The big picture

What else goes on back there besides the sensory flooding? There's a cognitive portion of each session too. For thirty minutes, Sam meets with a tutor to review specific sub-skills that are difficult for him. Areas like comprehension (reading and listening) and math reasoning can be problematic for right-brain weak children.  Kids like Sam often have a great memory for details, but have trouble with summarizing, getting the big picture and identifying the main idea. Understanding cause & effect relationships is sometimes challenging. And since they're usually very literal, they need to learn how to make inferences.  To get stronger in these areas, Sam uses worksheets, games and manipulatives.

When we signed up, I worried that Sam would resist this part of the program and that it might feel too much like school. But he likes it.  He's good at math and enjoys playing around with the numbers in different ways than he does in school. I think I mentioned before that Sam recently had a language evaluation which indicated that he has a hard time keeping up if a conversation or direction is too complex and lengthy - he's fine with individual words and sentences. But when he has to follow along with a whole paragraph, he gets lost. The evaluator didn't think this was because of his ADD. Hopefully this is something they'll work on since I pulled him out of his newly started language therapy when we started at Brain Balance.

This morning as Sam and I were listening to his music and doing wall push ups (my arms are getting stronger too!) I reminded Sam that if he didn't do the exercises as often as they recommend we might have to do more than twelve weeks. He looked at me with surprise:

We stop after twelve weeks?

That's the plan.

But I like it there.

You do?

Yup. It's fun and I like the stars.

I love that you like going.

Crazy. I never imagined that he would actually like being pushed so hard. Or that he would be sad to know that it's not a forever commitment like all his other therapies seem to be. As much as I love chatting with sweet Erin, I won't miss it when it's over. But with at least nine more weeks to go, we're getting ahead of ourselves.