I am speaking at the Marlborough Dyslexia Association AGM on Tuesday 12th November 2013. The topic is “Visualisation Techniques for Learning”. Do contact Susanne Harris 01672-514162 to book your place.
I want to change the focus of learning difficulties away from the individual have a deficit and to offering our teachers and parents the best skills to enable our exceptionally talented, creative and imaginative children to learn in a way that works best for them.
Mental imagery has been used for decades in sport to achieve excellence and completely ignored by the education system. Teachers are taught to show children pictures; this is visual teaching but unless you ask the child you have no idea how they are storing this information; this is visual learning and the qualities of your mental images are 95% of visual learning.
Once you have improved the quality of your mental images and become consciously aware of your own experience you can use them for all aspects of learning; literacy, numeracy, concentration, comprehension, revision etc.
It is a crime not to teach these skills in primary school, in parallel with phonics.
Some children will pick word recognition up naturally whilst others flounder around us a sea of confusion, entering a downward spiral of more and more learning difficulties; whether or not they are formally diagnosed. Our children become stressed to breaking, their behaviour deteriorates, their self esteem vanishes and they may even try suicide when they feel stupid or are bullied. If you are lucky you become resilient to all the bullying and feeling stupid to go onto greatness like Richard Branson, Jamie Oliver, Einstein, and those people in the recent film The Big Picture. But there are millions worldwide who are not so lucky and flounder around in confusion.
I have become an expert in the use of mental imagery in learning. It can and is taught quickly and easily. It needs to be integrated into primary school teaching and learnt side by side with phonics
Click here for more details : Autumn Lecture – visualisation 2013 Poster.
There is a very special offer on CPD for Primary Schools for those who attend the meeting. Take a look at www.cpdoutofthebox.co.uk.
Olive Hickmott, Empowering Learning
Olivehickmott 