Category Archives: NACD Families

Amy

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Yesterday I saw Amy, a bright and delightful six-year-old girl. While I was speaking to her mom, Amy walked over eating from a bag of Cheetos. I looked at Mom and softly said, “You know those aren’t good for her, right?” (I thought that Amy had been ignoring us, but I was wrong.)

Amy’s mouth drops open and wide-eyed she looks at her mom and says incredulously:

“Soooooo—why do you give these to me?”

Soooooo parents, why do you give such things to your kids?

Our children trust us. They trust us to take care of them and taking care of them includes making good choices and at times, hard choices. One of those choices is providing them with and teaching them about good nutrition. Amy’s assumption was that her mother wouldn’t give her anything harmful. Amy’s mom, a really super mom, certainly represents the majority of parents. Parents that often find it easier to give children what’s easy and convenient, what they like and to be truthful we like making our kids happy—but at what price?

Parenting isn’t easy.

Mila and Avery

Here are two videos of some extremely smart, happy, and very cute little girls. Two-year-old Mila is demonstrating her super auditory digit span of 5; and Avery (aka Shirley Temple), who just turned six, is showing us how much fun math can be.

Mila’s maturity and language, which are a reflection of her super processing skills, would blow your socks off! She’s really smart, really happy, and great fun. With her high processing, her world is much larger and richer than that of her peers, and the quality and quantity of information her brain processes every day is going to continue to keep moving her higher and higher. Just to put things in perspective, a lot of 5-year-olds can’t process a 5!

 

Miss Personality, Avery just gushes exuberance. To put her video in perspective, a note from Avery’s mom accompanied her video: “I just showed Avery the concept of borrowing (using Modular Math) and this is her second problem.“ The significance of this isn’t really that she has grasped borrowing, it’s that she loves it! How many parents can say their kids LOVE math? Step one in teaching any child anything—teach them to love it!

Every day I deal with children and parents struggling with school—kids who are learning to hate learning and often themselves in the process. Learning can and needs to be fun.

The foundation of development is neuroplasticity. Specific input delivered with the appropriate frequency, intensity, and duration is the key to success.

Guess what? If we can target our input, teach specifically to the child, create great processing skills, and make it fun, we produce great outcomes.

A big part of what excites me about these exceptional little ones is the fact that they are demonstrating the power of neuroplasticity and potential—the power and potential that lies in every child’s brain. They are a reflection of the opportunities they are receiving. Our children with developmental issues are often viewed as their labels with all the accompanying baggage. The baggage is being judged by the historical limitations of others with the same label that have preceded them over the past decades. The perception of limitations results in limited opportunities, and limited opportunities result in self-fulfilling prophecies. Every child, regardless of their issues and labels, needs to be perceived as a totally unique individual with unlimited potential and needs to be provided with real opportunities and the reality is the more issues they have, the more they need. We love seeing children exceed others’ expectations.

The power and potential of the human brain is literally unfathomable.

—Bob

“I used to look at a page and see words. Now I see worlds.”

5981I received a note from one of our dads today. Simon has his three children on program. Today he shared a couple of things his son, eight-year-old Noah, had just said. Noah is smart, fun, a fledging stand-up comic, has very good processing, and academically now is on a 5th grade level.

We have Noah working on math using Khan Academy; and when his dad asked him how it was going, Noah told him he had figured out how many paperclips it would take to reach the amount of kilograms in an elephant. According to Noah, a paperclip evidently weighs 0.0005 kg. So there–you can now go figure it out yourself. Very cool!

Noah just finished reading a chapter book and told his dad that he had read every word in the book, even about the author, (but not the copyright page). Then he said, “I used to look at a page and see words. Now I see worlds.” You have to love it.

Making Kids Smart Isn’t Tough

On my last trip I had the great joy of seeing two brilliant little children, one a 2 years old and the other 3, both of whom demonstrated once more what the future could be.  Both of these children, a boy and a girl, have digit spans of 5 (the processing abilities of a typical 6-7-year old and the processing level of many children in junior and senior high school and, sadly, many adults as well. Both of these children have been using our NACD Cognition Coach apps, and the results are right there in your face.  These little wonders are absolutely delightful, and true to their superior processing skills, they are very conversational, have good vocabularies, mature in every way, inquisitive, happy and really smart. Talk about fun!

Being with these kids and seeing what “smart” is and realizing that this is something that virtually all children could achieve is very reassuring and motivating.  We really can all be smarter, and successful outcomes in education should be focused much less on curriculum and much, much more on simply making kids smarter.  I would love to have the time to do a little study, and to test successful people, such as entrepreneurs, the top doctors, attorneys, scientists, etc. on elementary and middle school curriculum.  I know what the results would be, I would just like to have the data to make the point.  The point being that memorizing a bunch of stuff to take a test and then forgetting it doesn’t produce success. If we built a list of the actual core knowledge of successful people it wouldn’t look much like the stuff that most school curriculums are made of. I do however suspect that one of the common ingredients found in successful people, be they plumbers who have build a successful company or the successful developer, the neurosurgeon or engineer is that they are smart.

Making kids really smart isn’t all that tough; we have been developing techniques to develop short term and working memory the foundation for cognition for forty years and through our work with children and adults with developmental issues and helping them maximize their potential we have have really learned how to help typical children be truly exceptional. In about time then a child spends in brushing their teeth everyday targeted input can dramatically accelerate the process that can make them smarter. Smarter means, they enjoy a richer life, learn faster and better, derive more from their educations, increase their life and career options and raise the odds for living a happy and successful life. Smart is good and smarter is better and you simply can’t be too smart.

Educating for Excellence – Cougars in the Backyard

I just received a video created by two of our NACD boys—Matthew, 16, and Harrison, 14. My sister Ellen, who is directing their programs, gave these two homeschooled boys the assignment to create a unit study documentary.

We feel very strongly about inquiry-based, student-based learning. The boys might not know it, but what they are doing is called autodidactic learning. A good example of an autodidactic learner, or self-taught learner, was Leonardo da Vinci. History is full of many such self-taught, self-motivated inquiring minds that were given or took the opportunity to experience and interact with the learning experience and to create excellence. I would love to see more of our children be given the time and opportunity to have such real learning experiences. Learning to learn and not needing to be spoon-fed is necessary if we are going to assist our children in achieving excellence.

Matthew, Harrison, and the rest of the Murphy family–well done! I hope your documentary inspires other students to explore, investigate, and discover how really cool learning is.

Oh, and guys, I have seen cougars in my backyard.