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Creating a Home Structure for a Child with Learning Disabilities

January 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Helping a learning disabled child with homework can be frustrating, both for the child and the parent. Children with learning disabilities have a different way of looking at things than other people, therefore they have a special way of learning. No two children with one particularly disability may always learn the same way, so it’s important to draw on your child’s strengths and work on building up her confidence.

Parents can easily help their children perform better in school simply by taking an interest. Ask about what subjects they’re learning in the classroom, what books they’re reading, what their favorite subject is, and keep the conversation positive. Inquire about their homework and offer to look it over, even if it’s just to show an interest. This helps kids take ownership of their learning.

Establish a homework and reading routine. Kids with learning disabilities need structure, so having a set time each time devoted to schoolwork will make things go more smoothly. Designate a certain room and space for homework and reading. Make sure there’s plenty of light and that it’s free from distractions like toys and noise. Allow them to work independently when they can, but make sure they know to come to you when they have a question or encounter a problem or concept they don’t understand. Help them stay organized by keeping their workspace and backpacks free of clutter and file their homework in special folders so they can keep track of it.

Put concepts in a real-life perspective. If you’re helping your child with fractions, take out four quarters so they can visual that 25 cents is 1/4 of a dollar. If they’re learning about a subject at school that can be experienced with a quick trip to a nearby museum or library, take them on weekends and show excitement at the learning experience.

Be a role model in everything you do.

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Learning Disorders Are Not the End of the World

December 23, 2010 by Leave a Comment

When a child is first told that the reason they are having problems in school is because they have one learning disorder or another some families feel as though this might be the worst news they have ever gotten. What family members and the children need to realize is that while being diagnosed with a learning disorder is not actually good news it does meant that help is just around the corner and that the student’s struggles are not because he is somehow less than other students.

Once the diagnosis has been made, treatment can begin and the child can begin to actually beginning to learn in a way they had a problem before. As long as the family can approach the diagnosis as a sign of real hope because they finally have an answer to the problems their child was experiencing then being diagnoses with Dyslexia can be something they can all build a future upon.

Living with Dyslexia is also something that has become much more manageable over the last few decades as more and more information has become known about the disorder. With the latest developments in treatments with learning disabilities like Dyslexia the disorder is something that can be overcome with just a modicum of effort and understanding by the child and their family. Of course having a teacher on the child’s side will also mean the difference between overcoming the disorder and succumbing to it. A teacher who understands that while the child will need a little bit of extra rope when they have first been diagnosed, that extra level of patience will pay off in the long run both with the child and the kind of work he is doing in the classroom. When teachers and family members band together to help the child overcome something like Dyslexia, there is a much better chance of the diagnosis being less of a problem.

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Educating Your Child About Their Dyslexia

December 22, 2010 by Leave a Comment

One of the biggest problems when dealing with Dyslexia is convincing the child who has been diagnosed that the problems are not rooted in that child being stupid but rather it is a problem they cannot overcome without help and that IQ is not a factor. Children who are fresh off a diagnosis of Dyslexia often feel as though they are the only people in the world who have the disorder and that it means the end of the world for them. Families and teachers of kids who have been diagnosed with Dyslexia need to make the children realize that there is treatment and that what they have isn’t so different that it needs to change their whole world.

Dyslexia is a learning disorder that can affect someone’s ability to read and write but it does not mean that they can’t learn a way to do both as if nothing was wrong after a period of time. Unlike some learning disorders which are marginally treatable at best, Dyslexia treatment basically involves retraining your brain to do something, but it can be retrained. Dyslexia is not a life sentence the way its mathematical counterpart Dyscalculia is. Dyslexia can even be worked around even if you cannot completely retrain your brain by understand the context in which words are being used and therefore they can suss out the meaning and spelling of the word.

Children who are diagnosed with this particular disorder most of all need to know that they are not going to have to face it alone. They need to know that their family is going to be there with them, is willing to spend the time that needs to be spent in order to work around the problem and that they don’t think any less of the person with the disorder. This will go a long way in helping the child get over the initial shock and deal with the problem head on.

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Understanding Dyscalculia

December 20, 2010 by Leave a Comment

While there are many learning disorders that involve the inability to read or spell different words there are very few that are as specific to learning one specific field of study the way Dyscalculia is. Dyscalculia as you may have gotten an inkling from the name, deals with difficulty in studying mathematics specifically. Dyscalculia is basically the Dyslexia of the arithmetic genre.

Much like Dyslexia, which can make sufferers read one word as the exact opposite or even not be able to see certain letters, Dyscalculia usually manifests itself the most often by having sufferers struggle with being able to tell the difference between one symbol or another. This means that when a problem like five plus five is on a piece of paper, the sufferer of Dyscalculia will see the problem as five minus five or even five times five. Of course the answer to the equation is drastically different if the symbol that helps solve the problem shows up as anything other than what it actually is. Also like Dyslexia, because mathematics can be very difficult for quite a few students anyway, it can be extremely hard to see exactly where the problem is lying when it comes to solving the equation.

Perhaps the worst news in regards to Dyscalculia is that doctors and scientists are still pretty stumped as to what causes the disorder and what sort of treatments work the best to counter the effect. This means that really the only way people have been able to overcome the disorder is to constantly work the problem and have come to accept that to some degree they simply are not going to be able to match their peers when it comes to math scores and accomplishments. Unlike Dyslexia, which does have a set prescribed treatment that can make it less effectual, Dyscalculia remains with the person and can negatively affect them for the remainder of their life.

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Coping With Auditory Processing Disorder

December 19, 2010 by Leave a Comment

For about five percent of the school age children and affliction that does not allow their brain to process information they hear correctly can affect the way they learn in the classroom. Auditory Processing Disorder is a learning disability that can actually make a child feel as though they are not hearing the same type of info that the rest of the class is, otherwise surely they wouldn’t be having the problems understanding that they are. When afflicted with APD, something in the brain literally interferes with the connections between it and the ears, making it harder to understand different sounds including speech.

The usual outcome of APD is that children who have the disorder cannot distinguish between certain sounds, even if they are spoken at levels when most people can hear them. Since a great deal of learning, especially at the grade school level is done through audible learning, APD gets in the way of these kids’ educations.

One of the problems when talking about APD is that detecting the disorder can be very difficult. Children can generally hear well enough that they can carry on a conversation and decide what someone is telling them to the point that they can follow a conversation. It is only when they are actually trying to absorb new information that they have problems. This becomes a problem because if the APD is not detected early enough it becomes harder and harder for the children to adapt later on in life.

If your child has been diagnosed with APD, the single best way to help your child is to reduce the background noise whenever they are trying to absorb new information. APD sufferers can learn if they don’t have to try and decipher one sound from many. Keep the background noise down and the APD sufferer stands a much better chance.

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The Problems of Dyslexia

December 11, 2010 by Leave a Comment

One of the learning disabilities that Americans are most familiar with is Dyslexia. For whatever reason this particular disorder seems to have gone mainstream much easier than some of the other disorders that are still not diagnosed or not believed when they are diagnosed. Still, recognizing the term Dyslexia does not mean that people have the first clue about what the disability really is and part of the reason for that is because it can manifest in so many different ways.

Of course the way we usually think of dyslexia is that the people who are afflicted with it simply read words differently. Most people know that from time to time a dyslexic will straight up reverse a word, meaning that tip if now fit in their minds, or God is dog. These are the usual understandings people have with Dyslexia and what they fail to understand is that Dyslexics rarely realize that they are the only ones who see the world that way.

Dyslexia is not a matter of being stupid the way some of people view it. Dyslexia is in fact not tied to IQ at all and the way you can tell that is the number of incredibly intelligent people who have come out in the last few years to let the world know that they have this disorder. The funny thing about dyslexia is that the brain fools you into thinking that it is everyone else who simply is seeing or writing or doing something that are completely contrary to common sense. There was one case where a child could not read the silent “e” in words, meaning that bite now looked like bit and she simply could not understand how anyone else was seeing the difference. This may seem almost like a comical problem until you realize that the girl had no idea she had a problem, until she was finally diagnosed.

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Poor Forms Of Discipline With ESE Students

December 8, 2010 by Leave a Comment

In the current climate in this country and with a rash of violence popping up in schools across the country it seems that more and more school districts are adopting what is called the zero tolerance policy when it comes to disciplining students. While at times it may seem like taking this approach is taking an active role in making sure that students in the entire are being protected, the reality is that some students are going to get cast as the ones who deserve no tolerance when they actually need more than the norm.

Exceptional Student Education (ESE) qualified students will often appear as massive trouble makers to those who do not understand the kind of learning disabilities these children have come down with. It is even worse when ESE eligible students have not yet been diagnosed with a treatable learning disability and everyone including the child’s family just thinks they are either bad seeds or incorrigible. These types of students are usually the ones who are singled out and pointed to when school boards argue that they need the no tolerance policies in place in the first place when they should be taken aside and taught how to behave and how to handle themselves in the classroom.

ESE students are not the lost cause so many schools have suddenly decided they are, but treatment for the various learning disabilities they may be diagnosed with can be expensive and the funds for continuing to educate them in a totally different way than the rest of their class can sometimes be hard to come by. So instead the school district decides that these are the kind of kids who must be expunged from the rolls and they are left to fend for themselves in a world they aren’t fully equipped to deal with. Zero tolerance policies do fewer people less good than their brochures trumpet.

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Diagnosing Dyslexia In a Young Child

December 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Arriving at a diagnosis for a learning disability like dyslexia is never easy. There are many different problems that could be leading to the child’s underperforming at their grade level and rarely does a school, a teacher, or a parent want to hand a stigma like a learning disorder over to a child. Few people realize just how liberating being diagnosed with a disease that is every bit as treatable as a real virus can be. Once the child and its parents know what the problem is the long journey of treatment can begin. It is at this point that everyone involved will admit they can actually see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Diagnosing dyslexia in children from kindergarten until about fourth grade can actually be a fairly simply process of noticing when the child is having an especially hard time with one task or another. For the most part, younger children’s symptoms will actually pop up as a bit more obvious because everyone is just learning how to do, say, write and read new words. When one child is lagging behind all the others in the first couple of years of their education, it becomes a little clearer where the problem lies. For most kids in this age group, there are some specific symptoms to look out for. In the area of mathematics, one of the bigger signs that there may be a problem beyond lack of interest is when a child is constantly confusing the various symbols (+, -, =, x, /). In the area of reading and writing the problem will usually present itself as a juxtaposition of certain letters and words. The letter “m” might often be confused for “w” or the word “pot” might be used when the child meant to write “top.” Of course in order for any of these to count as symptoms there has to be a pattern emerging.

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Dealing With Dyslexia

December 4, 2010 by Leave a Comment

One of the most common and recognized learning disability among the general population is dyslexia. While 30 to 40 years ago people with dyslexia were simply dismissed as being stupider than their peers, we now understand that intellect has absolutely nothing to do with it. Dyslexia is simply a condition in which the brain filters information such as how words are spelled in a completely different way than the norm. Millions upon millions of children are diagnosed with Dyslexia every year and despite all we know about the affliction it can still be hard to understand it and to really tell when it is present.

There are several warning signs that should be able to tip parents and teachers off about a student and whether or not they are dyslexic. Of course like every disability in this area it pays not to rush to judgment, but rather make sure that the child truly has a disability. Sometimes a student may actually just be taking longer to grasp something than the others, only to catch up later on in life. When looking for the most common signs of dyslexia in kindergartners to fourth graders there are a couple of general signs. If the child reverses the directions of certain letters on a consistent basis, such as substituting “b” for “d”, “bog” instead of “dog” for instance, that could be a signal. Entire reversals of words can be another sign, in other word if the child is consistently writing top instead of pot warning bells should be going off.

In older students it can be even more difficult to diagnose because at this point they may simply have gotten used to struggling. This is where a great deal of students simply give up thanks to a lack of understanding or help from their teachers or parents.

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Learning Disabilities And Early Warnings

December 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Part of the thing that makes diagnosing a learning disability such a complicated task is that from time to time, every child is going to have some problems learning a new subject and controlling their behavior. When a child is having problems learning on a consistent basis or is constantly acting out, that is when it is time to take a closer look and make sure the behavior isn’t something else.

Thanks in large part to an organization called the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) there is a checklist that can be used to help parents decide if their child might have a learning disorder. Of course the thing to keep in mind even using a checklist like this is that this list is not the end all and the be all for determining the problem. Because learning disabilities are neurological in nature there is rarely one set of criteria that must be met in order to be diagnosed. A good rule of thumb when trying to diagnose this yourself is to be completely fair and honest when using the criteria such as “has trouble evaluating personal social strengths and challenges” and trying to realize how often that is really true.

The bottom line is that most of the criteria that are on the checklist can be symptoms of something much less severe than a learning disability and even if you feel as though you have found the source of your child’s problem you should have them see a professional therapist or evaluator. Seeing a professional will not only set your mind at ease as far as knowing for sure one way or the other, but it also provides an impartial judge on the situation. Frequently loses place while reading” is just vague enough that your child could either be flighty, or could have a disorder. A professional will better be able to tell the difference.

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