Results

Results can be seen in all sorts of areas - not just better listening.  This is a few examples from my son.  He was in grade 7, first part of the year.

His task was to write a paragraph.  It had to be taken from the "Chronicles of Narnia" and he had to change the paragraph to make a negative into a positive.   He was not to use the same language but to transform it totally into his own words but keep the same context.

My son had been on The Listening Program at this stage for 2 weeks.  He just came home with the paragraph and said his work had made his teacher cry today.  Not that unusual (although she usually didn't cry), but he should me the paragraph and I started to cry.  For him to even COMPREHEND the task in the first place let along produce the result was astounding to me.  This was my first BIG clue that TLP was doing something really fantastic.

His writing had even changed.  I could read it without interpretation!

We were thrilled and everyone kept asking him the same question "Who wrote this?"  Poor little guy, but neither Dad, his older brother, his Aunt or Grandma could understand how he could have written it.

We were going through a stressful time as my Dad was ill and dying and we were caring for him as we lived next door.  About 2 weeks later, he passed away and things got hectic.  I stopped TLP for 2 weeks.  At the end of that period, my son had to do an assignment where he had to make a castle and explain how he did it and the differnet parts of it.

We sat down together and researched it.  One of the questions was "What is the purpose of a moat?"  We sat there for 45 minutes trying to write this assignment together.  It was like pulling teeth.  On the computer we found a sentence that said, "A moat prevents the enemy from entering the castle.  When the drawbridge is raised, it makes the castle impenitrible."  We read it together and he said he didn't understand.  I got him to read it to me and then asked the question again and he looked at me with the normal look we had been getting prior to TLP and said "I don't get it."  I KNEW in that instant what TLP had done.  We had been in the unique position to be able to test (unknowingly) what the program was doing and see before and after results.  

Four weeks was not enough listening to make a permanent change in the brain and so he had regressed back to how he was.  We were enjoying the results so much that we had forgotten how bad it used to be.  After 1 1/2 hours of agonising together, we gave up but this was the paragraph we produced after that time.   Remember that he had a LOT of help with this (but we weren't going to write it for him).  Notice how the writing has changed, remembering that this was his good copy that he had re-written several times to correct mistakes.  He has not answered the questions and addressed the key criteria.  No mention of what a moat is for.   Remembering also that this is grade 7.

We decided that we would put it away and do one more week of listening before we attempted it again.  We did and after that time, my son did it on his own (no assistance from us), wrote one copy (which ended up being the good copy) and it took him 20 minutes.

Notice how he addresses the criteria, the language is more mature and writing more consistent.  There are not as many writing errors etc.

I find now that he really enjoys writing.  While comprehension has never been his strong point, he copes well with it now and find it so much easier than before.  We purposely didn't tell his teacher what we were doing because we wanted to know if she would notice a difference.  When we went to our parent teacher interview 2 months after beginning the program, she showed us the results of tests taken pretty much at the beginning and end of that 2 month period.

In comprehension and spatial relations (which he had always done poorly in) he went from C plus to A minus.  The thing that astounded me was that I had done at least a year of sensory integration exercises with him on the floor to improve SI challenges (spatial relations was one of those).  Although we had seen results, we had seen nothing like the results achieved after 2 months on TLP.