 Okay, so welcome everyone. Happy to have you all here today to learn from Patty. I'm going to pass it over to Susan in a second that she will do a quick introduction and then we shall get going. I am pleased to welcome Patty over to our webinar today and this week is an occupational therapist who has actually worked with Dr. William Nielsen and just informed me that she's been trying to develop a Denmark. So that's pretty exciting. And today, Patty's going to be talking to us about the five stages of dynamic learning circles and how they relate to active learning. Everybody should have gotten quite a detailed handout about Patty's activity and so hopefully everybody does one and if not, let me know. I can send it to you later. And follow along and learn and take it away, Patty. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. As mentioned, my name's Patty Oberzuck. I'm the assistant director at Patterson Center for Blind Children. And I work with children who are legally blind who have at least one other disability. So our children here are between the ages of one and 13. And we run a residential and a daycare program at Penrithson Center for Blind Children, which is located in Taylor, Michigan. And just so you know, our mission is to help children with special needs to reach their greatest potential and to serve children and families through advocacy, education, and support. And today, what I'm going to be presenting to you is a little bit about active learning. And I hope by the end of today that you're going to be able to identify the pathways by which children with special needs learn. I hope that you'll be able to understand how children learn new skills through the dynamic learning circle. And then also to recognize how the dynamic learning circle can be disrupted. And identify intervention strategies to resolve some of those disruptions. If you're unfamiliar with active learning, I just wanted to let you know that it was created by Dr. Lily Nielsen, who was born in Denmark. She was the second of seven children who were born blind, I'm sorry, four of whom were born blind. And she worked as a teacher and special educator in Denmark for the National Institute for the Blind. And she received her PhD in spatial relations for congenitally blind infants. And she was awarded the Order of Dan and Brock for her contributions and work in the field of special education. Now I know today we only have an hour, just so you know the first time that I met Lily was at a five-day active learning conference. So there's no way that we can cover everything about active learning today. I'm just hoping to give you a little bit of an introduction about active learning and give you some resources so that you can pursue more education on your own. But I want to mention that active learning is an approach. It can provide an opportunity for any child to learn. And so through learning, the children are going to achieve prerequisites so that they can learn higher and higher levels of skills. So active learning is not just equipment. You may have heard of a little room or a hops address or an SS board or a residence board. And I'm challenging my lovely interpreter to try to spell all of those things, but I apologize. But active learning is not just equipment. It's an approach. And the approach is really to establish environments by which children with special needs can learn. Today I'm going to hopefully show you some videos with different active learning environments and point out how children are learning in those environments. These are just some of the pictures of children at Tundricks and Center in different active learning environments. On the top left is Jordan and he's on a tear popper exploring some fine motor activities while in a gross motor situation as well. And then we have DJ at the pool and Ryan's down at the bottom using a position board. Madison is in the little room. And then here is Anna in a hops address. These are just a few of the environments that are active learning environments. Again, we don't have time to discuss them all, but I just wanted to show you an overview. One of the things I like about Dr. Nielsen is she defines a child as a learner. And I wanted to point out to you that children learn throughout life. A child learns gradually according to his or her physical, mental, and emotional capacity. So no matter how old a child is or what kind of disabilities a child may have, they're still going to be able to learn. Therefore, the only reason why learning does not occur is because you have a poor environment. So today hopefully I'm going to show you ways to change the environment and create environments by which the children can learn. So here's a video you're not going to have sound, but I'm just going to describe. I just want you to look at the video I'm going to play. I just want you to think about what the expectations would be for this child in this piece of equipment. So Rylan's just sitting on a swing in a blanket. There's music playing in the background. Other than that, if you looked at this video, the expectation for Rylan, in my opinion, is that he should go to sleep. And this is during the middle of the day. And Rylan has cerebral palsy. He's visually impaired. And if you wrap a child in the blanket, the assumption is they're going to go to sleep, which to me is not an appropriate active learning environment because Rylan doesn't need to sleep anymore. He needs to be active. So I'm going to show you the next slide, which will be a different active learning, or this one is an active learning environment. So let me just play this video. And if you can hear the sound, he's kicking, which is making the beads make noise. The paper that's underneath his head is crinkling. And you can see his face. He's happy. He's smiling. And he's moving his hands back and forth. So that's just a little 10-minute clip of the exact same position, but a different attitude from the staff about the expectation for Rylan. If you put objects in his environment for him to learn from, he's going to be active. If you give him a blanket, he's going to fall asleep. So that's just what we're going to hopefully talk about today is how to create these little environments. So first, I want to discuss how a child learns a new language. Howdy? Yes. It's Roy here. Howdy, could I get you to kill your video? I think it's interfering with our sign language interpretation. The video. Your picture. Nothing. Yeah. Just your video bead, your camera. Oh, this one. Are you not the mic? That one? Yes, I think you are now gone. Yeah. All right. You can still hear you. Yeah, and see the PowerPoint. We just can't see your lovely base. Hang on. Now I lost my PowerPoints and I have to figure out what I just did. It's still up for us. Yeah, I know that I just have to figure out what window I just accidentally, there I go. Okay. I was trying to make my lovely interpreter be a little smaller so I could see my own window. Perfect. Okay. So you can still see my PowerPoint, but you can't see me. Perfect. That is correct. Yeah. Okay. Just so I know where I'm at. All right. So now I just want to talk about how a child learns any new skill. So this is Dury A. And in the last year, Dury A has learned to walk. Most people can relate to a child walking. So let's talk about how a child learns a skill like walking. First of all, is a child active or passive? Most children who learn to walk are generally active participants. They're actually doing the walking. So a parent or an adult might help to encourage or support a child, but the child is the one doing the walking. The parent is not walking for the child. If you think about it, I don't think anyone here has seen a parent physically move the right leg, the left leg, the right leg, the left leg back and forth to have a child learn to walk. So the first rule about active learning is that the child needs to be the active participant. No one needs to be manipulating the child. The child should be doing the activity. So then the second concept about active learning I want you to remember is how long would it take a child to walk? Well, first a child is going to have to learn to balance and standing. They need to let go of an adult or the wall or the furniture to take a step. They might hold on to an adult for support to take a few steps. A child might sit down or fall down and then walk a little further. So eventually you have a child who masters a skill through repetition and through practice. So an active learner needs to repeat. The amount of time it takes the child to learn a new skill is going to vary from child to child. Some kids can learn something in a month. Some can learn something in three months. But obviously a child with special needs is going to need to repeat more and more than the child without a special need. So now what kind of developmental skills does it take a child to learn to walk? Well, obviously they have to move his or her legs. They have to stand up, be able to weight, bear, balance. A child has to have head control, trunk control. All of these skills are practiced for about 12 months before a child learns to walk. They crawl, they stand, then comes walking. So remember that learning always occurs developmentally. You can't just teach algebra. First kids have to count to one. So if a child doesn't know how to count to one, they can't do algebra. If a child can't hold his head up, it's going to be very difficult for that child to learn to walk. And then what motivates the child to walk? It could be to reach for a toy, to get to an adult, to receive applause or smiles from people. It could be just they want to move from one room to the other. These are all motivations. So any activity requires or has some kind of motivation. And then lastly, would there be anything that might interfere with your ability to walk? If a child's wearing socks and they're a new learner to walking, they might fall down because they can't keep their balance. Or if there's toys on the floor, a child might trip and fall down. Or if there's a sudden noise in the room, a child might become distracted and then lose his or her balance. So the important part is to remove or reduce as many interruptions to learning as possible so that a child can be more successful. Once you've done all that, then you get Durrier, who's here in our backyard and he's walking across the backyard and he might fall once or twice, but he's going to Hailey because he wants to hear her clap and smile to him walking across the backyard. So being an active learner really involves five key points. Any child needs to be an active participant. There needs to be repetition. You have to have developmental learning. There should be some type of reinforcement. And then you want to limit the amount of interruptions that are interfering with a child's learning. If you do all of that, then active learning is always going to promote learning and perception. In the right environment, any child can learn. I just want to stress that point. So what do kids do all day? It's not a trick question. This has been on the left and Oliver on the right. And they're both playing. What do children under the age of five developmentally do all day? They play. And the question would be, why don't they work? Well, play is their work. So this is a quote that I'd like you to remember that play is often overlooked as the key that helps unlock the doors to learning. And if a child is playing, they are learning. And if you think about children with special needs, if they aren't able to play independently, that is affecting their ability to learn. So we need to do everything in our power to create an environment where they can play. So you have to know the definition of play. Most people, it's kind of obvious, but the first thing that play needs to be to be play is it needs to be fun. So here's a definition of play, six characteristics. The first being that it's a complex set of behaviors that are characterized by fun and spontaneity. So if a child is not having a good time, they're not playing. So most of the videos that I'm going to show you, even though we won't have sound, you should be able to see happy kids having a good time, which means that they want to be there and they're having a good time and they're learning through activity. The second characteristic of play is that it could be sensory, neuromuscular, cognitive, or any combination of these items. Remember that children that are developmentally at a lower level will have difficulty doing more than one thing at a time. So they might be paying attention to the sound of an item and not really moving their arms too much, or they're going to be moving their arms and legs and not paying attention to a sound, or they might not be able to think or problem solve if they're in a gross motor activity. As children get older, they can combine these kind of skills, but at a young age, they can only do one thing at a time. Next, play involves repetition. We just talked about that. And if you notice, I'm repeating to you why, because I want you to remember that play involves repetition. There are kids here who have to practice something for a whole year before they can understand what they're doing. And other children could do something for a week and understand what they're doing. So play involves repetition of experiences, exploration and experimentation with one's surroundings. If a child only gets limited surroundings, then their experiences are limited. Therefore, their play is limited. Next play proceeds within its own space and boundaries. And that if I took a room that you were sitting in right now and emptied all of the furniture, all of the equipment, the chairs, the toys and brought in a child who was two years old, that child would run around the room doing cartwheels and somersaults or rolling on the ground because play proceeds within its own space and boundaries. No one has to tell a child where to play. A child just plays anywhere. If you go to a restaurant, they'll be on the floor under the table playing. So if you have a classroom or an area of your home where you only want the children to play in a certain part of the building, remember, kids play everywhere. And then play functions as an agent for integrating the internal and external world. If I asked you all when do children start to learn to play, most people will say at birth, but I'm going to tell you that play actually occurs before a child is born. So in the uterus, you have children who are sucking a thumb. They're pushing against the uterine wall. They're kicking their legs. And then when they're born, they compare the world that they used to know to the world that now exists for them. So the previous world would be dark. Sounds would be muffled. It's wet. The temperature is fairly consistent. And then they're born and they have an environment that is now loud, no longer wet. There's open space. Their muscles can move in a different way. So play begins even before birth. And then lastly play follows the sequential developmental progression. You cannot work a six-piece shaped sorter puzzle if you don't know how to put a ball in a cup. Therefore, it's important that you understand what development, what is developmentally appropriate for a child with special needs. And you use a good assessment that breaks down things into small steps so you know how to reach the next level of progression in play. This is a video of Adriana, who is the niece of one of our staff members. And I know you're not going to be able to hear it. I'm just going to narrate to you. At this point, if you can see, she's got a board with alphabetical letters in front of her. And she's five years old and she's pointing out how to spell her name. So she's picking out all the letters and she's going to spell Adriana. Now, if I go a little bit further here, you see me come into the picture and I'm asking her, does she know how to spell Patty? And she says no, but if you could give me a little bit of help, I can do it. So I found out the letters and I say my name is Patty with a puff puff and she says P. And so she guesses all of the letters correctly. She says P-A-T-T. And then when we get to the Y, I say Patty, and she says, is this an E? And I go close, but it's a Y. So she ends up writing her name and my name. And I'll just scroll to the end of the video where you can see that that's how she's spelled Patty and Adriana. So she's five years old in this video and is still learning to write her letters. But if we go to the next video, this is Adriana who is two. And we did this activity on purpose to demonstrate a point. Cindy, who is her aunt, is going to ask Adriana if she can spell her name. So right now she's saying, could you spell an A? And if you watch Adriana, she's just going to scribble. And Cindy is going to do what many people do. They take hand over hand and try to encourage her to draw an A. And then Adriana and Cindy is laughing because it's really difficult to ask her to do something that she knows she's not capable of doing. But if I fast forward a little bit here, you'll see Adriana trying to just get different markers or to scribble. And Cindy keeps trying to redirect her to a task that is too hard for her to do. And if we continue to watch this video, Adriana is going to get more and more frustrated. And then they start working on the letters that you just saw her spelling. And Cindy is asking her to point out the letter A. And she's pointing to the N. And then Adriana would like to get up and get out of the chair and go to play. But instead, Cindy keeps redirecting her. And then I want you to see what happens to her hands here. See how she's hiding her hands from Cindy. And Cindy is going to do hand over hand asking her to hand her the letter A. So just in this video, I don't know how many of you work with children with special needs. But you can see a child who's two and a half years old, who's exhibiting some of the behaviors that you'll see in children with special needs. They might try to pull their hands away. Sometimes they're just trying to communicate that the task you're asking them to do is developmentally too high. Adriana needed another three years before she was able to write her name with the letter A or to point to the letter A. So it's very important that you pick activities that are developmentally appropriate to children. And the other thing I wanted to mention is this quote by Mary Riley, which is that spontaneous attention is fundamental to all learning. We cannot force the special needs child to attend. For attention is a selective activity of the mind. And what does that mean for everyone here? I can't make you pay attention to me today. You're just listening to the sound of my voice. So I'm at a little bit of a disadvantage. I like to do things in person so I can see your feedback so I can try to use different visual aids. I have a lot of things here on the table. I want to try to show you to keep your attention. But you have the right to not listen to me. You have the right to be doing other work wherever you're at. You have the work to be thinking about the shopping you need to do this evening or the homework assignment you have or the plans that you have to do for working with a child. My job is to try to keep your attention as best I can. So our job in working with children with special needs is we have to try to gain their attention. So if the children run away from you when you walk into a room, you have to remember they have that right and they have, that's a basic right of every human being is to pay attention or to not pay attention. So how do kids usually pay attention, or how do kids learn? They're going to learn through different pathways. And most of you are going to recognize these pathways. They're the five senses. So you have sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing and movement. I'm adding movement for a reason. I really call this the sixth sense. Because if you think about it, kids who can't move are at a disadvantage for learning. And it's very important that you pay attention to how much movement a child has. For example, we had a child here at Penerentin Center whose parents brought their child in for an active learning consultation. And when I said to the parents, you know, what does this child do? The parents said this child doesn't do anything. They don't respond to any activity at all. And so we played with the child for a little bit and the child did not respond to a lot of the things we introduced. And so what we did was we looked at the child and said, what kind of movement does this child have? Well, this child could breathe. So what we did was we took a plate and put marbles on the plate and then set the plate on top of the child who is laying on a residence board, which is a piece of wood. And the child started breathing. Well, obviously the child was breathing already, but the child started breathing more purposefully to allow, when the child would breathe, the marbles would roll across the plate and make a sound. And the child started to pay attention to that sound and then started breathing in different ways to make the marbles roll and eventually roll off the plate and make a loud sound. So you could see this child breathing and moving their body on purpose. And here a parent, this parent was thinking that their child didn't have any ability to control their movement whatsoever. So that's just an example of how you can take movement and channel it into a learning environment. What I would like to get you to be aware of is getting a picture of the child that you're working with and what areas of, what characteristics of equipment that you can use for the child that you're working with. So we have two types of children on the screen that I want to talk about. A child who is visually impaired who has cerebral palsy and a child who's visually impaired who's autistic. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and show you all of these circles just so you can see the picture that I'm talking about. Let's say you have a child who's visually impaired who has cerebral palsy, who cannot roll over, who cannot sit up, who has a hand that's fisted, and this child has difficulty maybe even holding their head up and has difficulty with seeing, maybe they only see light perception. What I'm going to do is I'm going to color in the circle completely red to identify whether or not the child has that entire ability to smell or taste or whether their ability to touch or sight is restricted. So you can see on your site, I just colored it in a little bit and that's to remind me that if I am going to use visual items, I need to pay attention that this child can't see very well. Or if I'm going to use something for touch, then I need to use an object that responds to the slightest amount of touch because here you have a child who can't touch very well. So what are the strengths of this child? They can smell, they can taste, they can hear. And what are the things that are a little bit more difficult for this child? Movement, touch, and sight. Where an autistic child usually can walk and move, so they have smell, taste, touch, hearing, movement, but if they're blind, then vision may be a problem for this child. If someone had a hearing impairment, you wouldn't color that circle in completely. You would only color it in a little bit, maybe if they were hearing aids or you wouldn't color it in at all if they had no hearing whatsoever. So Roy, I'm going to see if I can switch. Can I possibly share my screen for a second? Do you think or no? Yeah, sure. I'm going to see if I can do this. So can you see me now? Or no? Can you see me? Yes, we can. Okay. Just wanted to, so for example, I just want to show a couple of objects. If I were trying to show, or to use different kinds of balls with a child and they had only light perception. If I just use, this is a golf ball, which is white, and this is a golf ball that is yellow. Well, if a child can see the yellow golf ball, I need to use a yellow ball versus the white ball. Or maybe I want to use these balls that if I push them in will light up and change colors. So I'm going from red to blue to green to if I keep going they'll strobe. So it's important for me to recognize which of these balls would be the best ball to use with a specific child. Or if I'm working on tactile, this ball, which is a shiny silver ball has spikes on it. This ball has rivets on it. So when I roll them on the ground, they'll make more noise. Or if I put them in my hand, they have a different texture to them. And then if I'm looking at grasping a toy, I brought a couple of cups here. So these cups have handles on them and people will think that they're more graspable because they have handles over a cup that has no handle on it. However, sometimes it's the actual opening in the cup that will make an item more graspable. If I take this cup and put it on my hand like this, which is my hand is inside the cup, I am holding or grasping the cup. And some children with special needs cannot use their fingers to hold on, but they might put their fist in to hold on. And so to them, this might be grasping, where if you use a cup with a narrow hole, I can't get my hand in here, so it makes it more difficult for me to hold onto it. So I'm going to turn off my camera again. So when you're looking at these different pathways to learning, you want to recognize what are the strengths of a child and try to play to that strength. For example, both of these children could smell very well. Let's say they don't have very good head control. If you took a plate and took an orange and rubbed in a fresh orange all over the plate, you're adding smell and taste to it. And now maybe a child, if you put that plate underneath their head, the child would lift their head up to try to smell the orange on the plate, which would work on head control using smell. The child might try to lick the plate with their tongue, which would also include taste. And now you've encouraged a child to lift their head in prone just by putting up plate with an orange rubbed on it underneath their head. And then I like to show you this slide, which just shows you the difference between children with disabilities and children without disabilities. So if you take some everyday activities like self-care activities or mobility activities, fine motor activities, communicating, children without disabilities spend much more time doing, running around doing mobility activities, fine motor activities, communicating. They play more independently and they play more with children. Where children with disabilities or special needs spend much more time doing activities of daily living. They might spend 45 minutes eating a meal versus a child without a disability, taking 10 minutes to eat. They go to the doctor, they're in therapy. They play a lot more with adults than they do by themselves or with children, and they spend much more time alone. So what you're trying to do is create an environment by which children replicate what non-disabled children are doing. So you need children with special needs to be able to be in more mobility activities, fine motor activities, playing independently and playing with other children. So remember that movement is going to be the prerequisite to all learning. So no skill is going to be able to be achieved without you performing the movement for that skill. So first you have to understand that usually movements occur because of unintentional movements. If you think about little babies that are only a month old, they have different reflexes, they have what Lily calls a kinematic movement, which is if you move one part of your body, typically another part of your body is going to move in response. So unintentional movements will lead to something else. And so unintentional movements lead to awareness of movement or sensory feedback. So to give you an example of this, this is Bryce and he has cerebral palsy and he's in a net swing, which is on a track system in our playroom. And you can tell by his arms right here that he has extensor tone in his arms and he still has some of the reflexes, the symmetrical tonic neck reflex. Oops, pardon me, I hit the wrong button. So I'm just going to play this video. In this net swing, his movement is causing the track to move across the room to reflect a crawling position. If I took him out of the swing, he would be unable to crawl independently or unable to roll over. But you can see how this extensor tone in his arms and in his head can be used to cause a movement, which then causes awareness that he's the one creating that movement. After you get reflexive movement, you get intentional movement. So reflexive movement leads to intentional movement, which then leads to more sensory feedback, which leads to more intentional movement or more kinematic movement. So to explain what kinematic movement is, I have a video I want to show you of Zane. If you look at Zane right here, you're going to see him moving his hands. But what I want you to look at is the movement of his feet down here. So when he tries to reach or grasp the ping pong balls with his hands, you probably can see he has cerebral palsy and he's trying to pick up the balls and drop them on purpose because he thinks that's funny. But what will happen is his feet move in response to that movement of the arms. So I'm just going to fast forward a little bit here so that you can see an up close version of what's going on with his feet. And what's underneath his feet are called o-beads, and they're little liquid water beads inside of a soft play tray that we have. So see how when he grasps those ping pong balls, his legs are moving. If I don't put activities by his feet to then get a sensory experience, I'm limiting his opportunity to learn to move those legs on purpose. Zane has a pretty severe cerebral palsy. He has difficulty rolling over. He needs help to sit up independently. But he does know how to kick his legs on purpose if he wants to in different pieces of equipment. Howdy, could you go ahead and turn your camera back on again? Sure. Okay, thanks a lot. We're going to leave it on. We are. Leave it on? Yeah. Okay. So we're going to start with disabilities. They provide fewer information and fewer cues. They use movements to communicate their feelings. And the problem is that sometimes people miss these movements completely, or their movements are misinterpreted. If I'm a child and I reach out like this for something, let's say there's a cup in front of me. Sorry, I'm just trying to focus. There's a cup out in front of me like this, and I reach for it. And no one recognizes that I can't reach the cup and they give me the cup. Over time, I'm going to stop reaching for the cup. So it's very important that you recognize that when Zane is reaching for those balls, his legs are moving, and that he needs something to provide him feedback at his feet and his hands to encourage those movements to occur and for him to learn from those activities. So as children get older, especially those with cerebral palsy, their muscle tone will get increased. And if you think about Zane as he gets older, his muscles are going to be tighter and his legs are going to weigh more. His arms are going to weigh more. And sometimes that makes it difficult for children with multiple disabilities to move. So it's extremely important that our kids get out of their wheelchair and they're able to use whatever movement they have to have sensory experiences. So now I want to review the steps of the dynamic learning circle. And I have a bunch of videos to try to point out some examples, as well as I'm going to try to demonstrate the dynamic learning circle with some things on my table as well. So I want to show you this slide just so that you become aware of the fact that the dynamic learning circle has four stages. And it is a circle. So stage one will lead to stage two, which will lead to stage three, then to stage four, and then we will go back to stage one. You can have problems anywhere within that circle, but I'm going to take each stage one at a time. And then at the end, we're going to talk about problems that occur in each stage. So the first stage is that a child becomes aware or interested in something. So a child should be aware of his or her on motor or sensory activities, objects in the environment, or people in the environment. For the example I'm going to use here with me, I have a little whisk here in my hands. So if I take this whisk and put it down in front of me at the table that's in front of me, and I'm a child with cerebral palsy, and my hands are fisted and my hands are usually up at my chest. If I'm visually impaired and cannot see, I am not aware of the whisk on my table. Therefore, I haven't hit stage one. So how can I make a child aware of the whisk? Most people will take the child's hand and bring the child's hand down to the whisk. By doing that, you've made the child aware of the person grabbing their hand. And your goal is to try to have the child become aware of the whisk. But what you've done is created awareness of the person in the environment, not in a good way. So you always want to take the object and bring the object to the child, not the other way around. So I'm going to take the object and dangle it close to a child's hand so that they can touch it and therefore become aware that it exists. So stage one is all about awareness. In this video, I'm going to show you how to make a child aware of the whisk. This is for children. I just want you to look at his attempt. He knows there's an object up above him, but he couldn't get to it. And that's because the objects were not secured properly. But if we take the objects and attach them so that they cannot move, now he can repeat his actions. And now he can get to stage two and be secured in the swing. So you can see him trying to repeat and bat at the toys over and over and over again. And then this is RJ. He's on what's called a gathering drum. And he has chimes hanging above him. So these chimes make a really nice, soft sound. And you'll notice that he can move his head and he will move his head to activate the sound. So in the beginning, is he aware that the objects are hanging there? Yes. He figures out that the object is there. And then he starts to shake his head on purpose to activate the chime. I do want to point out that most of these videos take place over a period of maybe 20 minutes to 33 minutes. Sometimes almost an hour. And I have shortened them to about two minutes. So I want you to understand that sometimes the kids might take five or 10 minutes to get to this point. As an example, I'm just going to go to the end of this video and show you right here how his hand is touching the chime. We decided to put a little mini massager that vibrates by his hand. And you can kind of see how much cerebral palsy affects his hand. And so he starts to learn to bat at the massager to touch it. And he eventually starts to open the finger and the thumb to attempt to grab the massager. So he becomes aware of the massager, which is stage one. And then that leads to a sensory experience, which then he is aware of the sensory experience. And then that leads to stage two, which we're going to cover next, which is repetition of an activity. And you can see how RJ is repeatedly going back and forth to the massager in an attempt to touch it and to open his fingers to explore the massager. This video goes on for another two minutes just here, but it went on for about 20 minutes in person. And if you can just see what we're hanging above him, these were chimes. And this is just a bag of marbles that we have hanging in a nylon bag. And previously he was batting at the marbles as well with his hand. The important part in this video is Karen, who's our dance and movement therapist, is holding the massager. And you'll notice that she does not move the massager. That RJ is the one moving his hand to explore the massager in the manner that works for him. Whatever you do, you do not want to chase a child, chase the hand, see how much the finger and the thumb are opening up. He needs to move his hand and figure out how to find that massager. So you have to leave it in one spot the entire time. Okay. Once the child becomes aware of objects in the environment or people in the environment or his or her sensory or motor experiences, you get to stage two, which is that a child becomes curious and that leads to activity. So in the example with my whisk, if I hang the whisk up above my hand, I might start hitting the whisk and banging it. And now what's happening is I'm making a memory in my brain about what happens when I hit the whisk. So it might feel hard against my hand. If I can hear it makes a little tingling sound when I hit it. If I hit it really hard, it might whack me in the face. And I might not like that experience and learn not to do that again. I might bring it to my mouth and lick it with my tongue or move my nose on the whisk. The whole time I'm repeating, I'm experimenting, I'm exploring with that object and I'm establishing memories and understanding what that object is. First the child needs to play with an object before someone gives it a name so that they can learn what an object does. Then someone can come and say, it's a whisk and it's metal. For the sake of today, I'm not going to discuss the imitation of activity of others. That's about a two-hour conversation and we don't have that kind of time today. So we're going to skip that. But I will encourage you, if you want to learn more about working one-on-one with a child, to go to the act-of-learning-space.org website and I will put up that information at the end of this webinar. For more information about working with a child and playing with them one-on-one. So here is a video of DJ and he's in a hops address. And if you can hear this video underneath his feet, that little drum is called an ocean drum. When he kicks his feet, little beads inside roll side to side and that makes DJ think that that is funny. So he keeps going back and forth and repeating the movement of his legs to hear that sound. And therefore he's making a memory about the sound. He's figuring out how to move his legs to get to one part of the tray to the other part of the tray. That tray is a tipping board so that when he kicks it, it will rock side to side. And he's in a piece of equipment called a hops address, a P-S-A-D-R-E-S-S hops address. And in this video, DJ does not know how to stand independently. At the point that this video was taken, he could roll over, but did not crawl. And he's just learned to crawl and is starting to pull up to sitting and standing right now. But you can see how his movement is making that track allow him to move and explore the objects underneath his feet. So he's repeating and learning about plastic. He's learning about metal. He's learning about sound. He's learning how to put pressure on his feet. So he would go on a hops address here every day, twice a day, sometimes for 20 minutes at a time. And he's learning, he's motivated if you go back to those first five points. His motivation is to move. And that movement motivation has turned into him now crawling all over the room. So you've got a child in stage two who's repeating and repeating and repeating and learning. And then you get to stage three, which is that a child completes learning with an activity. So if I had the whisk again, I'm going to hit this whisk over and over and over again to the point that it's no longer and that when you give me that whisk every day, I know exactly what to do to it. I know how to hit it. I know how to make a sound with it. So at some point, it's no longer interesting to me anymore. And you start to see a child who possibly hits it three times and then they stop. And that could be a sign that they're getting a little bored and they need something new, which leads to stage four, which is that a child is ready for new challenges. So a child can only proceed to stage four if you give them new challenges. So how can I make my whisk a new challenge? Well, if I take my ping-pong, or my golf ball or ping-pong ball and put it inside under a ping-pong ball, if I put it inside the whisk, now when the child bats at it, they get a sound that occurs that's different because there's no ping-pong ball inside. And now you have a child who has to compare everything that they knew before with what they have now with this new environment. So now you have a child go back to stage one, which is they're aware. Stage two is they're interested and they repeat and they learn everything they can from the ping-pong ball, the whisk. And maybe the child starts to open up the hand in the adult to put the ping-pong ball back in the whisk and they take it out and they put it back in, take it out, put it back in until they get to stage three, which is they've learned all they can from this object and they're ready for a new object. So just for an example, I brought three different kinds of whisks here. I have all made of metal but different shapes and sizes because if a child played with these three, they would start to learn how to make little metal. So really with the dynamic ring circle, a child continues to learn throughout life as long as they're presented with new challenges. Here's a couple of videos. This is Luke in a little room and you'll see right here he's not moving at all. This was the beginning of the video and then he accidentally hits the cups and then he starts pushing the cups and if you notice we have big cups and little cups hanging there so that he could compare and contrast if he wanted to. At this point in his learning, he's just at the stage of pushing objects so he's not grasping at all, he's just pushing but the objects that I presented him with will allow him to grasp if he wants to down the road and then I'm going to fast forward or I think it's coming up. I'm going to cut to a point about 20 minutes later when all of a sudden he stops playing with the right hand and starts to play with the left hand. If you see the left hand opening up and touching the spoons to his left. This is an example of how he's completed the learning at this session with the cups and is switching to something else. However, I want to stress that he needs he hasn't learned everything he can about those cups. He needs to play with them again the next day and the next day. He actually played with them for almost a year because he still hadn't learned everything he could from the cups. But once he got tired of the cups he would go to the objects next to the cups and he would start to compare and contrast between the objects. Then this is Erica with Dr. Nielsen and she's using what's called a Velcro board and if you can see she's trying she has cerebral palsy in both hands. Notice when she's moving the right hand that the left hand is also moving at the same time. She's trying to grasp those Velcro balls off the Velcro board and she has to really struggle quite hard to get that ball but she's highly engaged in the activity. So she does this activity for about 45 minutes and then at the end I'm just going to ask for it again to show you that what Lily does is she puts a cup to the right of Erica so that Erica instead of learning to just take the balls off and drop them she actually learns to pick up an item and bring it back to the tray which is a new skill. Only if you set up the environment with new skills can a child learn the new skill. If she's always dropping items off the board she'll never learn together and you can see how Lily's really excited that Erica finally after 45 minutes she learns to pick up a ball and bring it back to the Velcro board. So remember that any child with special needs needs to have an environment that will encourage developmental learning. You want to allow the learner to explore and experiment. You have to allow them to repeat their own activity. You want to allow the child to learn without interference from other people. Adults are always way too happy to assist the children and they need time to process, they need time to experiment, they might bring objects to their mouth, they might bang things, but if that's the level of learning they're at you have to allow that so that they can learn from their own activity. This allows the children to gain self-esteem and to use previous skills that they learned in the past. Now I know I only have a few more minutes. Ah! So I just want to point out that there can be disharmonious learning when you have a break in the dynamic learning circle. So for example this is DJ sitting there with nothing to do. If he's sitting there with nothing to do he can't learn anything. So it's a simple solution. All I do is give him an activity board. This is a position board and the moment he's given an activity board he starts to play with the objects in front of him. So if you think about a child's day they should always have toys in front of them. Every moment that they sit with nothing to do is a moment that they're not learning. This is Brian and I just want to point out here his toy is on the table and he's not really interested in those objects. He's not interested in that activity but he's into banging and that toy does not allow him to bang. So therefore he's not learning other than to bang his head or bang his hand. So if we just change the environment to something that allows him to bang all of a sudden you have a child who's learning appropriately to bang on an ocean drum and on an elastic board. And then this is Daniela. She's going to throw everything she comes in contact with. So you'll see a person come in here and try to give her something and she's going to end up throwing it on the floor. And so for her we put her in a little hops address and we set up an environment where she can throw all these balls and they'll come back to her so that she can repeat throwing which is something I'd like to share more with you but I know we don't have time. This is a position board we could make so that the items would come back to the child. Therefore they can repeat and repeat and repeat throwing and learn that eventually the throwing becomes boring and they start exploring the objects on the board. So Roy I know I only have a couple minutes. Correct? Yep, we're a couple minutes away. Okay. Let's come back to part two next year at one of our webinars. You scared this? While we're ending up I will just show you this little video of Jack who's been on our program for many years. The first video was him in prone where he didn't even know how to move his arms or leg in prone and then he ended up being in a this is a support bench and being in this environment he can move his arms and his legs and you can see he has started boxing water and he starts to play in the water and grab the rocks so now he's learning to use his arms and then here's him on his back where he isn't really rolling over but he can be active with the chimes above him and then as he got older again we put him in a little room and you can see him using his arms and his feet and then if I keep going here he is in the hops address leg and this is over a period of about four years oops sorry and then here he is at home learning to roll all over the living room and there's music playing and he's laughing hysterically and then here he is sitting up independently in music therapy strumming a guitar and maintaining his balance in sitting and then lastly this just happened last year and this is again in his home and his mom sent me this video of him of him learning to sit up all independently without any help from anyone so if you have the right active learning environment that supports him learning to move his arms his legs his head up you create an environment where he's motivated to roll move over move around your room to sit independently so I know we're pretty much at the end of my time that I was allowed I did want to put up there's an active learning space.org website with a lot of these videos and a lot of the information about active learning where you can get more information my email is patty at punnerton.com you're welcome to email me or to look up information on our website as well which is punnerton.com and then lilyworks.org is where you can get many of Dr. Nielsen's books and additional information about active learning as well so I guess why I think I used up all my time unless you want me to answer a question share any more information that was fantastic great session and thanks to you for spending time with us patty so many thanks to Tracy have the Marci language I'll comment in the chat those great session lots of ideas anybody with any quick comments just turn off your mic and we'll be a couple of minutes here I do want to thank you for trying to keep up with my speed I know I talk very fast there is so much to cover in a short period of time but I appreciate I try to provide most of the information in writing so that you could follow along we've got a question that certainly affects lots of us in our province and I think beyond our province and that's what about the kind of work that we were seeing today in an inclusive setting right there's actually information on the after learning space or we talk about schools and using it in a classroom setting I will point out there's one whole lecture that we put on about learning about plants and so I might have a child in a hops address talking exploring plants while another child I have a video of Luke using plants that are hanging on an activity board and he's learning to explore plants it's really about having all of the children have an activity at the same time and learning at their developmental level it can be done it's a lot of work but it's very rewarding because you see children actively participating versus someone just getting up in front and telling a story the kids are actually involved in the activity so hopefully that answers the question but I would encourage you to check out the website and it might have more details about how we make a curriculum for the kids and how we do IEP goals and things like that for the children in a classroom or curriculum setting okay well without having we will say thank you and let you get on with the with your evening it's just about dinner time where you are alright well good luck to everyone and thank you so much for inviting me to speak it's been a pleasure thank you