Ruth Luedke was volunteering as a reading tutor when she first decided she wanted to help students who need a little extra attention.

She realized that many students need more practice, but some have a harder time grasping the skills and concepts of reading. A registered nurse by trade, Luedke already enjoyed working with children, so she began searching for a way to do more.

Her search led her to brain training.

“A personal trainer is for physical fitness,” she said. “I’m a brain trainer for brain fitness. I work with students who want learning to be faster and easier. It’s about building the cognitive skills that are the basic building blocks of learning.”

Luedke worked for five years in Atlanta as a certified brain trainer and recently moved to Whitefish to open Brighter Brains tutoring.

Brain training is different than tutoring, she noted. Tutoring reteaches information that a student missed or didn’t understand the first time. Brain training, however, has the goal of improving cognitive skills to enhance comprehension and increase learning speed.

Luedke primarily works with students age 6 to high school. Some students might have a learning disability, while others may be looking to increase their cognitive skills.

She describes her typical student as one that is studying five hours to get a good grade on a test, while their peer might be studying a half hour to get the same result.

“I make it easier for them and make learning more enjoyable,” she said. “It’s geared toward strengthening skills. Once you can strengthen a skill it will help with learning.”

Luedke measures a student’s ability with a comprehensive cognitive skills assessment that looks at visual and auditory processing, memory, logic and problem solving. Based upon that, she creates a program tailored to the student’s needs.

She offers two programs. A 12-week program PACE for processing and cognitive enhancement and a 24-week program Master the Code that adds a reading component to the instruction.

The programs use learning games that aren’t subject specific. One game teaches a student to memorize all the names of the U.S. presidents. Another has the student recite the colors and direction of several arrows on a page. First, Luedke will ask for just the color of each arrow, then the color of just those pointing one direction, changing the object of the game with increasing difficulty.

She recalls a student she worked with in Georgia that had struggled with school since fifth grade. The high school junior had difficulty with visual processing and being able to create visual images in her mind, along with long-term memory. Memorizing vocabulary words was always a challenge.

Following Luedke’s program, the student easily memorized several pages of words and now is graduating from college.

“We worked on memorizing and the underlying skills,” Luedke said. “I didn’t even have to teach her how to apply those skills to school — her brain had changed and was able to think differently. That was life changing for her that we could make learning easier and more efficient.”

“It’s just so rewarding and amazing to touch lives like that,” Luedke said. “A child’s whole demeanor can change from when they are struggling to being happy to be learning.”

For more information on Brighter Brains, contact Luedke at 261-1637 or at www.brighterbrains.net.