The Old Schoolhouse Magazine

using this “family” approach to practicing the social scenarios that may present themselves.

Occupational Therapy

Occupational Therapy can help a child or teen modulate his sensory system responses to stressful situations. Often, they will employ sensory modulating techniques such as brushing, relaxing breathing, therapy balls to enhance the vestibular system, and specific exercises to strengthen neuro-cognitive connections.

Neuro-Cognitive Home Brain Training

This is my favorite therapy, not only be-
cause it can be done at home by a parent
(with very simple instructions), but it is the
therapy I saw work the fastest in the Re-
source Room setting in which I was work-
ing with my middle schoolers. It’s interest-
ing, that another label that was given in the
recent past to describe the characteristics
these children were struggling with was
“Non-Verbal Learning Disorder.”
As we know in our study of the respon-
sibilities of the brain hemispheres, the left
brain is considered the verbal brain, and
the right brain would be the more non-ver-
bal brain. What does it mean, practically,
when listening or reading. This, of course,
helps tremendously with both reading
comprehension and conversational appro-
priateness because the “whole picture” is
visualized as the speaker is speaking. The
right brain is considered the more “social”
side, being able to get jokes, and visual
cues, while the left brain is the more rule
oriented, data-driven, literal side of our
brain. I was always amazed that by using
simple body movements to help my stu-
dents access their right brain more eas-
ily (to address dyslexia and dysgraphia),
that my students with ASD characteristics
gained so much in understanding social
situations and engaging in learning. They
seemed to become so much more flexible
in their thinking.

How did I help the students in my Resource Room more easily access their right brain? I used specific midline exercises and once a week Brain Trainings. In the targeted Brain Trainings (done just once a week), the students would spend a minute or two looking upper left (accessing their right brain), while listening to music (right brain activation) and doing a cross crawl exercise. This simple but powerful neuro-cognitive brain-training gradually built stronger connections between both hemispheres, creating a veritable “bridge” for accessing both sides of the brain. This took about twenty minutes a day.

A newspaper article entitled “The Edu-
cation of Joshua” was written about one of
my eighth grade students affected by ASD.
He began conversing with others more
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