Word: fernald
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When his fifth-grade teacher despaired of ever teaching him to read or write, the boy was sent to the clinic school of Dr. Grace M. Fernald at the University of California at Los Angeles. His first day there he learned to write and recognized 14 words. In ten months he was back in school, able to read and write as well as his classmates...
...years at the clinic school, kindly, frowzy Grace Fernald has treated hundreds of thousands of such cases of "word blindness." Her only requirements: that pupils be of normal intelligence and that their parents leave them at the clinic until the cure is complete. In two months to two years, she has usually been able to bring their reading ability up to their mental age level...
Touch & Go. Grace Fernald is one of the pioneers of a latter-day science called remedial reading. Her "kinesthetic method" works on the theory that reading difficulties occur most frequently in people who lack the ability to summon up a mental picture of the way a word looks. She finds that women have more visual ability than men, and that word blindness is 60 times more common among...
Some rival practitioners in remedial reading believe that Dr. Fernald puts too much emphasis on the sense of touch, though admitting that her method has its advantages for many children. Her rivals are inclined to attribute her successes not so much to her method as to her gifts as a teacher...
Healing Touch. Dr. Fernald uses every standard psychological trick in the book to gain the confidence of her "patients." But more important, she really likes children. Young students, warped by years of being called "dumb," are greeted by a warm and sympathetic smile, a gentle, unhurried approach and the flattery of being talked to as equals. She has the same easy way with animals. There is always at least one dog and one cat in her Beverly Hills home, and she frequently tries to persuade students in her undergraduate psychology classes to find homes for the strays she picks...