see their eyes doing different things on the pages, or they’d look at me and their eye would bounce, and I thought ‘something is going on there.’”  Then she attended a training for a movement-based program that dealt with dyslexia. Her original teacher training had included very little about brain-related issues or the importance of movement to development. This new perspective changed her. “I started telling parents, ‘you might want to get their eyes checked, I’ve been noticing some things’ and parents wrote to me to say, ‘There was an issue, thanks for telling us!’  I thought, this is knowledge that everybody needs to have.  It’s great and more students could be helped.”
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Several years later, when she attended a three-day S.M.A.R.T. training, it was revelatory: “Every time I heard a story I thought ‘oh, that was that kid.’ I remember having an a-ha moment: They showed us how the alligator crawl is really good for reading comprehension, and I thought, ‘why have I not been doing this the whole time with the struggling readers?’”

She brought S.M.A.R.T. home as a summer program first. “I had about six kids – two of my own and four other kids. I did a S.M.A.R.T. circuit, for an hour and a half, with stations, and some reading interventions as well. A few kids had dyslexia and I remember, when they did tactile trackers, [they’d say] ‘oh my eyes they hurt!’ and I said ‘well good, that’s what you want! This is the right activity for you!’ Their parents said, ‘This is amazing, more schools need to be doing this.’ One parent, who was a special ed teacher at the high school level, said ‘Leah, more kids could benefit from this,” I said, “I know, I agree!”

Movement Anchors Learning!
Movement influences the ability to concentrate in a classroom and to learn to read and write. The body is designed to move. Research shows purposeful, specific, and systematic physical movement can affect the brain in a very positive and dramatic way. Physical activity helps create an optimal learning condition for the brain by:

• Increasing dendrite branching and creating more neural connections.
• Stimulating the brain to produce faster connections.
• Feeding the brain glucose and oxygen, which are brain food.

Leah began to advocate for all teachers in the district to incorporate S.M.A.R.T. into their classrooms. Last year, district administrators went all in, arranging for all teachers and assistants to get trained. “The first time through the training, some of [the teachers] said, ‘oh my gosh, I thought this kid was doing this because they were misbehaving but really, they had this sensory or auditory processing or vision issue.’  They started to see behaviors differently, which I think is amazing.”

Her S.M.A.R.T. training continues to inform her practice.  When her colleagues say, “This child has ADHD” she asks, “’Have you tried spinning? Or balancing? Or pencil rolls?  Let’s start with some of those.’  I say to parents, do you ever notice them spinning? And they say ‘yeah.’  And I say, ‘let them, they need it, their bodies are telling them they still need to move.’”   

​She says, “When parents are asking [about a child’s behavior], they know there’s a problem, so it’s a matter of letting them know that there’s a reason why that’s happening.  These behavioral issues might have a basis in something more concrete, and if you can address those things, they might go away or minimize.”

“I have probably three or four kids with high behavioral needs.  One of my little guys used to have really large emotions and now you wouldn’t really recognize him.  Does he still have moments?  Absolutely, we still have to work on it.  However, he’s really calmed down quite a bit.  His mom said, ‘oh my gosh, he has improved by leaps and bounds.’”

The knowledge Leah has gained through the S.M.A.R.T. training has given her a different perspective on her own children. “I wish I would have had this training before I had kids because I feel like I would have done a better job when my kids were toddlers, and it breaks my heart. As a parent, I would say it’s a life-changing training that teaches you movements that we often want to skip because they are doing it so fast. My oldest went straight from sliding on his belly to minimal amounts of crawling to running, so he missed most of the crawling, and he has struggled with reading and writing.

​“We are a container society, we are putting our kids in car seats to highchairs to bouncy seats and they are never getting those experiences on the ground, and those experiences are the ones that lead to academic success. We should tell parents ‘Don’t rush them, there are a lot of stages we try to rush through, and quite honestly they need to be on the ground moving.’"

For parents of older children that are having problems academically or behaviorally, Leah says, “There’s a lot of brain-based activities that we can be doing, even at upper levels. My favorite video to show people is The Brain Highway, because there’s always someone who says ‘oh, yeah, I get it!’ when they see it.”