Finding Out How Strong the Learning Foundation Is
We assess the Foundational Skills. These are several key underpinning abilities that form the foundation for cognitive function. This includes our ability to give attention and be able to concentrate for task completion. We need these foundational skills to be successful at reading, spelling, learning and problem solving. This is not a psychometric assessment.
What Does It Show?
This assessment reveals how well developed and integrated the Foundational Skills are, irrespective of age or gender. This will reveal whether it can support cognitive function for academic achievement or to withstand age-related mental decline.
What Does It Mean?
A weak skills foundation is unable to support learning development. Gaps in the Foundational Skills tell us why concentration is poor, what causes letter reversals or bad spelling, and why some are slow readers and other just avoid reading at all. It tells us what is hampering academic performance.
How Do We Improve Poor Foundation Skills?
Most therapies are aimed at the ‘walls and ceiling’, but without correcting the foundation, lasting results cannot be attained. Our cognitive development programmes zone in and address the weaknesses and gaps in the Foundational Skills. This is supported by our Tomatis® Method, Reflex Integration programmes and Mineral Therapy.
Finding Out How Well you Listen
Our Tomatis® Listening Profile reveals your listening ability. Listening is much more than hearing. Listening involves our emotions and trauma or stress can prevent us from listening well. For good listening and fast processing speed, we need right-ear dominance, which we also determine. Our Tomatis® Listening Profile is not a hearing test.
What Does It Show?
How our brain receives, processes and interprets information. Our ears should provide about 80% of the sensory stimulation for our brain to keep it energised, and we can tell if this is deficient. It also shows if recurring ear infections, glue ear and grommets may have hampered sound transmission to the brain and contribute to auditory processing disorder or learning difficulties.
What Does It Mean?
Our ears are not identical in sound processing. Imbalances contribute to a lack of concentration with slow processing speed, aggravated by Left-ear dominance. If insufficient cortical stimulation is received via our ears, we rely on constant body movements to compensate. As a result, it becomes a struggle to sit still in a classroom or office.
How Do We Improve Poor Foundation Skills?
We restore and rehabilitate the ear’s listening ability with our Tomatis® Method. This is supported by our Cognitive Development programmes aimed at addressing auditory weaknesses due to gaps in the Foundational Skills, Reflex Integration programmes and Mineral Therapy.
Reveals the Hidden Hurdles Causing Reading Difficulties
The KingsFisher Institute is the only centre in New Zealand that can perform this assessment.
The Visagraph™ measures actual eye movements during reading and checks reading comprehension. With our Visagraph™ we determine the ‘starting blocks’ and track progress during and after our interventions. A Visagraph™ is not an eye test.
What Does It Show?
Through tracking eye movements the Visagraph™ reveals how our eyes move during reading. Watch this moving dot on the video as an example of inefficient reading due to erratic eye movements.
Video reproduced with permission from Taylor Associates
What Does It Mean?
“There exists a functional relationship between ocular (eye) movements and central processes”
- Herman F. Brandt in The Psychology of Seeing.
This means that eye movements reveal how the brain receives, stores, interprets and recalls visual information. Erratic eye movements, as in the video clip above, are an indication of poor information filing, inability to recall and thus poor reading comprehension.
How Do We Improve Poor Foundation Skills?
Our cognitive development programmes zone in and address the weaknesses and gaps in the Foundational Skills that hamper fluent reading. Our Tomatis® Method improves eye muscle control for synchronised movement. This is supported by Reflex Integration programmes and Mineral Therapy.