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After 2 months of IM, her self portrait has significantly improved. Look particularly at the figure on the bottom right. Now this girl has a neck in proportion, arms with hands and fingers, and a body that is much more sophisticated as well. The children in this picture are actively playing together and look very happy. Just looking at the self portraits of this little girl, you know something has changed.
Here's her case study:
June of 2010: Nellie (Name changed to protect privacy) came to IM with her grandmother. Nellie is a creative kind first grader that loves art and people. Born prematurely, she is being raised by a single mother who herself finds it challenging to offer quality food choices and exercise rich free time activities. Nellie is already significantly behind her peers physically. Her larger body mass and poor motor planning results in slow, uncoordinated movements. She can not ride a bike and frequently even her peers complain of her slowness. She is receiving both speech and physical therapy from the local public school. She has difficulty falling asleep at night and rising again the next morning. She relies on others for most tasks including dressing herself and taking initiative with her homework. He grades are poor. Though she loves drawing, she is very sloppy and wasteful with her projects and papers. She often throws fits and whines, being very persistent when she wants something. She interrupts frequently. Nellie reported that she would like to be able to 'run fast like the other kids - both running and skipping' and write better - 'it's kinda hard to write' she explained during our interview. Her grandmother plays an active role in Nellie's life and brought her to IM Focused for services.
At assessment, Nellie's initial IM score put her in the disassociative range, meaning she had a very difficult time making her body move to a rhythm. She had very strong early tendency, meaning her brain worked faster than real time. One side of her body worked much more efficiently than the other. When asked to coordinate the two sides of her body or move into backwards space, she was unable to do the tasks correctly. She showed moderate retention of the ATNR, and infant reflex that should have been integrated years ago.
Nellie completed 12 days of synchronization - hand over hand IM where the adult directs the student to find the rhythm. On day one, she had such low stamina that she could only physically stay on a task for about one minute. Comments in her head could take her 30 - 90 seconds to express at times, evidenced by telling us we hit a green sometime even after the next beat. On day 4, grandma reported, 'It's much easier to get Nellie to sit down and do math and she seemed more interested in learning things and trying new things.' Her handwriting was already improving. By the end of the week, grandma was reporting that 'Nellie was getting up in the morning easy all the time now'. By the end of week two, Nellies speech became noticeably clearer.
Nellie moved into independent IM for 18 more sessions. After her first week of Basic IM (second format), grandma reported 'Nellie self initiated balancing and jumping jacks at home.' Grandma reported she has never been able to do jumping jacks before so this was huge. Just before second grade started, grandma sat down and read with Nellie and was pleasantly pleased how her reading was significantly better than at the end of first grade 3 months ago. "Nellie is not only more interested in reading, but is reading faster and not stumbling over words so much (reading fluency). She is also beginning to be more independent as well, as she use to be 'really clinging,'" grandma continued.
We continued IM into the school year for just a bit in order to complete as much of Basic IM as we could . Nellie could now focus for 15 to 20 minutes without much fatigue, versus the meer 60 seconds focus length/stamina of 3 months ago. This ability to focus better and stick with it longer will help her tremendously at school this next year to at least not fall behind nearly as far. The recommendation was made that Nellie come for more IM in 6 to 12 months, to continue improving her mental processing speed. But, at this point it was deemed time to allow the amount of brain change to date to become well integrated functionally before moving on to more IM.
The next spring (5 months later) I received this letter from Grandma. "Nellie has improved so much this year! Her spelling has improved 100%. She is still not where she needs to be and much of that is carelessness and not wanting to put in the extra effort." And after scheduling more IM this coming summer, grandma wrote, "Wonderful!! Looking forward to it! I know Nellie will be too! She asks about you often. :-)"
My comment about grandma's 'not wanting to put in the effort' comment: Nellie started in the very deficit range in IM, yes she gained a lot with her 2 formats of IM last summer, but there were still many indicators that she needed more IM to get her brain working up to speed with her peers. An analogy is, if you have 10 pounds of weight to lose, it might take you one month. If you have 50 pounds, it might take you 5 months. Nellie had a lot of mental processing deficiencies to recover, she's maybe lost half the weight to date. This summer we'll work on losing more 'weight' and improving her mental processing even more. Simply knowing where she started in IM tells me Nellie will need more IM than those individuals that come in with an average score and 'just' attention issues.( Attention issues are huge and can significantly prevent students from reaching their potential, but attention alone is an easier and quicker fix than attention, stamina, coordination, speech, and mental processing speed issues all combined.)
Functionally in life, it takes Nellie much MORE effort to do the basics. If your brain is working slower and less efficiently than your peers, it takes you more effort to do the same amount of work. Therefore Nellie fatigues sooner than her peers with better mental processing abilities. She gained much in mental stamina from the work she did last summer in IM, evidenced by improving focus from just one minute in June to 15 minutes of focus by Sept, but she still had much room to grow. Parents often label the child's behavior as 'not wanting to put in the effort' because they know the child can do the work. In a sense, it's true, the child doesn't want to put in the effort - they have already put in more effort than their friends and have less to show for it. Improve the brain functioning and the child will find more success with LESS effort!
