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Summary:
Recognizing each child's intellectual, emotional, and physical strengths--and teaching directly to these strengths--is key to sculpting "a mind at a time," according to Dr. Mel Levine. While this flashing yellow light will not surprise many skilled educators, limited resources often prevent them from shifting their instructional gears. But to teachers and parents whose children face daily humiliation at school, the author bellows, "Try harder!" A professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School, Levine eloquently substantiates his claim that developmental growth deserves the same monitoring as a child's physical growth.
Tales of creative, clumsy, impulsive, nerdy, intuitive, loud-mouthed, and painfully shy kids help Levine define eight specific mind systems (attention, memory, language, spatial ordering, sequential ordering, motor, higher thinking, and social thinking). Levine also incorporates scientific research to show readers how the eight neurodevelopmental systems evolve, interact, and contribute to a child's success in school. Detailed steps describe how mental processes (like problem solving) work for capable kids, and how they can be finessed to serve those who struggle. Clear, practical suggestions for fostering self-monitoring skills and building self-esteem add the most important elements to this essential--yet challenging--program for "raisin' brain." --Liane Thomas
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
A MIND IN TIME & A LIGHTHOUSE IN HAPPY VALLEY
Customer Rating:
A MIND IN TIME came highly recommended for people like (all of) us who face certain uncertain challenges. Ourselves & our dear children & friends. I bought it for my partner in these tasks. She read it & found it very helpful. I will read it next. Because MEL LEVINE's work on the 8 neurodevelopmental mind systems seems to put an important focus on a vital view. Because it appears he's also worked up some practical strategies.
From my experience & study I do believe that we ARE what we think, among other considerations. So HOW do we think, how do we LEARN to think, how do we THINK about all this ? There is much we can learn.
A salute to MR. LONDON & all who labor in these fields ! A million thumbs up to all who struggle here ! There is much we can do NOW to make our lives & our children's lives much happier & healthier ! Let us ALL be encouraged, with good reason ! Even knowing that this is very difficult work & that we sometimes (often) do NOT get the results we may want or need & in fact suffer immensely !
I may have more to say after I read A MIND IN TIME. I expect it will be a very valuable read.
We got A MIND IN TIME from LIGHTHOUSE BOOKS, an excellent AMAZON partner. A "new" copy retailed for $ 15 @ BORDERS by The Water Tower on Michigan Avenue in Chicago but was out of stock there. LIGHTHOUSE BOOKS had it "used" in stock for $ 1. LIGHTHOUSE BOOKS's copy was in even better condition than described. Just as good as "new." Shipping was several days quicker than promised or expected. LIGHTHOUSE BOOKS is an unusually effective & highly economical resource for booklovers. HAPPY VALLEY ? That's where they live !
A Mind at a Time
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Book is in good, promised condition. My only complaint is that it got here later than I thought it would.
Mel Levine opened my eyes and my heart
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I've read the professional reviews and they are interesting, but as a parent they are glossy and shiny but don't ring with the truth I found in this book. The first time I read a Mel Levine book I cried. Because finally someone understood just what my child FELT. I was also enraged because here was a learned professional espousing what I always knew in my heart to be true but the education system in our rural community was so hopelessly out of date, change of this scope is decades if not centuries away.
But, what this book did give me was a new vocabulary. It opened my eyes to the fact that many teachers are rigid and many simply do not have the resources in the existing structure of the school system to meet the needs of, not only my child, but as many as half the children in their classroom. And in all honesty, some teachers should not be teachers. With luck and perseverence, I MAY be able to influence my child's teachers, but I can not change this system in his lifetime.
What I can do, is change how I talk to my child, how I reinforce their learning in the home, and more importantly how I talk to him about his frustrations in his classroom.
I am my child's best advocate. After reading this book, I was better armed with tools and ideas for addressing my child's educational needs, and my informed input was better received by his educators.
Having a child with "special needs" has no easy cure and will always be a source of anxiety for me. But Mel Levine's books (I've read four of them) help arm me for the on-going fight for his rights as a student.
parents and educators need to understand this
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Dr. Mel Levine has worked for a long time with children so that they could grow up feeling responsible, successful and with good self esteem. He has spent a great deal of time working with experts in many disciplines in order to understand how children learn and how to help them if they are struggling.
He has broken learning into several areas of input, processing, storage, retrieval and output. Parents and educators can use this information to understand where a child may be having problems and then use ideas from his book to help turn things around for the child/student.
What the book does let us know is that learning is not easy but more like rocket science, in that it is a combination of innate abilities and deficits of the child, and the abilities of the adults to work with the abilities and help remediate the deficits through a combination of interventions and accommodations. There is also no quick turn around, since the educational demands change over time with new areas of difficulty recognized with the increased demands.
Great! It'll change your perspective!
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In this book you realize that there is really no such thing as dumb, that all brains work differently. It helps focus on the REAL issues of learning, instead of lumping your understanding into ADHD or some other category. You should read it!
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