- Address
- 142 Blaxland Road
Ryde, NSW 2112 - Contact
- Heidi No
About Gymbaroo
GymbaROO founder Margaret Sasse believed that she would have been burnt at the stake if she had lived a few centuries earlier, such was the horror with which her ideas on early childhood were greeted over thirty years ago. Fortunately, Margaret paid little heed to the ‘knockers’ and as a result, many thousands of children and their families have benefited from her insight and sheer determination to have her approach of aiding child development by focusing on neurology, accepted and adopted.
The GymbaROO story starts with ‘Marg’ as she was affectionately known, a farmer’s wife, the mother of five and an ex-nurse, who took up remedial English teaching at the local country Technical School (Wonthaggi Tech) in the late 1950’s to support the farm income. Observing that many of her poor readers seemed quite clever except for their ‘reading’, and disillusioned with the poor progress she was having with the standard remedial reading offerings of the time, she sought alternatives.
Marg came in contact with professionals overseas who were using new and innovative neurological programs to assist children with learning difficulties and developmental delays. She applied these techniques which, instead of trying to teach these teenagers to read, involved activities such as flip flops on the floor (now known as ‘crocodiles’ at GymbaROO), swinging from the monkey bars and crawling – and for homework, more of the same!
The implementation of this program resulted in the learning suppo