The Geo Board Hack That Fixed Handwriting AND Math Anxiety! S2 E29

And after this conversation, I'm really thinking to like a few specific kids who can't take notes at the seat can't do, or struggle I should say. They're really struggling to look up and look down, and I hadn't really picked up on that specifically before, but when they go to boards, they are on it. They're right there. They're zoned in, they're leading the group, they're taking charge. Hey everybody. Welcome to Tier One Interventions podcast. We are here today to talk about a geo board.

Geo board is a very interesting device and when I first looked at it, I only saw it from an occupational therapy perspective where we were working on it with hand strengthening and such. But I come to see how valuable it is as a math tool as well. Today we are going to blend the math and the occupational therapy together so that you can understand better what it looks like to have a geo board

as a intervention in your classroom. Welcome Jonily to today's episode and everybody else who is with us. I want to move on to chunk one and chunk one is gonna bring us back to the math and we're gonna be toggling back and forth academic math, academic non-academic all day. But I'm also gonna connect this to a comment that Natalie put in the chat and Natalie says, some of my most struggling kids do best when we work at vertical whiteboards. And this could be why.

It's exactly why I wanna give a shout out to in the math world. You all know him as Peter. That's all I have to say, Peter. Hey, if someone is listening to this tag, Peter, get Peter on here. Have him listen to this podcast. We love you, Peter. And Peter has written the book and many other resources,

building Thinking Classrooms. Natalie is a full implementer of the techniques and building thinking classrooms. And I will say that when we are, when you're reading Building Thinking Classrooms and you're adding some of these strategies into your cl into your math classroom, because it's for math classrooms, it's not just for math classrooms, but the book was written for math classrooms with specific math content. As a math teacher, we're like, oh yeah, I can do that with my math content.

And so we constantly refer back to the math content. But what we're missing in Peter's writing is the neuroscience. And in little pieces, he does point out the brain-based neuroscience for why he gives the strategies he gives. But let's face it, if he does too much of that, we kind of tune out as a classroom teacher, we just want those grab and goes. We just want just tell me what to do in my classroom.

I don't care why I am doing it, but we do have to care why we're doing it, because then we're going to do it more frequently because we're gonna start to see the benefits. Also in the book, Peter does talk in a chapter about flow and flow state, which Sherry shares a lot with us, that neuroscience perspective on how to get students to focus and then how to get kids into a flow state where they're in the zone and nothing can relieve their attention because they

are so focused on the task at hand. But Natalie, do you wanna talk talk to us just a little bit about some of your successes with vertical surfaces that related to Chunk Zero, but then I'm gonna move this back into Chunk one for today, which is one of the mathematics pieces of using the Geo Board. Natalie? Yeah. I've definitely noticed successes with all of my kids, but I've always noticed that some of my most struggling kids are the most successful.

And after this conversation, I'm really thinking to like a few specific kids who can't take notes at the seat can't do, or struggle I should say. They're really struggling to look up and look down, and I hadn't really picked up on that specifically before, but when they go to boards, they are on it. They're right there. They're zoned in, they're leading the group, they're taking charge. So like now I can really pinpoint some of those specific kids and see, that

where, why they might be struggling. They're very capable. Now I have more strategies to help them, succeed and explains why that sit, why that, switch is so much better for them. But hashtag building thinking classrooms, vertical non permit surfaces. I've been in it for I think this three years now. And it is a game changer and it goes so nicely with everything we do. And it's not another thing. It's just a different way. And it's awesome.

And the outcomes that I know you've said that you get from this is focus on content, increased content understanding and as well as engagement, as well as discussion, as well as active learning as opposed to passive learning. And let's think about this vertical surfaces. Kids are on the vertical, but they're also standing, which is another thing that Theresa said.

So all of these practices coming together, all we have to do is have kids stand work on a vertical surface, and that is going to solve many of the issues that we're having in our math classrooms. Yes. And it also provides accessibility and user friendly mathematics in our classrooms. Sherry, oh, I love your comment. Vertical surfaces decrease the need to extend risks for writing. Yes. When you're writing, when you're writing on a flat surface, your wrist needs to be.

Extended to about 30 degrees to get your fingers at the position that they can actually move to. When you're on a vertical surface, guess what? You can get those fingers in that position so that they can and they don't have to extend their wrist. So there's twofold reason here.

To use a vertical surface and mechanically in your wrist, it is to help give that those muscles in the back of your arm chance to get strengthened so you don't have to de open up your wrist as far so that by the time that you are going back down to a flat surface, these muscles are strong enough that they can actually do it. Fantastic.

And those kids who can't do a vertical surface, but you want a vertical surface, put 'em on their belly with a clipboard and it's the same thing, but they're on, they're laying down and you've decreased the gravity they have to deal with.

You know what, Theresa, this is funny because chunk number two today is called teenage tummy time, and we are going to, we're going to tag right back to that in a moment. For occupational therapists, one thing that we do a lot is we score figures that look like this with different standardized tests that we have available to us. Utilizing those progressions that Jonily lined out.

Will help us in our upgrading and downgrading of helping our students manipulate the different way, the different types of paper that we might present to them. When we're looking at design copying, think about how it is related to the geo board and the mathematics. And so it's looking at the de the design copying activity from

a whole different perspective. 'cause I've never looked at it from that perspective before, but when we started talking ahead of time, I wanted to make sure that I showed that. And it was an older copy of a standardized test. And I didn't show you the whole standardized test. I showed you two of the I images from it.

But students struggle to do those complicated designs like that and they also will have trouble putting 'em on the physical geo board, which is why unstructured play with the geo board. Dot paper, just unstructured, un facilitated play in just creating pictures, image images or abstracts is not only gonna benefit students non-academically and functionally, but it's going to benefit students

mathematically because they are going to have a feel, a sense, a taste, a touch, a smell. It's gonna engage all of their senses in how shape and images work mathematically so that then we can attend to precision when we're defining shape function using those tools, which students have a hard time mathematically and non mathematically. Yeah. I'm just processing a lot. My mind is blown today oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. So many things. Give us a few takeaways, Natalie.

I. I, one thing I wrote in the chat earlier I feel pretty good with my content, but then picking up these brain science things is like

the next maybe big layer for me. I am really excited to continue to learn more and just dive more into that and just seeing that connection, just knowing that the whiteboards work for my students, but then now being able to pinpoint specific students and oh, okay, I'm seeing that more. And even was thinking further. Like one kid writes, oh, ridiculous. This doesn't even look like handwriting on paper, but at the board I can read everything he writes. It's I never made that connection till today.

I am like, okay, I'm just developing those different things. So I'm really excited to, and I think really important to learn more about the brain science and make those connections, but just even the connection to content and pizza problem and diagonals and like thinking about

air parallelograms and area and all the things, I'm just, Ugh, I'm so excited. What a great session. So excited. Awesome. Awesome. When he's so Natalie, so when he is working at his desk, not everybody has access to a lamp board, but you can use a binder. Just give him a binder and see if that works for him and just put his worksheet on the binder, a three ring binder, you have various sizes. Just see if that works for him and see if just changing the height of his paper helps him.

I will try that. Great idea. The binding being away from him so that it's on the slant this way. Sometimes they collapse and you just stick stuff in it, to stop the collapse. But otherwise, they're inexpensive. They probably have 'em in the building three, 3, 2, 1. You can vary the size based on what he needs, which creates that slant using a, yeah. Couple inch binder. Dang. Yes. That's so easy. Do you know how many schools throw away two inch binders. Collect those things and use 'em for slant.

And you know what you can use 'em for too, is you can use them as a wedge on your seat. So you know how kids they, you can turn them so that the wedge goes, so they angle, you put the three to the front, so they angle them back

in the seat or the other way around. So they can angle either direction. All you do is put some, nice, tape on it, make it nice and sturdy because you may not have the money. I don't have a budget to do anything. Yeah. So you just make 'em nice and sturdy and you can make 'em as wedges for the chair and duct tape. Duct tape, duct tape cover. So it's almost the end of the year. There you go. It's thrown away. Binders, one inch, two inch, three inch binders.

Collect all the old binder binders and cover them with duct tape to make them sturdy. You've got slant surfaces and you've got sitting slanted surfaces or for the feet on the bottom, if you, if a kid can't, you gotta make sure their feet are stable on

the floor, stack a couple, there you go. Rest, you get your feet touching the floor. Love it. Watch the duct tape and the writing surfaces. Okay? Because they will, that will influence their writing because of the duct tape texture. One thing that you can do then, if you're gonna use it for a writing surface, is put construction paper over the duct tape. It will help buffer that texture a little bit.

It won't solve it all, but if you're writing on a construction paper, it's a better blot feel than even writing on the hard desk. That ends segment two, chunk one of the Geo Board. Check in next week for more discussion on how the Geo Board can work

in your math classroom and your occupational therapy intervention. If you'd like to learn the and hear the entire instruction on the geo board, you wanna go to disability labs.com and look for the Geo Board in our courses. Talk to you next week.