I am happy to share a guest blog from Gil Tippy.  Gil is the Director of Advocacy for ICDL and the Clinical Director at the Rebecca School in New York City.  He also has a private clinical practice and speaks all over the world about DIR®.  Here's Gil's blog:

“Foundation Academics” is a concept I created more than ten years ago, at the beginning of Rebecca School, to help parents understand that the DIRFloortime curriculum addresses the foundations on which more typical academics stand. Without a solid ability to stay calm and available, be engaged, be able to open and close simple circles, and be able to open more complex interactions with another to solve some mutual challenge, think symbolically and finally create a synthesis of the thought of a teacher and the student’s own thought, students could not address what parents see as academics. I wanted parents to understand that the first six FEDC’s are the hidden curriculum that children developing typically get through before they enter nursery school. I wanted them to understand that without the first six FEDC’s, typical academics are pure memory, and not very useful.

For example, other schools, and other interventions, often show parents that their children can add and subtract, and parents, who have been brainwashed into believing that their children are capable of no more than that, are happy to have this little bit of academics. They get disillusioned with their children’s lack of progress eventually though, and move to the DIR/Floortime model. However, they really want this memory-based attempt at math to continue, because they have had so little other evidence of success. The concept of Foundation Academics is what I have used to help mommies and daddies to understand that we believe in academics, but without the right foundation, no meaningful advance to the higher maths, or the sciences will happen without the abilities most kids somehow get on their own before they enter kindergarten.

Children born within the last few years will live much longer than people of my generation, so we have time. We have time to build a solid foundation on which to base all of a child’s future and thought. That foundation is the first six FEDC’s. Foundation Academics.

For a video of me explaining some of these Foundation Academics concepts to the following link: https://drgiltippy.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/gil-tippy-has-a-simple-mind-part-3-foundation-academics-symbolism-abstraction-and-how-to-write-goals-from-simple-curriculum/

Gil Tippy, PsyD