Education Workshops

What are the most recent discoveries and theories about how the brain learns? Can we match with instructional practices, pre-K through 12th grade, in order to nurture the brain¹s natural capacities and allow students to learn at optimal levels?

If you want to find out more about how to improve student attention, understanding, and memory, or if you want to explore how the emotional systems of our body/mind and brain both function and impact learning, classroom behavior and assessments, this cutting-edge workshop is for you.

Accelerated Learning
Have Fun Helping Your Students Become SUPER Learners!

Rediscover the joy and ease of learning how to learn. This experiential course will give you practical, brain-compatible strategies to facilitate lasting changes and increase results for your students. You will examine proven Accelerated Learning techniques to improve study skills, retention, comprehension, and enthusiasm for learning.

Topics to be covered include: optimum learning environments, building rapport and motivation, creative problem solving and critical thinking, multi-sensory activities to boost learning, recent brain research and its application in the classroom, learning styles, memory, math games, power reading, creative writing and much more. This is a highly interactive, playful course, so come prepared to have fun!

Multiple Intelligence
Success for All Students

Learn how to present core content through the prism of Multiple Intelligences. Based on modern brain research and the visionary work of Howard Gardner, this dynamic course will give you practical strategies and activities for identifying and developing the strengths of your students, including those with special needs, while improving their performance and enthusiasm for learning.

Specifically, you will discover how to identify the 'eight intelligences' as defined by Howard Gardner, as well as how to integrate your understanding of them into your classroom environment and teaching. You will have the opportunity to examine lesson plans and units of study created by the nationally recognized New City School in St. Louis, Missouri, as well as by other 'master' teachers and authorities in the field.

This one-day workshop, or week-long course, can be modified for any grade level and student population and is particularly relevant in light of the new standards and assessments shaping education today.

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High Impact Teaching Through
TRUE COLORS TM

Create a climate for optimal learning and student success with TRUE COLORS, a dynamic, easy-to-use, 'personality type' assessment tool based on the work of Carl Jung and Myers-Briggs. Discover how to use TRUE COLORS to:

1. Identify the different learning and communication styles of your students and co-workers.

2. Understand your students' strengths, needs, and the ways they build self-esteem and resolve conflicts.

3. Learn 'colorized' lesson planning as well as a variety of team building strategies to help motivate your students to fulfill their potential and achieve higher performance at all ability levels.

4. Experience new counseling techniques to help older students discover their ideal careers.

This workshop will provide participants with a through introduction to the TRUE COLORS model. You will learn how to identify your own color spectrum as well as how to use 'High Impact' teaching techniques to integrate this material into your curriculum and classroom environment while 'delivering' lessons to all types of learners in a very exciting way.

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"FUNdamentals"
Maximizing Early Childhood Development

Research confirms that most children are born with more than enough basic "brain power" to be highly intelligent and successful. Whether they receive enough of the right sort of stimulation and opportunities during their early years makes the difference.

Recently, the Bush administration has called for "another essential step" in educational reform, proposing that the federal government and states prod parents, day-care centers and preschools, including Head Start, to teach more academic skills to children before they get to kindergarten. (Washington Post, April 3, 2002; Page A05)

When taking the wide range of developmental levels represented by young children into account, this "essential step" may seem difficult, if not detrimental However, it is possible to achieve balance in your children¹s early learning experiences so that they can create a solid foundation for beginning reading, writing and mathematics in a non-stressful, joyful way, while they also are building self-esteem, creativity, clear thinking, musical sense, persistence, responsibility, and self-confidence. This developmental achievement can be guided through many excellent systems. LAFF¹s workshop will focus on:

1) a wide variety of carefully tested games and activities called "FUNdamentals" based on more than two decades of research by noted educational author, Colin Rose

2) exciting, cutting-edge, body/mind/brain research presented during the past year at Learning Brain Conferences throughout the United States and Canada

We will explore not only the different ways in which children, newborn to 7 years of age learn, but also how to apply "brain-compatible" activities so that parents and teachers of young children, can better ensure that learning is both fun and a vital growth experience.
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Peace Smarts
From Creative Conflict Resolution to Community Service

Experience a new, transformational problem solving approach which
supports, encourages and guides students toward a peaceful lifestyle. This process incorporates a well-defined sequence of seven steps, or activities, designed to teach core social skills, character traits such as respect and tolerance, as well as the crucial problem solving abilities in the classroom as well as in the world at large.

Designed specifically for those working with youth, ages nine to eighteen, Peace Smarts also provides innovative strategies for community based violence and drug prevention programs as well as 'action projects' to positively engage youth, thereby helping them to feel needed for the common good.

Teaching Thinking Skills
from the Perspective of Modern Brain Research
and Cultural Diversity

Originally designed as a Graduate Education course for educators wishing to develop or revise programs for teaching thinking skills on the elementary level, this material is also appropriate for those in secondary and special education who work with students who have mild disabilities.

Teaching Thinking Skills places an emphasis on practical teaching strategies and models for facilitating a commitment to critical thinking, both in the classroom and in daily life. Collaborative learning, questioning techniques, preferred styles of learning, new computer tools for developing ideas and organizing thinking, as well as the effect of modern brain research on our understanding of memory, culturally biased perception, and the organization of thought are among the topics to be discussed and exemplified.

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Applied Learning Styles
Serving the Needs of All Learners

Inspired by the highly successful 'learner centered/diversity' model development by the John Eliot School in Needham, MA, this fascinating course focuses on the relationship between learning style and personality type theories and their practical application in the classroom.

Special attention is given to examining how the course material not only supports student mastery of the State Standards and Assessments, but also can help reduce student apprehension and the stresses that sometimes accompany 'high stakes' testing.
Many successful teaching methods are provided for tapping and developing student strengths and self-awareness, while improving comprehension, retention and enthusiasm for learning, and ultimately traversing ability groups, and socioeconomic boundaries effectively.

While "Applied Learning Styles" is most often presented as a Graduate Education course, it can be modified to meet the needs of a workshop setting.

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The Giftedness of Every Child
Diversity and the New Standards In Education

Every Human being you meet is gifted in one or more ways. Discovering the unique gifts of each and every one of your students requires great sensitivity, patience, a broad perspective, and the ability to respect our students enough to listen to them and, finally, to learn from them.

This discovery process takes time. Unfortunately, it appears that many schools are faced with so much pressure to master the new standards and graduate students at ever higher levels of competency, that teachers are buried under massive amounts of new curriculum which they say leaves them little time to do more than 'teach to the test'.

For example, Commissioner Mills of the New York State Department of Education says that "creating better test takers" is not what was intended by raising standards. So how then can this paradox be resolved? Attend this thought provoking workshop for some insight into what may be the most pressing issue facing education today.

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Reducing TEST STRESS
for Everyone Concerned

Recent brain research conducted at the John Hopkins School of Medicine and Stanford University confirms that stress which lasts more than thirty minutes leaves the brain low on energy. Over longer periods, the 'fight or flight' hormones released by stress actually sever connections beyween the brain's neurons and damage the hippocampus and the amygdala, those parts of the brain believed to be responsible for conveying information into long-term memory.

Modern classrooms are all too often hotbeds of stress as teachers struggle to help diverse populations of learners pass increasingly difficult tests. Fortunately, there are dozens of practices, old and new, which can help to offset the damage of prolonged stress and actually improve student performance in the process.

Laff's Stress Reduction Workshops can include: breathing exercises, guided imagery and mental centering techniques, "Brain Gym" movements, simple Hatha Yoga, music, and well documented relaxation techniques used successfully by students before tests to improve their confidence and final scores.

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Laff's Greatest Hits for
After School Enrichment Programs!

Sherie Senne brings to Learning and Arts for Fun's After School Programs more than three decades of experience working with children and adults in the Performing Arts. In 1992, Creativity Immersion and Accelerated Learning were integrated into her work to help form the basis of Laff's rich variety of challenging After School Enrichment Programs for students, K-12. While these programs can focus on accelerating academic skill building in a more formal sense, it is recommended that students be given the opportunity to explore in depth subjects of their own choosing. Therefore, staff development to support the creation or maintenance of an ongoing After School enrichment Program can include:

A wide variety of warm-up, trust and "Getting to Know You" games, creativity challenges (including paradigm shifts and questioning assumptions), construction projects, song writing, stimulating the imagination through guided imagery and the visual arts, play writing, drama performance, dane, working with puppets, video and computer projects, and much more.

Special Announcements!

In January, 2002, Sherie Senne and Penelope Torribio co-presented"
Transforming the Learning Brain Through the Arts"
to rave reviews at the Learning Brain Expo in San Diego, CA.

If you would like to know more about this fascinating & exciting workshop, contact Sherie or Penelope for a description.