Kids with zing.... anyone recommend

[heartofhome]

Just that - has anyone ever done kids with zing, seems to be directed at neurological development - but wondering if has good proven results
Slick marketing, need some independent reviews tho

I have seen presentation and am similarly very sceptical

see
www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/the-man-who-spent-millions-proving-he-could-cure-dyslexia-837417.html

Hi - I have researched Winford Dore and I am using Kid with Zing and after 8 weeks I'm seeing amazing results with my severely dyslexic son. What a parent needs to know is that a child needs to do brain exercises or reading interventions every day for at least 20 min for 120-150 hours for the brain to grown neurons. Winford's heart is in the right place but his marketing style is hopeless. I paid £350 for the App and half price for my daughter to use. The App is used daily for 6 months and progress is recorded. The child follows the movements of a character for eye tracking, balance, coordination etc. The child uses it twice a day for 10 mins. These brain integration exercises are well known to the build neuron capacity needed for reading/spelling. It is easy for parent/child to use. Unfortunately the education system does not understand brain integration, vilified the man as being a fraud and only after peoples money. A more in depth system is Integrated Listening, the website is very good and you can find people who use the system in the UK integratedlistening.com/ Their system you incorporate sound with movement but the child needs to do it for 1 hour a few times a week and you need to be trained on the system . This link is on the website and it shows the found describe how the system works (Wynford Dore should take lessons from him :-) integratedlistening.com/ils-video-library/

Hi, have you heard about Smart Start Minds? Www.smartstartminds.co.uk. They do a neurofeedback training for kids and adults to improve concentration.

@evansge I’m curious how the program worked for your son. Would you recommend it?

I had a lovely conversation with one of sales representatives from Zing today. I am still conflicted/confused on whether this approach would really work. She stated that tens of thousands of people had been helped through using the program, although there are no clinical trials to prove any of it. I find this to be very odd.

Has anyone used the program, and if so, would you please share your thoughts on it? I do think that all parents of ADHD kids are desperate for a solution, and just hate to see any of us spend the money and energy on this program if it doesn't work.

Hello @evansge,
Have read your post from October 2017, I'm really curious to know if over 3 years on you would recommend Zing Performance to parents with dyslexic and or ADHD children.
I think you could do parents a huge favour by posting your honest opinion, there is conflicting information on the web about the programme and Wyford Dore. You could help clear things up for people.
Please could you post your longer term finding here.
Many thanks!

Hi HarrisonDaDa

The problem with dyslexia is that it is no longer diagnosed by doctors in the UK. Over a 100 years ago there were lots of publications on how to diagnose dyslexia and they were looking at various signs/symptoms that were not just related to reading. With dyslexia the left side of the brain is smaller than the right and it impacts the degree of synchronisation between the left and right side of the brain.
With well synchronised brains the child had good balance (on one foot), good co-ordination, good fine motor control (fingers and eyes), automatically knows left from right etc.

The part of the brain most affected by dyslexia is the language processing area in the left side of the brain, which is linked to physically making and processing individual phoneme sounds in words. Children learn to say words as a whole sound but can't manipulate the individual sounds that make up the word. This is a vital skill because to learn how to read you need to link that phoneme sound to the alphabetic symbols that are processed on the right side of the brain.
100 years ago a teaching method was developed to help dyslexic children learn how to read and spell (Orton Gillingham method). A child needs to physically write the letters while saying the phoneme sound. By writing the letters you induce muscle memory. You can only read with your eyes open but you can write with your eyes closed. With daily practice new neural networks are formed between the left and right side of the brain.
I believe that you can increase the connections between the left and right side of the brain by doing the Wynford Dore exercises. These connections act like trunk roads that the phoneme/letter neural connections integrate with. My son has severe dyslexia and has not learned to read/spell using Wynford Dore but through daily systematic phonics. What the Zing programme helped with were all the other physical things you also need to do while reading i.e. steady eye tracking from left to right, sitting more calmly etc. My son's self esteem improved as his ability to catch balls with his left hand improved. One key symptom for him was not being able to stand on his left foot for more than 30 seconds, with the exercises he achieved it and I know it is a sign his brain connections have improved.
Finally, I looked up all the brain training exercises we could do together etc but usually days would go by with us not doing any. The critical thing with brain plasticity and making new networks is that you need to repeat tasks daily. By using the Zing programme we kept to a schedule that is not too arduous and tracking data was great. I could see improvements in my sons' working memory and it was reflected in his scores.
Hope this helps.

Many thanks for getting back to me so quickly @evansge.
That information on Orton Gillingham method is interesting, I'll definitely look further into it.
A was particularly interested in Zing because I was already aware there neurofeedback also helps with plasticity but it's more expensive the Zing and for fewer sessions.
Would it be fair to say that the benefits from the programme to your son were worth the money?
And also it seems that you don't feel Wyndford Dore is a charlatan or deluded?

The Orton Gillingham method is now called structured literacy in the US. In England Sir Jim Rose made every school in England start using systematic synthetic phonics for the early instruction for reading and writing. SSP is practically the same as structured literacy. I've looked at a few SSP commercial programmes and I'm using Sound Discovery (Marlynne Grant), also called Rapid Phonics. We have been making steady but excellent progress with Rapid Phonics. A good source of knowledge about learning how to teach phonics/alphabetic code is Phonics International website (Debbie Hepplewhite). Both systems have a very strong writing component. Zing is worth the money but if a child gets bored doing it they will stop and you can't force them. It was very helpful for the 4 months we did it. Wynford is very passionate about helping people and his excercises may not help a particular child but they are not harmful. On the other hand my son had an emotional breakdown after being given nothing but inappropriate whole language teaching at school for 5 years. A child with dyslexia can not learn to read/write with a system that is only effective for 80% in the class. That is why Sir Jim Rose recommended SSP but that does not mean every school in England is teaching it effectively.

Excellent! Thank you so much for all of that information.

Glad to be able to help.

I find that very interesting that structured literacy is a requirement of every school. I was a part of a small school (private) start up and we used an OG method. We did not have one child who did not learn to read. We found it interesting that older teachers who had been accustomed to other reading programs were the ones that gave us the most resistance to the OG reading program. It is a lot of intense direct instruction (very specific procedures that have to be followed with childrens' behavior) The teachers straight out of school who hadn't used anything else were very open to learning it and had great success. As a nurse, the OG method makes sense to me because you are teaching in a way that uses all of a child's senses, building them all up, so to speak and allowing young children, who may have significant sensory/neurological weaknesses use their stronger senses in order to learn. My last child is signficantly dyslexic. We couldn't use the OG method I'd used before at the school and with all of my other kids, as it taught all vowel sounds per vowel grapheme and he was too overwhelmed. He did great with Fundations from the Wilson Reading program though. I highly, highly recommend it. Thank you for the feedback on Dore's Zing program. It seems that it may be similar to the Learning Breakthrough that was developed in the 80s.