Are you feeling the pressure to help your child succeed when others have failed?

You know your child is bright, but he’s struggling to keep up at school.

The teachers say he’s just not trying, he’s daydreaming, or just not doing his work. He spends hours each night on homework, and still brings home Cs, Ds, and Fs.

Is it a learning disability? Could it be?

Wikipedia says: “In the United States and Canada, the terms learning disability, learning disabilities, and learning disorders (LD) refer to a group of disorders that affect a broad range of academic and functional skills including the ability to speak, listen, read, write, spell, reason and organize information.

A learning disability is not indicative of low intelligence. Indeed, research indicates that some people with learning disabilities may have average or above-average intelligence. Causes of learning disabilities include a deficit in the brain that affects the processing of information.”

According to The National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) approximately 5% of children enrolled in public school in the United States have some form of learning disability.

Language processing?

“Language processing” or “processing” is a term you’ll see often in our posts.  First, let’s clarify that language is much more than the spoken word. Language is the information received by the brain, stored and recalled when needed. Language is conversation, auditory and visual cues, written directions and so much more.  Processing is what your brain does with language.

If you think of your brain as a huge file room with rows and rows of filing cabinets, when information (language) is received whether it be something you saw or heard or read or felt that information is stored in your file room. For some people and for a variety of reasons the filing system used by their brain is not the correct order.

 

 

Imagine if your employer told you to go to the file room and retrieve an important file, you open the first filing cabinet to find none of the files are in alphabetical order. In fact the filing system makes no sense to you at all. How long do you think it will take you to find that all important file?

For people with processing deficits the filing system chaos in their brain can make even the easiest task difficult or at the very least laborious.

The programs used by The Therapy Group help to re-order that file system and strenghten the neuro-pathways (routes) from information intake to the correct file cabinet.

Visual Perception Deficits

Let us guess…nobody can figure out what exactly the problem is: Your child just cannot seem to grasp the concepts involved in his or her academic tasks.  School is a struggle and a challenge; you and your child dread doing school work at home on a daily basis. You’ve talked to their teacher, doctor, and maybe even gone so far as to have an evaluation by a speech or occupational therapist. But they all said, “Your child seems to be functioning within the average range…there isn’t really anything we can do…your child is being lazy”.  Yet somehow your child just doesn’t seem to be able to grasp the concepts of learning. You’ve done all you can do! 

 

Your child could have visual perception deficits that have been overlooked.

 

The act of visual perception is comprised of various fine motor and hand-eye correlation skills that process visual information in order to make sense of what is seen.

 

These are some of the major indicators of visual perception disorder: 

v  Handwriting is messy.

v  The speed of writing is slow.

v  Some of the required information is written and then the child gives up.

v  Numbers and letters are reversed. 

There are 3 key elements of visual perception development that play a major role in reading, writing, and functioning in school.

• Visual discrimination is the most commonly used skill and develops at a very early age. This is simply the ability to notice similarities and differences between objects.  Sounds simple, however this skill is not always as polished as it should be or COULD be.  Red flags of visual discrimination are:

v  “b” and “d” look alike. 

v  Circles and ovals are both round. 

v  The subtle difference in length of graphic information is difficult to detect.

v  There are gaps of whole words or lines when reading.

v  Random words are inserted when reading text. 

v  Inability to discriminate what line is being read or hold the place on the paper. 

• Visual memory is the next skill to develop.  It is simply the ability to see something, and recall it.  This becomes critical when writing is involved, especially when one is writing without a model in front of them.  If there is a deficit in the ability to hold an accurate picture of what the letter “q” actually looks like, one is never going to be able to write the word “quack” even though they know “u-a-c and k”.
• Visual sequential memory is a more advanced version of visual memory.  This is simply the ability to recall multiple things in their proper order.  Someone with a visual sequential memory deficit often can read the word “quack”, tell you what each letter is and write the word beautifully if you spell it for them letter by letter.  Sometimes they can even write a short word like “quack” if their pencil is ready to go and they quickly write it immediately after hearing it.  However, the person lacks the ability to spell it back accurately or write it down using the correct letters in the correct order after a short period of time.  Severe cases are often to blame for difficulty copying notes from the board.  The inability to hold the information one reads from the board long enough to write it down on your paper can sometimes be attributed to a lack of visual sequential memory. 

 

The Therapy Group is here to help you help your child by using programs that assist in increasing neurological potential which results in increased visual perception skill development.. 

 

Let us help you possibly identify a problem area that has been overlooked!

Neurological deficits and dyslexia

Two commonly held beliefs about dyslexia are that children with it are prone to seeing letters or words backward, and that the problem is linked to intelligence. Both beliefs are incorrect. The problem is a linguistic (of language and the processing of language) one, not a visual one. And dyslexia in no way stems from any lack of intelligence. People with severe dyslexia can be brilliant.

The effects of dyslexia, in fact, vary from person to person. The only shared trait among people with dyslexia is that they read at levels significantly lower than typical for people of their age.

A child with dyslexia will struggle with age appropriate reading, cognitively processing information heard or read and recalling/retrieving information learned.

If we understand that the effects of dyslexia are caused by processing errors in the brain or faulty wiring, it follows that we can eliminate or vastly improve those effects by addressing the problems neurologically.

The past 5-10 years have seen an explosion in research focusing on the relationship of cognitive functioning, processing of information and the neuro-plasticity of the brain. Scientists and neurologists have determined that the brain possesses the ability to “re-wire” around damaged or non-functioning areas and to build new neuro-pathways to improve performance.

A neurologically based program designed to strengthen the brain’s ability to process, store and correctly retrieve information would be the first intervention recommended by The Therapy Group.