Kids living with learning exceptionalities

Speech difficulties

If, for example, your child stutters or can't articulate particular sounds, you have probably been working with him to overcome the speech difficulty since you noticed it. However, some parents and their doctor believe that a child will grow out of an oral idiosyncrasy, as many kids do. But if he hasn't grown out of it by the time he starts school, it's important to act quickly.

First, approach your child's classroom teacher and possibly the principal. Some school boards require an assessment by a speech language pathologist whose diagnosis is used by the board's speech therapists. You may have to wait a month or up to a year for the assessment, which has no separate fee if handled by the school or a hospital. If the wait seems too long, you might ask your family doctor for a referral. Speech language pathologists charge about $100 an hour, but some health plans cover up to 85 per cent of that cost.

Once your child has been diagnosed and is working with a speech therapist, you can usually supplement the therapy with work at home. Ask the therapist how you can help. Lynn Barnhardt is the only speech language pathologist for the fifteen schools in the Nipissing-Parry Sound Catholic District School Board in Ontario. Once a week she holds an after-school clinic for her student clients and their parents to help them understand how to do the required exercises properly at home. According to Barnhardt, the kids whose parents participate in the free clinics show a better rate of improvement over the kids whose parents don't attend.

Language disabilities

Over the years, learning disabilities have been given many labels. But the definitions of the various disabilities overlap and not all experts use the same labels for the same problems. Dyslexia, which describes a complex of reading and writing comprehension problems, is the term that covers the most common learning disability.

In the past, dyslexia was considered a problem of perception. The core symptom of this difficulty is the inability to sound out words or to read individual words quickly or automatically. But it is now believed that there isn't a problem with how the child perceives the letters and words, but there is a problem with her "working memory.' Working memory is the term for holding something in your memory in the way that you've just seen or heard it, while simultaneously manipulating or working with it. It appears that kids with a reading disability don't remember the orientation of the letters in a word they've just seen.

Reading disabilities and phonics

Children who have difficulty associating the sounds of language (phonemes) with the letters that represent those sounds have another type of dyslexia. A difficulty translating sounds into letters or letters into sounds may be seen in youngsters who have trouble sounding out words like caterpillar as cat-er-pil-lar, or in the child who can't string rhyming words together like mummy, tummy, yummy.

Most kids learn to read at their own speed within the first year of school, so grade one may be too early to do any formal assessment. But if you become concerned during the first term of grade one that your child has made very little progress in language skills, discuss your concerns with his teacher. Inquire whether her language arts program for the class includes specific instruction and practice in phonics and spelling.

Many children learn to read and write without problems, but some children, especially those with learning disabilities, benefit from the slow and steady process of linking the sounds they hear to the printed letters that represent these sounds. Emphasis on phonics instruction has gone in and out of favour over the years in Canadian schools. The pendulum has swung back, and phonics again has a prominent role in the language arts curriculum for kindergarten and the primary grades.

Although all kids have to learn about the shapes and forms of letters and how they're grouped to form words, most kids grasp these basics by the age of seven. If your child still has difficulty and hasn't progressed in his language skills by the end of grade two, it may be because of a learning disability. You might ask the classroom teacher and the principal to arrange for an assessment by an educational psychologist. If the psychologist's report describes a particular disability, your school or neighbourhood of schools should provide the help your child needs. A resource teacher may work with him and others in his regular class, or he may attend a seperate resource class part-time or full-time.

At home, parents can supplement their child's language experiences by playing games with language, by a daily session of reading, by taking turns reading and being read to, and by talking together about what you've read or about any activity you've been doing together. In these ways, you help him explore written materials that match his intellectual level or interests, and he picks up new vocabulary, increases his comprehension skills, and maintains a love of books.

Writing disability in language and mathematics

Children who have problems with the number operations in mathematics often also have difficulties with printing and spelling. They have difficulty putting words down on paper, whether copying written work from the chalkboard or writing a story. Composing the story is not the problem; the stumbling block arises when they try to transfer the ideas from their imagination to the paper. These kids may sometimes read slowly, but their comprehension skills are solid, and they seldom have difficulty talking and answering questions.

The difficulties become apparent during grade three, when the amount of mathematics and written work in all subjects increases. Share your concerns with your child's teacher and principal. If they agree that the child's difficulty is serious, there may be reason to request a formal assessment. But sometimes just acknowledging the difficulty and undertaking remedial work is the best help. The help should focus on teaching the child strategies for coping with his disability and practising techniques to improve in the areas affected.

These strategies include, for young kids, the concrete manipulation of numbers (as on an abacus), doing math problems on graph paper to keep the digits in columns, highlighting the mathematical symbols for operations like addition and subtraction, or, for older kids, using a calculator and an electronic dictionary for spelling. These kids do much better on assignments with fill-in-the-blanks answer sheets and multiple choice tests, than on projects that require more writing. Some schools also permit them to have extended time to complete essays and exams in later years.