April 2008

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

* Introduction to The Tonelli Learning Center (TLC)

* Welcome from Norman Tonelli, L.M.H.C.

* Article - Teaching As Therapy for the Whole Child

* Homework Helper

 

 

Introduction to The Tonelli Learning Center in Cherry Valley

 

                                     Exercise Both Mind and Body!!!

          Giguere Gymnastics and The Tonelli Learning Center will be working together to promote a "Whole Child" approach to exercise and academics!  In February at Giguere Gymnastics in Cherry Valley, Norman Tonelli spoke to parents about a new satellite program to promote learning and offer academic support to children at this new additional location.

           Some of the proposed services available at Giguere's will include a SAT prep class for students in grades 10 and 11, a MCAS prep class for grades 9 and 10, and classes in study skills for grades 4-8. The study skills taught will include organization, test preparation and test taking strategies to promote academic confidence and success in your child. Tonelli Learning Center will also offer a full individualized tutorial program based on your child's academic needs as identified through an individual academic assessment by our Center's Psychologist, Dr. Mark Caron. Brochures about our individualized program are available at Giguere's or information may be obtained by contacting Norman Tonelli at 508-867-4451 Ext. 2. 

 

 

 

Welcome from Norman Tonelli, L.M.H.C.

 

Dear Parents:

 

I, Norman P. Tonelli, promise to deliver on the following message:  As the owner and director of the West Brookfield counseling and the Tonelli Learning Center (TLC), I will continue to listen to you, the parents, intently.  I will see to it that both your child’s needs and your needs as a parent are respected as well as understood.  I have hired professionally credentialed, friendly, and supportive professionals.  We will not stop at simply educating your children, but we will inspire in them a love of learning and self-appreciation.  I stand on my reputation as a child and family therapist in private practice for 20 plus years.  I promise to deliver the same personalized and energetic service that I have given my clients all these years, to this new educational endeavor.

 

Thank you,

Norman Tonelli LMHC

 

Owner and Director of the West Brookfield Counseling Center and the Tonelli Learning Center

 

Article

Teaching as Therapy for the Whole Child

 

Luke - not his real name - is a character in the book ''City Kid,'' by Mary McCracken. He was an angelic-looking 7-year-old who believes in the tooth fairy. He was also a thief, a burglar and an arsonist who had been arrested 24 times. In less than one school year, she says, Luke changed from dumb to bright, from crooked to honest, from sullenly silent to friendly under the tutoring of Mrs. McCracken. She says his story is true, and that he is one of many children she has helped.

Mrs. McCracken - long a teacher, now an ''educational therapist'' operating out of her home - has worked many years with children who have been judged difficult to impossible. There have been the seriously emotionally disturbed - psychotic, autistic or schizophrenic - as well as the ''socially maladjusted'' children like Luke. Mrs. McCracken's rate of success, or at least progress, has been high, and she is full of ideas - some of them controversial - about how more children can be helped to reach their highest potential and how teachers can be trained.

''For instance,'' she said recently, ''I think our best and our highest paid teachers should be in the first and second grades. That is where we either win or lose our children. What's important in the life of a first grader is learning to read. If he doesn't he is called a dummy by his classmates. He will eventually turn to something else to satisfy his ego. Often this is vagrancy, delinquency, dropping out and crime.''

The streets and jails are full, she said, of violent teen-agers who might have been salvaged in their earliest school years and gone on to well-adjusted lives. Among the programs Mrs. McCracken endorses is ''therapeutic tutoring'' by volunteers. The formula includes giving students self-esteem along with academic skills.

Mrs. McCracken's passionate commitment to children is exemplified by the story of Luke the bad boy, which she wrote in ''City Kid,'' published this month by Little, Brown & Company. Only the names have been changed. In earlier books, ''Lovey'' and ''A Circle of Children,'' she told how she had worked with pupils who were profoundly emotionally disturbed.

She is a little uncomfortable with the term ''educational therapist'' for the work she now does. ''I wish I could put out a shingle that read, instead, 'Lover of Children,' '' said the smiling, fluffy-haired woman.

Although she knows now, at 54, that she is a born teacher, she came late to her chosen profession. She dropped out of Wellesley after two years to marry her first husband, moved back to her home town of Englewood, had twins and a third child and ''did the things my mother had done before me.''

''I was deaconess of my church, a volunteer at a hospital, a den mother, on lots of boards, a member of the Junior League,'' Mrs. McCracken recalled.

The years passed, one much like another. Then, one day, the league's placement chairman sent Mrs. McCracken to a small school for emotionally disturbed children. ''I walked in that classroom and it was just wham!'' she exclaimed. ''I was home. I knew this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

''Shy and unsure of many things, I knew I could teach. I had no degree, no certification, but it wasn't necessary there. I heard a child screaming, and saw the teacher answering with love. It was not a mushy, sentimental kind of love. It changed my life.''

She found that learning and emotional problems were inextricably linked, and that ''if you feel terribly bad and troubled you're not going to be able to learn - a teacher has to deal with both.''

Mrs. McCracken taught there as a full-time volunteer for six years. Then, at the age of 44, she had to return to college to get the necessary credentials to continue teaching in the New Jersey public school system.

''I was appalled,'' she said, ''to discover how little teacher training had to do with children. The students had no direct contact with children until their senior year, and then only for six weeks.'' She was forced to learn how to play the recorder and take mathematics - two courses of no use to her professional life.

She found many of the teacher candidates poorly qualified: ''It's hard to get into medical school or into law,'' Mrs. McCracken said. ''Anybody can be a teacher, and that's bad. We should have much, much higher standards. And for heaven's sakes, there must be some way to find out if they truly like children.

''The only way to learn is to have a model,'' she added. ''Teaching students should be put in classrooms with real children from the beginning of freshman year.'' She believes that this way they would know early on, before much money had been spent and their life direction had been wrongly fixed, whether they were good with children.

Mrs. McCracken is convinced through her own experience that ''all kids who can go to school can learn to read on grade level.'' ''It may well take one-to-one work with the child, which the student teachers, the elderly or other volunteers can do under the supervision of a top-grade teacher,'' she said.

Mrs. McCracken is wise in the ways of children not only from her teaching but also from her private life: She now has four stepchildren by her second marriage, in addition to her own children, and nine grandchildren.

She believes that every child should be individually tested and that every parent and child is entitled to know the child's strengths, weaknesses and I.Q. In addition, she said, ''Teaching time and effort should be 90 percent to the child's strong points and only 10 percent on remediation of weaknesses. Requirements must be lowered as necessary to achieve success. The child must be successful, or he won't go on to the next task.''

One of Mrs. McCracken's mottos in working with children is ''level with them,'' physically and mentally. ''I don't know how many firstgraders work in a world of adults' knees,'' she said. ''Get down on the floor with them. Then, level with them as far as their interests are concerned - their books, their music. And certainly level with them by being honest. Nobody spots a phony quicker than a child.''

 

Homework Helper

Classes now forming for the second session of Homework Helper. This program is for grade levels 3^rd through 6^th. Classes will run from April 28^th until June 9^th, every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 4pm-5pm. For more information or any questions please call The Tonelli Learning Center.

 

 

508-867-4451 Ext. 2

CALL OR E-MAIL TODAY FOR YOUR FREE SESSION.