Body Thinking
I teach them that they are training their muscles. From the recognition of letters to the physical act of writing letters and numbers, we learn that the more we practice correctly, the better our "muscles" will remember how to perform the function. We use some brain gym activities as well, especially ones such as cross-crawls, which stimulate the cerebral spinal fluid through the body while working both sides of the brain. And (b) they love it!
Now that I found Jack Hartmann's DVD and watched some of the previews, I plan to purchase it and integrate it into our day. There are a few times where we have 3-5 minutes to do something like this!
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.
I teach and I master.
Empathizing
Empathizing is a tool that I use pretty naturally. An avid reader, I lose myself deep in a story, taking on the persona of the character and actually living the story, losing all sense of time in the real world. It is why I love to read. It's the cheapest vacation I can take! It also makes me a strong critic of actors and audiobook performers, whose performance is the personification of that empathy. I like to hear stories of actors who have taken on a role so immersively that they find it difficult to take on another role, such as the story of Jennifer Garner, super-double-agent-spy of the ABC series Alias. When she took a hiatus from the show to star in the chick-flick, 13 Going on 30, she had trouble not "running like a spy!" She had to reconsider how she was empathizing with this new, gentler character.
I teach students to empathize at a simple level: noticing how someone else feels based on their facial expressions is part of our social skills curriculum. We talk about things that you could say if you notice someone who looks unhappy or angry, or even excited by thinking about how we feel. This is about as deep as we get in our grade though; their ego-centric view of the world can be tapped into. We do try to take on the characteristics of books that we are reading as well with questions like "what is that character thinking?" They actually do well with this.