In an October 25th Newsday letter to the editor, Donna Ricci,a mother from West Islip was urged to medicate her son for displaying attention deficit hyperactivity disorder behavior by his elementary teachers, school psychologist and school officials. She resisted: “I would sit there in tears, never believing it.” She believed that her son would grow out of it with time and maturity. He did. With diet, nutrition, and flexible learning strategies, her son, now 15 thrives.
Seven or eight-year-old boys are immature and wild with energy; yet, this is perceived as abnormal behavior? As a middle school teacher and a mom of an active “speed demon” son (an observation from his then first grade teacher) I understood, as did she, how boys need to fidget and move. When I taught 8th grade English, I made sure that some time during a class session students were given the opportunity to get up and move around. Drama strategies facilitated all of my class lessons to insure that students had an opportunity to take ownership of their learning utilizing an integrated arts praxis pedagogy. A correlation could be drawn to improved testing results on New York State ELA scores.