My consultant popped in during the first hour of my session and read to me a whole paragraph. I ensured I understood the idea before she began reading. The idea: as she reads, I’m to visualize — create images and moving pictures in my mind — of what she’s reading. When she’s finished, I tell her the story based only on the images I’ve created. Then she asks me questions about those images to help me fill them out and, as well, asks me what I picture in those parts of the stories I’d totally forgotten or hadn’t created images for. Once I have a vivid and stable series of images and/or moving pictures of the whole paragraph, like with Sentence by Sentence and Multiple Sentences, I give the main idea.
It is not as easy as the words make it sound. The effort strains my concentration ability; it fatigues so much, I’d like to quit; it’s a series of my mind consciously commanding my brain to create images as I push my brain to keep focused on the words coming into my ears and eyes and my mind once again consciously commanding image creation until the words blur into each other and fall out of my consciousness until I can again pick them up and create out of them an image.
The consultant had done this before with me on the fourth day. This time, some images popped into my head a little more readily than last time. I did well enough that she added Whole Paragraph to my regimen, as we’d discussed she may do during my progress report. I had a small heart attack at the idea of creating images on the fly and the thought of launching right into that and abandoning the comforting regimen of creating images one sentence or two sentences at a time, under the guidance of the clinicians. But never fear, we would retain the core part of the program. Sentence by Sentence followed by Multiple Sentence followed by Whole Paragraph in one hour. I wasn’t sure how we could fit that all in because I didn’t think I’d completed three tasks yet in one hour. But my consultant assured me that as I improved, the Sentence by Sentence wouldn’t take the first half hour but less time. That one takes the most time because we do each sentence individually.
When Lindamood-Bell consultants assess, the lesson plan changes immediately. No dilly dallying here. My second hour tonight included Whole Paragraph, a story on ancient Romans. No giving the brain any choice in the matter. Naturally, it went, WHAT?! You want me to do WHAT?!!!! Then it glared at me, demanded truckloads of sugar, we bargained, then agreed upon the usual ice cream afterwards, this time chocolate with its added benefit of a taste so strong, it belted the tongue and woke up the brain.
