Links
Inclusion of a resource among the links below does not constitute an endorsement by the McNatt Learning Center, Inc., of every opinion—or any opinion—featured in that resource. Please exercise discernment.
Also, none of the following statements has been evaluated by the FDA. None of the following statements is intended as medical advice, nor should any be construed as such. For medical advise, please see a qualified physician.
Local Links
Dining near the McNatt Learning Center, Inc.
Lodging near the McNatt Learning Center, Inc., including Ottawa's River Loft. The Grand Bear Resort, with its fun indoor water park, is just one town away.
Events in Ottawa, Illinois, home of the McNatt Learning Center, Inc.
More events near Ottawa, Illinois—on Common Grounds Bookstore's website.
Color Me Yours, a paint-your-own pottery studio not far from the McNatt Learning Center, Inc., offers drop-in entertainment if you're making a day of visiting us.
Weather
Forecast for Ottawa, Illinois.
Ottawa, Illinois, is located at the convergence of two rivers: the Illinois and the Fox. "Ottawa" means "traders." Historically, these two rivers and, later, a convergence of railways made Ottawa a hotbed of trade and a major stop on the Underground Railroad. Many families have fun canoeing the Fox or the nearby Vermillion, as well as visiting nearby Starved Rock State Park. If you're planning a trip that includes fun on the rivers, you can click on the links above to check river levels to help ensure everyone's fun and safety.
Health Resources
Body Balance Whole-Food Nutrition: Enter 20627504 to receive your free quart of Body Balance. If you're hypoglycemic, lethargic, or have difficulties with digestion, you owe it to yourself to give Body Balance a try! To support digestion and overall health, both Matthew McNatt and Barb Wendel take Body Balance daily with one dollop of Perfect Colon Formula #1 (PCF) and one Fisol® softgel.
Four quarts of Body Balance and one 15-oz. bottle of PCF Body Balance last one person about two months. One 180-softgel bottle of Fisol® lasts about six months.
While this regimen is very low-allergen, some individuals with extreme sensitivities to MSG may respond negatively to Body Balance, since it is made from sea vegetables, including some which contain natural free glutamate. Natural free glutamate, like every amino acid found in nature, is left-handed. (Actually, 19 of the essential 20 amino acids are left-handed; the other is too simple to have a handedness.) MSG, in contrast, is right-handed. The free glutamate in almost every neurotoxic "savory" flavoring is right-handed. If you're extremely sensitive to MSG, Body Balance probably isn't for you. Otherwise, if you're looking to enhance digestion and sugar metabolism, give it a try! You have nothing to lose and, possibly, quite a lot to gain!
BEMER 3000: Staff at the McNatt Learning Center also make regular use of our BEMER 3000, a device that emits a healthful EM field less than 1/40 the intensity of an electric blanket—hardly anything, but enough to have a profound effect on the immune and nervous systems. If you have multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS), extreme lethargy, asthma, arthritis, Crohn's disease, an anxiety disorder, or an autism-spectrum condition, please email Dr. Yael Shany for more information.
Stress Eraser: Do you feel overwhelmed? Out of sync? Have difficulty falling asleep? The StressEraser is a heartrate varability biofeedback device that may help.
Safe Wireless Initiative: The proliferation of cellular phones and Wi-Fi Internet access places us in a sea of electromagnetic pulses that, by some estimates, is over a billion times stronger than the natural fields faced by our ancestors. Might EM radiation be contributing to the surge in autism-spectrum conditions and an increasingly cultural difficulty sustaining attention? Might radiation from cell phones cause brain cancer, breach the blood-brain barrier (leading to toxins in the brain), and damage the body's ability to repair damaged DNA? The Safe Wireless Initiative believes so and presents evidence for their case.
Psychotropic Medication
Drug Awareness: This website has many articles and links on the risks of anti-depressants and other psychotropic drugs. Please visit here before taking mind-altering substances, legal or illegal: they're not as safe as advertising has led many to believe. If you're shocked by the information on DrugAwareness.org, you might also appreciate SSRI Stories, which features case studies of drug reactions to anti-depresstans, and Healthy Skepticism.
Ritalin Death: This is a website created by Lawrence Smith, whose son's death certificate reads "Death caused from Long Term Use of Methylphenidate, (Ritalin)." Ritalin Death features articles on the risks of stimulant and psychotropic medications, with links to other sites with similar concerns.
CHAADA (Children and Adults Aainst Drugging America) is a newly formed information and advocacy group. CHAADA is certainly not to be confused with CHAAD, which sponsors support groups that promote the psychiatric drugging of children.
Unite for Life: This website examines the dangers of anti-depressants to mothers and their children.
From CCHR:
Fitness Products
Flex-Away Facial Exercise System: Improve sphincter muscle response plus facial muscle tone and appearance in just two to four minutes per day.
FlexTend Extensor Strengthening Program: Strengthen your grip, improve neurologic discrimination, and help prevent carpal tunnel with only 10 minutes three times per week.
The Trainer: An intense, muscle-building workout from a highly portable device, which allows for creativity and variation among exciting, 12-minute workouts only three times per week.
Day 6 Bicycles: Given up cycling? Imagine bicycling for hours without pain: no back pain, no wrist pain, no shoulder pain—just a breeze through your hair as the wheels turn beneath you. Balance and coordination difficulties? Imagine riding a two-wheeler with minimal risk of falling over. Imagine no more—Day 6 Bicycles are here!
Trikke Cambering Scooter: Train contralateral movement while getting great exercise, portable transportation, and a fun time outdoors. To train pelvic musculature, develop contralateral movement during inclement weather, or just for the variety of indoor exercise, consider the Lateral Thigh Trainer, too.
Helpful Tools
Joe's Goals: Track how often you do HANDLE® Activities or meet self-improvement goals. The ability to send scores to a friend can facilitate accountability, while totals and averages can help you gauge consistency.
Time Timer: Helpful countdown timers—tangible and software—that visually represent the passage of time.
Invisible Clock: Disguised as a pager and small enough to fit in one's pocket, this timer might remind you to think good thoughts, to take your vitamins, or to draw what you're doing to a close so you can make a meeting on time. Its automatic repeat feature is particularly helpful.
Scripture Memory: Helpful software to memorize Scripture or any other text you'd like to memorize. (For more Scripture memorization help, see Scripture Songs, below, under "Music Resources.")
Kadon Enterprises' Fine Touch Collection: Tactile puzzles that can help redirect tactile sensitivities to enhance classroom focus.
Word Menu: A combined dictionary, thesaurus, and idea generator, Word Menu (software) is a great writer's companion and must-have composition resource for high school and college students—at least those who don't have Visual Thesaurus.
Visual Thesaurus: Similar to Word Menu, above, but particularly appropriate for the right-brained learner, Visual Thesaurus (software or website) is a great writer's companion and must-have composition tool for high school and college students—at least for those who don't have Word Menu.
Video Modeling: These videos teach social cues for children with Asperger and other autism-spectrum conditions. They are geared toward children in public/government schools.
LaneChanger Rearview Mirrors: When a driver with a poorly integrated Assymetric Tonic Neck Reflex (ATNR) does a shoulder check, if (s)he's under stress, (s)he can end up turning his/her head as (s)he turns the wheel—a dangerous and potentially fatal situation. Until the ATNR is integrated (and even afterward), a LaneChanger rearview mirror can help.
Book Recommendations
Judith Bluestone's Fabric of Autism. This is a bedrock book for perspective on what causes some of the "strange" behaviors associated with learning difficulties and attachment issues. Fabric of Autism introduces Bluestone's Holistic Approach to Neuro-Development and Learning Efficiency (HANDLE). Highly recommended!
Dr. Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins' The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body draws from decades of research into EEG Biofeedback to provides helpful meditations that can complement HANDLE®. These meditations, while helpful in their own right, can also help a parent relate to the "awakening" a child may experience through HANDLE®. For older students, the meditations may also enhance mental rehearsal of HANDLE® Activities during moments that doing Activities is impractical. More Open Focus tools are available here.
Carola Speads' Ways to Better Breathing helps explain the difference between activities (which it calls "explorations") and exercises. It offers helpful breathing explorations that, while helful in their own right, can also help parents relate to the perceptual shifts their children may be experiencing through HANDLE®.
Dr. Eugene Gendlin's Focusing is the result of an unexpected discovery in experimental psychotherapy—that a client’s success or failure in psychotherapy, regardless of the school or method of the psychotherapist, could be reliably predicted from video recordings of the first two sessions: clients who could access their internal, bodily "felt sense" improved. Clients who didn't know how to listen to their bodies didn't improve, despite the best efforts of their psychotherapists and caseworkers. (Gendlin and his colleagues called this ability to access the "felt sense" Focusing.) This discovery has obvious implications for HANDLE® and Open Focus, which can help develop a reliable "felt sense" and coherent "sense of self." An accepting, HANDLE®-friendly school of Focusing has been further developed by Ann Weiser Cornell, Ph.D., and Barbara McGavin. Their "short form" of Focusing can be found online here; their training CDs can be ordered here.
Dr. Terry Warner's Bonds That Make Us Free helps explain why a non-judgmental approach is essential to helping others and offers concrete steps to stop judging: it's truly life changing! This was the source book for the excellent bestsellers Leadership and Self-Deception, which explains how self-justification and accusation can destroy a workplace, and The Anatomy of Peace, which both explains how self-justification and accusation can destroy relationships and also provides guidance "out of the box."
Chalmers Brothers' Language and the Pursuit of Happiness (available through Amazon.com here) explains how language can convey and contain our ways of being. For individuals with Asperger’s, or for families of individuals with Asperger’s, this book may be a godsend. It explores differences between how we feel and how we come across to others; ways to be more flexible; ways to discern when and whom to trust; and ways to follow through in a timely manner, not only intending well and eventually following through but also doing what’s necessary now.
David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity is based on the premise that our productivity is directly proportional to our mind’s ability to relax. Especially helpful for individuals with inter-hemispheric issues, it explains how to move from getting something and wondering "What on earth do I do with this?" to actually getting things done on time. The abridged audio recording of his subsequent Ready for Anything is also a joy.
Book Recommendations for Education Professionals
Gerald Coles' The Learning Mystique: A Critical Look at "Learning Disabilities" helps explain problems with common explanations of and interventions for learning difficulties. Its thesis is that
both brain difference and brain dysfunction are created within dysfunctional social relationships and activity. Social interactivity and the brain functioning associated with them are mutable: a positive change in the former can allow for a positive change in the latter. Researchers pursuing the cause of LD have tried to filter out, divide up, and chart the features of the learning-disabled brain. Doing so has been like analyzing the wounds of gladiators mauled by lions in the amphitheater to determine the cause of their 'disabilities.' If a finger were pointed only to the immediate causes of brain dysfunctioning, it would be like blaming the lions and not the empire. (187–188)
If one views "dysfunctional social relationships" as those in which children with struggles are seen as problems to be fixed through behavior modification, rather than as people who are trying to get their needs met as best as they know how, and views "dysfunctional activity" as trying to do whatever is asked, regardless of stress response or opportunity to develop differentiation and foundational learning skills, this thesis—despite other challenging aspects of the text—is quite compatible with HANDLE® and the perspectives of the McNatt Learning Center, Inc.
For a religious, lay-level retelling of some of the arguments in The Learning Mystique, see Jan Strydom and Susan du Plessis's The Myth of ADHD and Other Learning Disabilities. It paints with too broad a brush, sometimes rejecting helpful interventions and often over-recommending physical discipline. It's nevertheless a tremendous wake-up call to what's wrong in North American education and educational psychology. The Myth of ADHD also provides helpful background information for books written by educational "experts," since it delves into and critiques beliefs that support what many "experts" present. It has been republished online here.
Kieran Egan's homepage at Simon Fraser University. Egan is the author of what Matthew considers one of the best series in educational philosophy: The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding, Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget, and An Imaginative Approach to Teaching. For a taste of Getting It Wrong from the Beginning, the lightest read in the above triad, see Egan's article "The Analytic and the Arbitrary in Educational Research."
Art
F. W. Tamblyn's Home Instructor in Penmanship Course teaches wonderful ornate penmanship, picking up where Peterson Handwriting's instruction in business script leaves off. To read about an ornate penman who wrote without hands, click here.
Draw Right teaches ways to see the lines and shapes in what they're drawing. Due to the tremendous difference between seeing real things and seeing symbols, similar training used for handwriting can contribute to letter reversals. (A dinosaur facing right or a dinosaur facing left is still a dinosaur; a "d" facing right, in contrast, becomes a "b.") But there's no problem with learning to see real things afresh!
Lon Haverly teaches drawing using a "stroke first" method, much like Peterson Handwriting teaches cursive. For students who can "see" what they want to draw, Haverly's emphasis on posture, paper position, and pencil position help students make consistently beautiful and efficient strokes. You can view clips from Lon's videos on YouTube here.
Music
Lyrical Learning
Lyrical Learning promotes scientific literacy through catchy songs. Learn about basic organisms, mammals and ecology, human anatomy, and basic earth science through song. Lyrical learning produces CDs, songbooks, and workbooks.
Radio
Solo Piano Radio: If you have a broadband connection to the Internet, you can enjoy wonderful piano music any time day or night!
Old Christian Radio: If you have a broadband connection to the Internet, you can enjoy wonderful Christian hymns and gospel music any time day or night!
Scripture Songs
The Feher Family's folksy Scripture Songs are a real blessing. You can listen to samples and explore Patti Vaillant's Scripture Songs I through V while you're on this site.
The Harrow Family's Sing the Word series offer a contemporary, uplifting collection of Scripture memory songs.
Music for Rhythmic Marching, Handwriting, and Poi Spinning
Music with a consistent beat can make rhythm training easier. While many children's songs offer a steady cadence, music for older students can be hard to come by. Rock, polka, and waltz have • | | • | | or | • • | • • beat structures, which don't work, and in many pieces of classical music, the beat structure is difficult to discern. The following resources may help:
Strictly Sousa (Dallas Wind Symphony). March music needn't sound like an oompah band. Here's a creative, fresh rendition of some of Sousa's best.
Stars and Stripes Forever (Boston Pops Orchestra). A vibrant, uplifting rendition of march music.
Who Needs Guitars, Anyway?* (Alice DeeJay) Creative, classically inspired techno music.
Believe* (4 Strings). Creative techno music with amazing, soaring vocals.
* Listener discretion advised: not all songs on these albums have uplifting, appropriate lyrics. Encoding appropriate songs into MP3 format can provide appropriate training music.
Playing Music
Learning to sing or play an instrument can be immensely beneficial—cognitively, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. If you're interested in learning music, these resources may help:
Christian Leaders' Home Discipleship Hymbook: Learn to sing in parts with classic hymns. This Family Pack comes with five alphabetized hymnals of Christian classics and CD's with separate tracks for different vocal ranges.
Indelible Grace has helpful CD's and songbooks with classic hymns re-written to fresh, yet tasteful, contemporary tunes.
Dean Kincaid's Piano Course for Christians offers a sound, skills-based piano instruction program that can be used with a teacher (preferably) or in self-study.
Wayne Simms's Compact Bowed Psaltry, a modified version of a traditional instrument, provides the bowed equivalent of 2 1/2 octaves of a piano. Unlike portable, electronic keyboards, a Waynie Compact Psaltry resonates beautifully. Waynie Compact Psaltries are easy and fun to learn alongside piano, which can be a real plus when studying music theory.
Games
For an extensive list of cognitive training games, the abilities they train, and a few stores from which to purchase them, click here to visit our Structure of Intellect page.
Online Resources
Christian Living
Recovery Version Online: The Recovery Version is one of Matthew McNatt's favorite translations of the Bible. This link takes you to an online version of the New Testament. Though Matthew thinks the footnotes are sometimes best ignored, he appreciates many of them—and is especially nourished by ways the translation captures nuances from the original languages easily missed in other translations. (For an independent analysis of the Recovery Version, you can visit here). The neXt Bible is also a good resource.
For more Christian Living links, see "Banners," below.
School Reform
Creating Learning Communities: Novel approaches to collaborative education.
School & State: The oldest solution to problems with schools… just might be the best hope for their reform.
Open Walforf: Did you know that Walforf education is religious in nature, based on the religion of anthroposophy? Few do, which may be one reason that Walforf education can receive public-school funding in the U.S., while other distinctively religious education generally cannot. Please visit Open Waldorf before enrolling your child in any Waldorf school.
APACHE—Central Illinois Homeschooling.
Literacy & Dyslexia
Confusing Literature with Literacy: This article from Spelling.org presents myths and realities about learning disabilities and dyslexia.
News
CS Monitor: Produced by the unorthodox Christian Science Church, which denies the reality of evil, the CS Monitor is nevertheless one of the few sources of largely impartial news reporting available in the United States today. The only mention of "Christian Science" is a single, short article in every paper.
The New American: Good paleoconservative (traditional, Judeo-Christian) journalism, albeit with occasional, unfortunate conspiratorial themes. Paleoconservative news commentary can be found at The American Conservative and Chronicles Magazine.
Gospel for Asia News: News of native Christian missionaries and the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Banners
