Let me once again make it very clear to all that the intention of my posts on Learning Disability is early identification and early intervention so that most of these kids will come out of the problem or the damages are minimized or intelligent kids are helped to make their own strategies to overcome the issues bogging them down. Please do not be hasty in labelling a child as dyslexic just because he/she shows some of the features of LD. There can be other reasons too as I have explained earlier.
Some children have very specific problem in the area of spellings or in writing or in one particular subject. The problem is then referred to as Specific Learning Disability or SLD.
Let us see what may be the indicators of LD in a child. And parents, please do not get unduly perturbed if your child shows any of these symptoms. The child may not yet have acquired these skills and given exposure and practice, it would surely catch up.
Many parents complain that the child is able to narrate the full dialogue of his/her favourite hero of a particular movie, but unable to learn three stanzas of a poemin the text book! Here we need to understand that there is no pressure upon the child to narrate the dialogues of a hero nor will the child be evaluated by anybody for at the end of this task! And the child has learnt it of his/her own free will because saying those dialogues gives the child satisfaction and he/she loves to identify with that actor that in-turn may boost his/her self-image. Whereas, the text book poem is not meaningful to the child’s life in any way, nor does it serve any personal satisfaction. Teacher has assigned this task and she is going to evaluate each child by the rendition of the poem. That may spell doom for the child for anxiety can create havoc in its mind!
Come to think of it, which are the most remembered events in our lives? I am sure each one of us have many memorable events that may or may not be significant to others! And I am sure each of those remembered event is associated with a wide variety of emotions! Yes, moments that have impacting emotions are remembered best! Some times you do not even remember what you had eaten for the morning breakfast, but would recollect with ease which coloured shirt you had worn when you dated your ‘would-be wife’ 15 years ago or even 50 years ago! or what words were exchanged between you and your girl friend in a fit of rage on that fateful evening!
Now make a story of that poem and narrate it interestingly to your child. Use many of the words that are present in the poem and in a similar sequence. Once you are able to hold your child’s attention and interest through this story, the child will soon be able to narrate the poem very well.
Some children who have LD may have problem understanding the emotionsprevailing in a situation. They will not be able to assess a situation as per the expected norm for that age. For ex: A 12 year old boy may start telling jokes to others when people may have gathered to mourn the death of somebody. or a child of 15 may not be able to gauge the intensity of his father’s anger and may wrongly place a demand for a toy at that time. This can happen because of a developmental lag in emotional maturity. This lag may persist even in adulthood. Parents may need to teach the intricacies of emotions and consequences to these children like how they would teach a lesson from a text book.
Many of these children have problems in sequencing information. For ex: they may not be able to list out the names of months in a year in their correct order. If they listen to a story, later they may not be able to narrate the happenings in the story in the right sequence. If you show them a calender and ask them to take out the page in which their Birthday would fall, they may aimlessly turn the pages without knowing where their birth month would occur.
Some of them have difficulty with directionality – the positioning in space, like confusion with up- down, next to, above-under, inside-outside etc. Most of them may have difficulty deciding the ‘right’ from the ‘left’ (laterality), reading a simple map and locating some body’s house. If the school building is very huge and students have to change classrooms for different subjects, some of them will have a tough time locating their class. They may be poor in ‘spatial ability’, ie, ‘what-fits-where‘ kind of problem in arranging puzzle pieces.
Children with LD may have poor temporal concept. They may be unable to gauge the period of time that needs to elapse between two events. Suppose their Birthday falls in the month of May, from January they start asking their mother when May would come? If they are having their tests in a week’s time, they may not have the concept of how long or short they have to wait to write the test. They may have difficulty reading a clock, understanding the time concept and managing the time available to them.
…………….. to be continued
Dear Madam,
I would like to meet you personally and discuss about my daughter who is have problem in spelling, maths and learning, and her teacher had just given me an hit that she may be having Dyslexia, She is 12 years old, and very poor in her studies and does not have memory power.
As advised by her teacher I was just checking the internet, where I came across you, kindly give me a suitable time or contact No. so that I could contact you and come and meet your personally. We stay in HAL. Kindly help me in this regard and how do I go about my daughter.
My mobile No. is 9845422039.
Regards
Asha.
I have an eleven year old daughter, she has a hard time learning,but its just at certain times. Last year she hit the honor roll three times but still can not memorize her times table.Now she has started 6th grade and when I sit down with her and try to study for test she just gets kind of restless and does not care if she studies or not and then cries that she is going to fail and asks me why she can not learn like other children? Is there something wrong or is she just being lazy?
Thanks, Angela
dear angela, kindly go through all the posts on dyslexia wherein i have described various signs that children with dyslexia express. when in doubt, it is always better to get an assessment of her learning abilities done to rule out any learning problems. any thing bothering a child’s mind also can take away the interest from studies and show a decline in it. kindly get her assessed and take suitable measures to mitigate the issue.
my best wishes to you.