Archive for February, 2012

  Every Day We See Success

Every day the Neuro-Educational Specialists see children, teens, and even adults move from being people who struggle with learning to folks with confidence, increased comprehension, and faster processing of the information they encounter.  There is no magic. It’s all done by addressing functional issues in the brain. Mostly those developmental steps or stages that may have been missed for a variety of reasons.

Here’s what a reader has said about the information we have on our blog.  I hope you, too, will join the growing number of people who now know that having learning issues is not a life sentence!  It doesn’t matter whether an individual is gifted, typical, or has special needs.  Ones potential can be realized with the right application of a Neuro-Developmental/Educational Program .  That is Little Giant Step’s specialty! We’ve  even created an at-home program for those who desire to make a difference in their children’s lives.  It’s called: Developmental Foundations.  Investigate, gain knowledge, then you can make a difference in someone’s life, as well.

“I truly wanted to write down a small word in order to thank you for all the nice items you are showing on this website. My time consuming internet research has finally been rewarded with extremely good facts and strategies to exchange with my friends and family. I would mention that we readers are definitely lucky to exist in a useful site with  many wonderful professionals with good techniques. I feel really lucky to have seen your website and look forward to some more amazing moments reading here. Thanks again for everything.”

Little Giant Steps (LGS) is here to make a positive difference in peoples lives!  Come by and read our helpful articles! They’re FREE!  Learn about the ND Approach. We have a full length seminar available on our store!  If Dyslexia is a problem, see the training sessions we’ve made for you.  Have a blessed day and come back soon!

 Faith Plays A Part Of Our Daily Life

 Little Giant Step’s committment to helping those with learning issues is founded and grounded in a belief of God’s miraculous design of the human being….. in his image.  Every child we work with starts out in a place of  dysfunction.  It takes the faith to do a program that will build a foundation totally unseen.  However, as many can testify over the past twently years Little Giant Steps’ programs work!  The missing pieces of the neuro-developmental foundation are put into place through daily activities, cognitive, visual, auditory, and tactile.  Every day physical, mental, and emotional boundries are met and exceeded until the dysfunction has been eliminated.  God created the neuroplasticity of the brain, so injured parts can be healed, and incomplete connections can become whole and strong.  We apply what is needed to stimulate the brain to develop as it was intended.  We are blessed, our clients and the children we work with are blessed and grateful for the knowledge we possess.

With our faith being such an important part of what we do daily, we also feel very strongly about the importance of the strength of families, and our nation.  Today, I want to share a song that we believe our country needs to hear.  It was sung at a Diamond Rio concert.  We hope you share our appreciation of this song and pass it on to those who believe in freedom, justice, and in God we still trust!

We Knew There Was A Problem With Learning

 Our daughter knew she was behind and couldn’t read like her friends. She would retreat to Mom whenever she grew uncomfortable with her limitations. It was one of only a few coping mechanisms she had for the internal struggles that ensued. I knew I had to do something, anything, to help her overcome her learning challenges. We suspected Dyslexia when the usual switching of her B’s and D’s lingered. She would skip words, start reading a word she couldn’t decode and fill in the wrong word with one that started with similar letters. She complained of headaches when she did academics. Keeping her on task and getting her schoolwork done everyday put a strain on our relationship and our days typically ended in tears.
 

Some Help Is Not Really Help

I had no idea it would be such a challenge for a homeschooler to get help. Even tried and true homeschool sources couldn’t offer any resources that we could afford. As with many homeschoolers, we have both a large family (8 children) and a single income. So we searched and searched, bet couldn’t seem to find any way for her to be tested or evaluated to see if she truly had Dyslexia or something else. I was also concerned that even a Dyslexia diagnosis would not help us to fix the problem for her.
After trying a developmental pediatrician through our insurance we were told she had ADD and should be put on Ritalin. We knew this was a wrong diagnosis; her issues had nothing to do with an inability to stay on task, and everything to do with her inability to read at grade level. We felt like we were back at square one with no real options to help our daughter overcome her challenges. We were at our wits end, yet we owed it to her to find something to help her reach her potential.

Little Giant Steps ~ A Silver Lining

My frustration came up one day when speaking to a friend and fellow homeschool mom who shared with us that another mutual friend had similar issues with her daughter and that she not only overcame her issues, but advanced to college level work by the age of 16 using the program. Hope returned. We learned about this program called Little Giant Steps (LGS), which uses a neurodevelopmental approach to addressing a gamut of learning disabilities. Nationally, LGS  Neuro-Educational Specialists are part of the International Christian Association of Neurodevelopmentalist (ICAN) network.

The approach has found that certain children have incomplete neuropathways that cause the brain to become disorganized and information is stored and recalled improperly. By doing certain exercises, these pathways are completed and the brain becomes properly organized so that information can be stored and retrieved efficiently and without obstacles.  When our daughter was first evaluated by an LGS neurodevelopmental specialist, we were shocked to discover that she couldn’t skip across a room, crawl or track an object with her eyes. Though she seemed to go through all the stages of development as expected as an infant and toddler, it was clear that there were pathways that were not complete and likely the source of her reading challenges and other physical manifestations we hadn’t realized before.

Our Journey To Healing

We began the journey of healing. And we are so relieved and grateful. In the first four months alone, our daughter improved one and a half grade levels! Along the way, an extra blessing surfaced. Our daughter had also been diagnosed with scoliosis. The curvature of her spine had advanced so drastically and so quickly that the doctor believed she would require a brace. But to our surprise, her scoliosis not only arrested, it receded (which is medically unheard of) due to a hanging exercises required by her neurodevelopmental program.  Our daughter is not even halfway through our eighteen month commitment with LGS, but she has made significant strides and for the first time in a long time we, with God’s help, feel she is FINALLY on the path toward healing… healing for both body and soul.  T.H.

With All The Resources We Have….

Why, at this time in our history, when we know more about what an infant and developing child needs to gain optimum brain and body growth, many parents are unaware?  Little Giant Steps has been doing all they can to get the word out so parents can be raising healthier, brighter, and happier children.

What is most distressing, from our vantage point, is that learning disabilities have become an epidemic force in our educational systems.  Teachers are being more and more stressed by the wide diversity of learning readiness in their students. More children are coming to school with low processing abilities, disorganized thinking (which means a disorganized brain), and behaviors that reduce their ability to receive, comprehend, store, and recall information.

The Neuro-Educational Specialists know that symptomatic functional learning deficits are typically caused from early developmental insufficiency (lack of required developmental activity). They see in their daily practice of working with children and their families that these issues can be eliminated by doing specific brain stimulating activities with a child for whatever time it takes for the brain to develop the neuro-pathways or connections.  As one researcher states, “Those undeveloped (incomplete) neuro-connections are in the brain just waiting for the developmental stimulation process to complete the circuit.”

All Parents Need to Know

A child must have focused attention from the parents for its whole health, and for its complete and fullest potential to be realized. They need sleep ~  sleeps that’s recommended. Most of our kids are sleep deprived in our country! They need nutritious and balanced food intake. They need to be stimulated and nurtured by their parents.  They need to be allowed to be on the floor during their waking hours, from the time they are new born babies, until they have mastered the art of walking, because it is on their tummies that their neuro-musculature develops, their brains and bodies become mapped, so the impulses of thought and action, cognitive thinking, comprehension, organizing thoughts, processing information and all the many things for which the brain is responsible can be efficient and effective.  I’ve said this many times, but it bears repeating,”Becoming neurologically efficient is like going from a dial up connection on the internet to a high speed optical line.”  Both ways work, but the dial up line leaves people frustrated, with many items never being completed, and almost all, eventually, give up!

Please, if you’re a parent, take a look at the free articles we provide for your journey to becoming a well informed parent who desires the very best for their children, and not just give them lip service with good intentions.  You’ll be surprised how much you can learn and how much you can do to change the course of your child’s academic journey.  Leaving children in infant seats, jumpers, swings, high chairs for most of their day, is literally putting their early and complete neuro-development in jeopardy.

Little Giant  Steps is truly the best head-start program ever.  Yes, there must be parent involvement, but that is at the heart of achieving the best parent a child could ask  or pray for.