I have been teaching for almost 21 years. Every year I encounter students who learn things so easily and others who struggle. Last spring I started searching for a program that would address cognitive skills to try to help some of these students. I came across Audiblox/Schoolblox and ordered it for my regular 5th grade classroom.
My class started the program at the beginning of Sept. They did and continue to do the exercises 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week.
About 8 weeks into the program I noticed an improvement in one student’s ability to read. When he came to our school at the beginning of the year, he read at about a beginning 2nd grade level. One day in class he volunteered to read aloud a sentence from our English textbook. The other students in the class looked up, and I asked the class if they noticed something. Another student exclaimed that he can read better. The class cheered. This student continues to make steady progress in his reading. He seems to pick up new words from Science and Social Studies class quite easily and can read them when he encounters them at a later time. He now reads the tests by himself and is very pleased about that. Every time I hand him a test I ask if he wants me to read it to him. He just grins back and says that he can do it. At the beginning of the year, I was reading the tests to him. He continues to go to the resource room for Reading class. They are using a Reading series that focuses on phonics skills as this is an area still difficult for him.
About 2 months into the program, another teacher stated that another student was attending better. I noticed an improvement in the regular classroom too. At this time he is very organized and completes all of his assignments on time which was not the case at the beginning of the year. He uses his daily assignment book well. His language is delayed though and he has started on the language component of Audiblox at home.
I have noticed improvements in my students when they do the exercises. They are able to do longer sequences and patterns. The ability to do the directionality exercise has improved. Reading and spelling the words in the Reading and Spelling Exercises has also improved.
As far as noticing other improvement, that has been hard for me throughout the months. I decided to check with the parents. At the beginning of February I sent a questionnaire/rating scale home to them to get their observations. Seven of the questionnaires had the rating scale marked. Five of these parents have noticed encouraging to astounding improvements in Reading and General Attitude Towards Learning. Four parents have noticed encouraging to astounding improvements in Spelling, Math, Attitude Towards Self, and Attitude Towards Homework.
At the end of the 3rd quarter of school a week ago, I thought I would take the class average for each subject from the first 4 weeks of school and compare them with the class average for the 3rd quarter. Three subject areas showed marked differences, English went from a class average of 84% to 89%, Science from 84% to 91%, and Reading from 85% to 91%. Looking at the report card of one of the struggling students at the beginning of the year, the grades have not changed much, but I realized that there have been gains made as he is now able to read his Science and Social Studies tests himself.
Each of the exercises in the program seems to be very good and challenge all the students in my class. They really make the students work and think. I tell my students that these are brain exercises. When I forget something in the classroom, they now tell me that I need to do Audiblox too.
An area of difficulty for me has been to know when to move on to the next step of each exercise. Sometimes my own impatience has entered in and I think we should move on before the students are ready to. Susan at Audiblox has been a tremendous help to me not only with this problem, but also with other questions that I have had.
My class will continue to do the exercises daily until school is out, and at this time I do plan on using Audiblox/Schoolblox with my class next year. I would like to use a pretest of some kind with the class at the beginning of the year, and then give it later on to give me a more visible sign of improvements made. For the first time in my teaching career, I feel like I am doing something to help children so they can learn more easily.
Sheila
Grade 5 Educator
North Dakota
USA
Sheila Grade 5 Educator, USA
