White Matter

Highlighted areas show white matter studied

by Beaulieu and Rasmussen at the University of Alberta

A new medical study from the University of Alberta shows that the brains of children affected by FASD generally do not develop as rapidly as the brains of normal children, with brain volume and amount of white matter remaining lower as the children grow up.

But the study also finds that the “brain wiring” within the white matter of children affected by FASD can, under the right circumstances, develop more rapidly.

As a teacher, I have used interventions that build brain connections to help these children achieve better outcomes.

1) Multi-sensory reading instruction allows children to access information with multiple senses--visual, auditory, and tactile--building stronger connections between letter and sound.

2) Number sense can be taught in a concrete multi-sensory way, starting with visually grouping dots on a card to help understand how numbers can be taken apart and recombined, the first step in mental addition and subtraction.

It's also exciting to think that brain imaging may one day help identify additional specific interventions for children with brain damage from FASD.

Read the full article in Science Codex

Additionally, Stanford sometimes offers a free on-line class on  How To Teach Math, for helping children work on basic number sense. Researchers there continue to come out with useful information on teaching math.