Raising Smarter Children

 

This is part 2 of our back to school success series.

How to Diagnose and Correct Your Child’s Learning Problems

You can use the following questionnaires to determine your child’s or learning needs.

This information may save your child hours of specialized and expensive testing and can be used to report the information to your child’s teacher.  If necessary, you may bring this information into a special education IEP meeting.

The information that follows the testing will help you design an individual solution to meet your child’s learning needs.

Before you begin, it is helpful to understand what causes most learning problems. Once you read through these, you will want to have your child or student present so that you can read the questions aloud as they look at them in print. 

That way, you’re involving your child in determining what is needed to solve his or her own learning problems and it preserves their self-esteem once they see that these issues are not the result of being a “slow” learner as most kids tend to think, because they compare themselves with other kids. 

It also helps their self-esteem because you won’t get a “grade level” score, but a true picture of how the world looks and sounds to your child.

The Four Primary Reasons for Learning Problems/Disabilities

Years of research and teaching experience has revealed that most learning disabilities, ADHD or “at risk” student learning problems are basically the result of only four things:

1. Learning Styles: a mis-match between how your child learns and how s/he is tested in writing. Kids learn in 3 primary ways – in pictures (visual);, by listening and repeating (auditory) and physically, by touching or feeling the information (kinesthetic).

The problem is that schools test in only one of those styles – the written visual style.  If your child is more auditory or kinesthetic, they may not be able to show what they know on a written test.

This mis-match may cause problems in learning math facts, spelling, vocabulary, reading comprehension and study skills.

2. Vision and Perception: undetected eyesight or visual perception stress problems which cause reading and writing problems. 

You don’t know how the printed page looks to your child, and your child’s school vision screening misses over 90% of what children need in order to read, copy from the board, and even play sports.  This is more than just eyesight – perception of what they see is involved and most schools never check for these items which may cause untold reading and learning problems.

Additionally, If a child has something like a visual figure-grouud problem, he or she will not be able to distinguish what is on certain pages from the background (remember where’s Waldo? – It is very much like that)- so imagine how much a child struggles to read with a visual figure ground problem.

3. Nutrition: nutritional deficiencies or food sensitivities and allergies can masquerade as learning disability/behavioral symptoms. Your child may be labeled with ADHD and it could be, according to pediatric allergist, Doris Rapp, M.D., numerous other problems that look like ADHD.

4. Speech and language, or auditory perception problems: the inability to hear and create various sounds or auditory figure ground problems (the inability to hear the words one person speaks when there is other background noise in the room).

Although other factors such as hearing difficulties, severe emotional distress or organic brain dysfunction may be at the root of a smaller number of learning problems, but the vast majority of children respond with overwhelming success when the four aspects discussed above are addressed.

Be sure to check with your pediatrician about other possible causes of learning difficulties like autism, dysgraphia (my son suffered from this, which is a small motor control problem which makes things like writing or cutting with scissors very difficult), etc.

 Resources: 

Questionnaires to Discover the Causes Of Your Child’s or Student’s Learning Needs

By answering the following questionnaires, you can determine the actual causes of most learning difficulties. You will receive more information on how to solve most learning challenges at the end of each questionnaire. You may find that your child or student has a combination of needs, which when dealt with directly, will result in the inspiring success we have found in our 25 years of positive educational experience.

With the exception of true organic brain dysfunction the three causes of most learning problems listed above can easily be determined by answering the questions on each of the following questionnaires:

A. Want to know how your child learns best and how to fix a possible mis-match between learning and testing?

Use the Personal Learning Style Inventory at http://www.howtolearn.com

B. Want to know how to improve your child’s reading?

Use the Parent and Teacher’s Guide to Vision Problems at http://www.howtolearn.com/ireadisucceed.html

C. Want to know if food is causing your child’s learning problems?

Go to: http://www.howtolearn.com/add-adhd.html for the chart on what may be masquerading as ADHD.

D.  See your local, highly recommended speech and language pathologist if you believe your child is having speech and language issues which may impede learning.  Be sure to check for auditory figure ground perception problems.  Next, take your child to a hearing specialist to check hearing and listening levels.  This is critical to school success.

We hope you find these resources helpful and if you have comments or questions, please submit them below – (add the two numbers together so the system knows you’re a real person :)

Also, if you want to share this information with your friends, hit the “share this” button and pass the information around to the social communities where millions of parents can see it and get the help they need.

Bookmark this page and return shortly for part 3 of our Back To School Success Series.

Remember, every child is smart!

Warmly,

Pat Wyman and Erin Mavredakis, M.D.