The Gift

Austin and I went to meet with Sue Hall, from Positive Dyslexia http://www.positivedyslexia.com/. Sue uses the Davis Method, designed by Ron Davis, author of The Gift of Dyslexia and The Gift of Learning. Sue refers to dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyspraxia as a "Talent."
Sue explained about how Austin's brain works when he is writing letters and numbers. It's really cool, how she described that dyslexics and dysgraphics see, in their mind's eye, in 3D. So, it is very challenging to know which way to place a letter on a 2D page. That's how Austin is able to write "5" backwards (I find it challenging to do this) and a "g" upside-down and mirrored.

Sue delivers a program that takes a full week, Monday to Friday, 9:00-4:00, working with her one:one. The medium she uses is clay. The students she works with, learn writing and math skills that enable them to use their brain the way it was intended to be used, instead of how schools try to force them to use their brains. This way, students can create similar output to their counterparts in a school/work setting, though they are using their 3D brains in the way nature intended. Sue suggested that Austin has devised reading strategies to decode words, enabling him to read very well for his age.

Sue's program sounds very interesting, but it is very expensive. If we qualify for a bursary, we may be able to put Austin through the program, if he is willing and interested.

Incentive to type

Skye and I have been challenged to find ways to positively motivate Aidan to get in regular practice on his violin. His teacher asks him to only practice for 10 minutes per day. It might be hard to believe this, but even that is challenging when we don't have it built into a daily routine. Prompting Aidan at various times of the day, to practice, hasn't been successful so far. We've considered getting him into another lesson, closer to home, in the middle of the week, but this will cost at least another $80/month, and may require an additional trip to the lesson, if we can't coordinate with Austin's music lesson time slot.
On the way to Aidan's lesson on Saturday, I was inspired to try the same incentive program that was so successful for both boys, when learning to toilet train ... Lego!!! Only this time, it's big-boy Lego. I bought Aidan the Star Wars Separatist Shuttle and Austin the Power Miners Crystal Sweeper.
Aidan earns 19 pieces per day, for 2 weeks and Austin earns 22 pieces per day, for 3 weeks.
Aidan earns pieces each day he practices his violin for a minimum of 10 minutes, and Austin earns pieces each day he practices typing for a minimum of 15 minutes. So far, it's working like a charm.
And we have the side benefit of a lot of math figuring ;) They've been going through the instruction books, to find out how far they'll get "tomorrow," and how many days it will take to get to various stages in the building process. They work out how many pieces they'll have in a week. Austin worked out 7 x 22, by starting with 10 x 22, then subtracting 3 x 22. He arrived at 144, because he had worked out 3 x 22 to equal 76, in his head, so he subtracted 10 too many. Once he realised where he went wrong, he corrected, but accidentally took another 10 off to arrive at 134, and caught himself quickly to change his answer to 154. I worked out the answer by multiplying 7 x 20 = 140 and adding 7 x 2 = 14, 140 + 14 = 154.
This incentive program might be a way to teach our boys a bit of patience, too. They are so accustomed to not having to wait for what they want, and not having to work for it. Not entirely, of course (they do chores to earn pocket money), but Skye and I feel that it's very difficult for our kids to understand what it's like to have to live without things you want, when they seem to be surrounded by such abundance.
Anyway, it is achieving the primary goals to motivate Aidan to practice his violin and Austin to practice keyboarding.

Information at your fingertips

Austin, Iain and I watched the TED talk on the 6th Sense research project at the MIT media labs.

http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

Iain and Austin were particularly impressed with the idea of using gestures to access information and features. The demos of using your hand to dial a phone, the wrist watch gesture and the picture-taking gesture inspired them the most. I asked them to put some thought into ideas they have for new gesture features or interesting ways to use the ones in the talk. I need to follow-up with them on this.

Boys' night to cook

Last weekend was the boys' night to cook and the challenge was to cook something that they hadn't cooked before (so no spaghetti and no tacos). They attacked the cupboard full of cookbooks and came up with ginger beef and noodles as their choice. Carla was out doing errands so they quickly called her to request a few missing ingredients from the store (noodles and beef).

With dinner time quickly approaching they launched into action. Iain cut the beef into strips and Austin chopped the green onions. They both collaborated on the seasoning (we discovered that we were out of Paprika but decided to go ahead anyway and hoped that it would still taste good). Both the boys like the flavor of garlic so lots of chopped garlic went in (yum!).

Once the meat was cooked, in went the water and noodles. It's at this point that they discovered that the wok would have been a better vessel to do this kind of cooking. The pan they chose was overflowing with good stuff.

About an hour after starting we got out the noodle bowls and had a very tasty dinner. I sure hope they do this one again some time! :)

Audiblox

Austin started using Audiblox on November 16. This is a program designed by Dr. Jan Strydom of South Africa, to reverse disabling effects of dyslexia, dysgraphia and other conditions.

The exercises use coloured blocks for block design, sequencing and patterns, letter tiles to practice spelling, bean bags, a page of arrows to practice orientation (up, down, left, right)... Austin particularly enjoys the block design exercises, and he is doing very well at them.

I've noticed that he is creating clever ways to remember the colour sequences - very similar strategies to building vocabulary when he is learning a new language. For instance, when he sees a horizontal series of three blocks, blue/white/red, he says out loud, "France," if he sees these blocks in a vertical orientation, he says, "France sideways," and if they are red/white/blue, he says, "France backwards." He uses similar phrasing for green/white/red, substituting "Italy" for "France." A yellow/black combination is "Bumblebee," and a green/blue combination is "Vancouver." He explained that he's referring to the Canucks' blue/green jersey. A red/white/yellow combination is "too bright." I've noticed that he consistently uses the same descriptions for the same colour combinations.

He's not mixing up his green and red, but occasionally gets blue and green in the wrong positions when they are together in a colour sequence.

He hates to repeat a design, so I've noticed he is now trying harder to get them right on the first try.

Austin and I have agreed to practice Audiblox together for three months, 5 times per week, to see if it makes a difference with his handwriting skill. Fortunately, the exercises are varied, he's not being timed, and I'm usually able to hold his interest through each section. We spend 45 minutes per day on these exercises.

Where is all this wind coming from?!

Now that we've seen the destructive force that the wind can have when it topples trees (see the earlier post about the tree falling in our yard), Austin was interested to know a little bit more about where this evening's strong wind was coming from. This required that we did a bit of investigating using the Environment Canada web site. The best information is found on the Marine Forecast pages for the Georgia Strait South of Nanaimo.

First we took a look at the detailed weather reports from the local marine weather station at Pt. Atkinson.

From this we could see that the average wind speed had been increasing all afternoon and peaking at 1700 (5pm). However, the gusts had continued to increase all the way to a top speed of 50 knots (approx 90Km/h) between 8pm and 9pm. The other thing that we noticed was that the temperature had been dropping all evening which is what you'd expect once the sun goes down but why was it rising again? Time to break out more reports to see what was going on in the bigger picture.

By going to the Environment Canada Analysis Charts we can see a large low pressure system moving in from the North West. The contour lines indicate the rate in change of air pressure and can be thought of as a slope with the air moving down it like water. The closer together the lines, the steeper the slope and the faster the wind. So now we know what's creating all that wind tonight. But why is the temperature rising even though the sun's gone down?

Looking at the Analysis Chart a little more we can see some thick, curved lines spiraling out from the big L (for Low) with triangles and semi-circles on one of the lines. These indicate warm and cold fronts where the triangles represent a cold front and the semi-circle bumps represent warm fronts. Austin could see that on this chart there is a warm front just off the coast of Vancouver Island and Washington State. This is bringing warm air to us which is causing the temperature to rise.

Timber!!!

One of the big hemlocks in our back yard came down on Friday. When Austin and I were driving home from his Spanish lesson, I received a call from our neighbour, to give me the news. I was pretty worried that the tree might have come down onto our house, and that it will cost a lot to have it removed.

Austin was quite cheerful, and mentioned that, if the tree hadn't come down, we wouldn't have an opportunity to inspect the upper branches and see what was living in the tree. I said it would be sad if birds lost their nest as a result of the tree falling. Austin said, "But, it's natural. And besides, most birds will have flown south for the winter, by now." What an optimist!

Austin was excited to explore the tree, and he brought his leatherman out, so he could use the saw blade to cut off a few branches. He gave Aidan a lesson in how to saw off branches.

The District sent an arborist to inspect the tree. She determined that a fungus had caused wood rot, weakened the tree, so in the heavy winds, it came down. The other big hemlock on our property is not experiencing the same fungus, even though the trees were adjacent to each other. However another arborist (Jesse) determined that our tree has dead wood at the base of the trunk, so that's not a good sign, and he pointed out to Austin and I, how most of the branches, and therefore most of the weight is on the south side of the tree. If the tree is going to fall, it will fall to the south - directly onto our house. Jesse also explained to Austin and I that our hemlock is experiencing "mistletoe," causing additional shoots to grow at the ends of limbs, making them heavier. Jesse pointed out that the tree that fell would have been sheltering our tree from northerly winds, and now our tree is more vulnerable. So, all in all, the situation is not good for our tree, or our pocketbook. Austin left that conversation feeling pretty convinced that the tree has to come down.