Smart phones are everywhere these days.  Many kids seem to have those phones to go online, check Facebook, or use Twitter to send tweets to their friends.  Although there are plenty of game applications around like Angry Birds, there are increasing numbers of educational apps, too.  Let’s start with the math related ones.  The Google app store has an Android app called Algebra Tutor http://bit.ly/I4Dz4t.  You can walk through each step and get problem-solving help on the go.  For those students who want a wider range of help from basic math through Analytical Geometry, they can download the Android Math Formulary app http://bit.ly/IpIQjX.  The iPhone, of course, also has math apps like Math Ref, http://bit.ly/2rMgO8, which has 1400 different formulas and equations.  How about help in language arts for our Success in Reading, Math, and Music students?  The Android Grammar Guide http://bit.ly/IHC1N0  helps you with punctuation, misused words, capitalization, and tips for proofreading.   It’s even considered a big help for college students.  Apple also offers an iPhone app that gives you a Dictionary and Thesaurus http://bit.ly/5zwMgf.  Why not consider a music learning app?  You can help your sight reading with the iPhone Music Tutor app http://bit.ly/IbFPFM.  There’s another iPhone app called Tuna Pitch that helps you tune your instrument http://bit.ly/K50ixH.  For a little more fun, check out the School of Rock app http://cnet.co/7xVb9v.  There are so many great applications that you’d need an awful lot of storage space to deal with them all. The new phones, it seems, are getting smarter than those of us who use them!

We have already blogged on great Internet resources for math students, but we have so many more math-related websites to tell you about.  For example, it can certainly get expensive if you have to buy specialized calculators to solve Algebra problems as well as figuring out solutions to trigonometry, statistics, and analytical geometry.  One website has free on-line calculators for those subjects, and a whole lot more including mortgage amortization and even weather wind chill factors.  The site is called easycalculation.com.  You can also use easycalculation.com to get an additional free download of a calculator to solve squares, rectangles, triangles and circles.

Another website that will supplement your math tutoring is called Mathway.com. It allows you to solve algebra expressions along with trigonometry and statistics. Mathway.com also has a subscription option which would provide you with each and every step in solving the math problem in addition to those free answers.

Do you need graph paper for math solutions?  Well you’re in luck because the site printfreegraphpaper.com will provide free graph paper in various forms and sizes.  The free graph paper can also be used for sketches and craft projects and other non-math uses.

Finally, there is a website called Purplemath.com which can be used as a search engine for a whole range of math websites.  The categories include online lessons along with quizzes and worksheets, and the other useful sites and services.  Be sure to also click the learning forum link so you can ask specific questions.  The Internet has become a great resource here at Success in Reading, Math, and Music.  Our students will undoubtedly continue exchanging information about new sites as they become available.

Stanford University medical scientists have discovered that there are actual differences in the way the brain functions for students with a serious fear of math, or math anxiety.  2^nd and 3^rd grade students were given questionnaires to discover the ones with math anxiety.  They then had MRI brain scans while solving addition and subtraction math problems. The brain differences were described by the Stanford School of Medicine http://bit.ly/GDoC5S.  The lead researcher, Vinod Menon, was quoted in Palo Alto Online News http://bit.ly/H8q0hq as saying “It’s remarkable that, although the phenomenon was first identified over 50 years back, nobody had bothered to ask how math anxiety manifests itself in terms of neural activity.”  Success in Reading, Math, and Music offers parents the Diagnostic Online Math Assessment, or DOMA, from Letsgolearn.com.    The students tested at the Visalia tutoring center occasionally take a very long time to finish the online test.  Could this be part of math anxiety?  Well, the children with high math anxiety were significantly slower at solving math problems, as explained by Medical News Today http://bit.ly/GW0lsm. The report also quoted Dr. Menon as comparing math anxiety as the same type of fear that some people have of spiders or snakes.  The good news is that Menon will continue to work on possible treatments for math anxiety.  In the meantime, we will press-on by offering tutoring, with understanding, for students who face these extra challenges.

New research has shown that eating healthy can improve the way both kids and adults learn.  In fact, what we eat, and when, can get us on the right track.  It all comes down to breakfast.  A study from the journal Physiology and Behavior was quoted in an L.A. Times article http://lat.ms/GIdpBS which showed that oatmeal may be one of the best breakfasts for children.  Other daily foods can really make a difference in learning.  For example children have a real advantage if they eat their vegetables according to a Canadian study http://bit.ly/GJnGRV.  There is even a long list of power foods that can give a studying and learning advantage when you or your kids visit our Visalia tutoring center for classes http://bit.ly/GDXK4e. It’s important, though, to avoid the chemicals that seem to be a part of our environment and are also in certain foods.  Even if the box says it’s healthy or wholesome, beware.  There is a long list of toxins http://bit.ly/alLZFO that can actually make it harder to learn.  We can’t always eat right all the time, but if we can make that the exception, rather than the rule, we’ll make things much easier for our families and also for the tutors at Success in Reading, Math, and Music!

Most of us have already learned that you can get a wealth of knowledge from the Internet.   That includes websites that give examples of math or science problems.  What sites like that don’t give you is one-on-one interaction.  Personal communication is what helps us understand one another while providing feedback.  For example, a student may see a problem solved by a teacher but will not be able to solve similar problems without learning the basic concepts.  A teacher can only know whether the student understands by walking the student through the process while asking questions and allowing the student to ask questions as well.  Because we live in a media savvy world, this interaction is actually being done on Cable TV through a public access channel in Dorchester Massachusetts called Extra Help. As you will see, there are math tutors, as well as those assisting in Language Arts and Reading. http://bit.ly/zxf7gp.  It may interest you to know that computers are now being developed that can also provide the interaction those students need.  Current computers are certainly advanced and they have become a part of our everyday world.  What you might not know is that the mind of a baby is actually much more advanced than our computers.  The computer scientists are working to develop a processor that mimics the way babies learn, helping the computers respond to us in the same way. Their work is happening now at U.C. Berkeley where researchers are studying infants as described in this website http://bit.ly/FOJBn5.  In short, we are entering a new frontier in learning that can only further assist the students at Success in Reading, Math, and Music as well as students at other excellent  tutoring centers.  We just have to wait and see where the new technology takes us.

You can access some great math teaching videos on the Internet to help you retain the information you get at Success in Reading, Math, and Music. Let’s start with a Visalia on-line resource provided by Brad Robb, an Algebra 2 and AP Calculus teacher at El Diamante High School.  His WOWmath.org website provides YouTube videos that start with an intro to Algebra 1 which covers positive and negative integers.  They then continue all the way through advanced placement Calculus.  You simply click on the home page links that say “Notes and Videos”.   There are also practice tests you complete and then you click a button at the bottom to grade your test, or take it again. There are even free math ap’s for your cell phone.  While we’re on the subject of cell phone ap’s,  We found one for your Blackberry  where you can practice multiplication with three digit numbers.

Another great website to assist with your Visalia math tutoring (or even help you to understand many other subjects) is the Khanacademy.org site.  Khan Academy describes itself as a not-for-profit organization intended to provide a free world education to anyone.   Scrolling down from the home page you see an alphabetical listing of 3000 videos that teach on all subjects.  Scroll past the great information about Algebra to get to basic Arithmetic as well to Biology, the arts, and the social studies subjects.  Using the  ”Jump to topic” bar, you get to math testing pages based on the CAHSEE, the California High School Exit Examination and the GMAT, the Graduate Management Admission Test.

If you want to take things a step further than your traditional math tutoring videos, why not try Physics.  There are very entertaining videos where MIT Professor Walter Lewin demonstrates how Physics works.  Find those videos on the MIT Open Courseware website.

Whether  you need Visalia math tutoring or even Physics instruction, Success in Reading, Math, and Music has some excellent teachers who understand both subjects and can provide you with outstanding hands-on instruction.

Children can have a variety of learning disabilities that can act as a barrier to learning reading in a traditional classroom setting.  One of those is Dyslexia, defined as any of various reading disorders where there are problems in a child or adult in being able to interpret spatial relationships or to integrate auditory and visual information.   In plain English, dyslexics can be confused by letters, numbers or words.  They may write letters backwards, but dyslexia can come out in a variety of ways.  Some dyslexic children and adults are considered bright and may have a high IQ.  A tutor may find that the student is excellent in art, drama, or musical ability.  Another learning disability is called Dysgraphia and it means that there is a block that prevents a student from writing down information, although they may be able to read well.  One symptom of Dysgraphia is that the writing has a mixture of capital and lower case letters or even parts of letters that aren’t complete.  Each tutor at Success in Reading, Math, and Music is equipped to help a child or adult with a learning disability through the Orton-Gillingham method which addresses Dyslexia and other barriers through phonics and individualized diagnostic teaching.  Samuel Orton combined his medical neuroscientific knowledge with Anna Gillingman’s background in language structure and education psychology.  The multisensory part of the method involves a sand-tray where students write the letters with their finger after speaking the name of each letter and saying the sound of the letter.  This approach helps the students remember since they have experienced it through touch as well as speaking and writing.  The method also involves a cumulative structure where the letters are then blended into syllables and words.   Aside from the Learning Disabilities we’ve covered, there is also a thought that basic shyness may be a problem.  There is new information in an article we found that dogs can help improve reading skills in shy kids.  Check it out in this article: http://bit.ly/xal4Lv

Success in Reading, Math, and Music uses the DORA and DOMA online tests to help our credentialed teachers understand the areas where students need special help.  The DORA is the Diagnostic Online Reading Assessment which adapts to each learner’s ability in real time. The DOMA is the Diagnostic Online Math Assessment.  There are basic math, pre-algebra, and algebra versions. The tests we use can be found at letsgolearn.com which was founded in 2000 by technologist Richard Capone and by Dr. Richard McCallum, a renowned reading expert out of UC Berkeley California.  According to Let’s Go Learn, the DORA and DOMA assessments have been administered over 2-million times worldwide!  By the way, the assessments we use at Success in Reading, Math, and Music are also used by public school teachers to connect the school experience with the home experience.  In that way, public school teachers can advise parents to help their children succeed by either helping their child on their own, or encouraging them to seek tutoring.  The Let’s Go Learn assessments also provide the school teachers with additional areas to measure progress.  For example, teachers can track phonemic awareness (the speech elements of language) and reading comprehension.  There are some new developments in tutoring and you can read about emotion sensing software that actually mimics the interaction of human tutors by clicking here http://bit.ly/yukbbn

Coming soon!