FORT WORTH (The Fort Worth Star-Telegram) -- Shelby Morrissey, 8, listens intently to the words she hears in her left ear while trying to ignore the classical music coming from a headphone into her right ear.

In this 30-minute exercise, she repeats the words into a microphone, "swallow . . . slowly . . . sleeping . . . ," frowning when she's not sure and smiling enthusiastically when she is. Next, she writes the words phonetically, and finally, she corrects her own phonetic spellings, scratching out some letters to get rid of extra sounds.

Therapists call it "aerobics for the brain" - repetitive auditory, visual or tactile exercises designed to help restructure and reconnect various brain pathways to knowledge. The goal is to create a permanent fix for many learning disabilities.

Parents call the methodology, developed at the Bellefonds Medical-Psychological Institute in Bordeaux, France, "amazing, wonderful, a real blessing, almost too good to be true."

They tell of trying everything to help their children succeed - medications like Ritalin, tutoring, special schools and remedial programs that help youngsters with learning disabilities master specific skills or grasp particular kinds of facts.

Jeanie Morrissey says her son Shayne, now 11, started having learning and conduct problems in kindergarten. He was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, but the Ritalin prescribed for him only made his problems worse.

"We knew something was not clicking. One day he would do well in math, and the next day he would bomb it, and his teachers were always complaining about his conduct. We finally figured out he was acting out because he couldn't keep up," she says.

The family was still looking for something to help Shayne, who was going into fifth grade at the end of last summer, when they heard about the Bellefonds Method at a meeting held at Texas Christian University.

"We signed both our children up," says Morrissey, "Shelby's done great, and Shayne's doing wonderful."

"It helps you do everything better in school," says Shelby, who has gone from Bs and "pretty bad Cs in math" to all As and Bs.

As for Shayne, "Some days, the sky's the limit," his mother says.

Another of the nearly 90 students currently enrolled in the program, conducted in four Fort Worth private schools as well as at an outpatient clinic, is Price George, 8. He has gone from not reading or writing at all to catching up with his first-grade classmates in less than a year, says his mother, Kim George.

"His confidence level is so much higher, and his behavior so much better," George says. "He's getting stars for behavior, and that certainly wasn't the case last year. He's in a regular classroom, and his self-worth has increased so much that he volunteered to read in front of the class last week."

The mental-gymnastics therapy requires the repetition of various exercises for 30 minutes five to seven days a week - usually twice in a classroom setting and three to four times each week at home. While Bellefonds helps children with learning disabilities learn to read and write, the exercises are fairly abstract and work at building basic connections in the brain.

Among the exercises are one that uses a hinged chalkboard, stood on end like a large book and opened slightly. The child takes a piece of chalk in each hand, and with nose to the spine of the "book" begins to draw loops on the chalk board with both hands at the same time. It's known as the "divided field" exercise, and the idea is to get both sides of the brain working together equally. The child says the word "loop" as he draws each one, attempting to make all the loops the same size and distance apart.

Another, called the tanagram, involves a solid black jigsaw puzzle with 10 to 12 pieces that are first put together over a tin plate, outlining where each piece goes, then on a plain, solid surface while looking at the tinplate for reference, then with the tinplate turned sideways and upside down, and finally without using the pattern at all. The purpose is to strengthen parts of the brain responsible for organization and memory.

Greg Owens, principal at the Hill School in Fort Worth, for children with learning disorders, says he is "cautiously optimistic" about the methodology, introduced here two years ago in a pilot program when a group of parents asked the school to provide space for it.

Owens has seen the mental exercises work wonders for children with learning differences, but he still wants to see more data - qualitative follow-up evaluations that demonstrate objectively just how well the exercises work for particular learning disorders.

"All our children are struggling to some degree," Owens acknowledges. "The premise of this is different from remedial kinds of programs in which we try to accommodate for particular deficiencies.

"This tries to bridge the gaps missed at different developmental stages. You can get remediation, and it can be a big help - but this goes back and tries to fix the problem so that kids can learn in the standard ways, so they don't need accommodation."

William Nicholsen, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who serves as director of education for the Institute for Learning Abilities, the nonprofit social services agency that brought the Bellefonds Method from France to Pittsburgh five years ago and then to Fort Worth, explains that the program does not teach children to read, but rather assists them in setting up the neural structure that will allow them to read in typical ways.

"This is therapy in the same way speech therapy or occupational therapy or physical therapy is," Nicholsen says. "It works by repetition to build connections in the brain. First you assess the child's central information processing and target where the information flow breaks down. Then, on the basis of strategically applied cognitive exercises, you rewire the brain's neuro pathways so they operate more efficiently."

David Feldman, a neurologist, developed the program in France to help with the rehabilitation of people who have had strokes and closed-head injuries, and later converted the same methodology to treat learning and language development disorders. He says the key to the Bellefonds Method is to help each child develop his or her best strategies for processing information.

"You can hear something or see something or touch something and know a lot about it, but if you want to make sense of that information, you have to have a strategy for taking it apart and understanding what all it can possibly mean," Feldman said in a telephone interview from Bordeaux.

"Simply stated, the goal of the Bellefonds Method is to help the user develop and perfect appropriate and efficient cognitive strategies for integrating new information accurately. Very often in learning disabilities, these strategies don't develop well so the information is not correctly treated. How your brain treats information it receives - badly, incompletely, erroneously - makes a big difference in your understanding of the information."

Feldman adds that Bellefonds principally addresses children of normal intelligence whose difficulties at school are not limited to one subject and cannot be linked to any specific neurological condition.

Therapists here say the program typically takes two years of exercising the brain five to seven days a week, depending on the severity of the learning disorder and, to some degree, the age of the child. (The younger the child, the more malleable the brain.)

"We call it aerobics for the brain," Nicholsen says. "Repetition is far more important than intensity. Repetition makes this program work. The impact is minimal if there is no commitment to the repetition needed."

With commitment, Nicholsen's data shows, at least 80 percent of participants achieve very good outcomes.

"Every child is different," Nicholsen says. "A lot of learning-disabled children are very bright. We see the complete spectrum - gifted to below-average intelligence."

The program doesn't make a child smarter; it helps the child process and understand information more quickly and easily, and that can make all the difference with learning-disabled children, says Susan Karnes, the Fort Worth mother whose tenacity is credited with getting the program here.

"These kids have slower processing, but slow does not equal stupid," Karnes points out. "Kids with learning disabilities need more time and effort to grasp an idea, and sometimes they mistakenly believe they are not as smart when they see all their friends reading and understanding something much more quickly than they do.

"In kindergarten, when all the children around you are looking at a page and seeing "See Spot run,' and you are still trying to figure out what that first squiggly S is all about, it can be devastating. The erosion of self-esteem is frightening."

Karnes says her 15-year-old son has had severe reading problems, but is now reading at grade level or above. He was one of the first Fort Worth students to start the program 18 months ago.

"A child who can't read, write or spell has very few choices in adulthood. The Bellefonds program opens a lot more doors," she says.

Copyright 2002 The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. All rights reserved.