Women's Home Activities

Some of my most current posts have been dealing with the problems that struggling readers face and what parents need to know about children with dyslexia. In continuing with the theme of these posts today I would like to share with you another side of the coin. This time I wanted to bring you a post on Helping Your Child Understand Dyslexia and Learning Disabilities.

Those of you that have visited this site before know that I am a former teacher. My background in education dealt primarily with high school aged students with learning disabilities. Like the old saying goes, “you can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of the teacher”. This blog in part has become a “classroom” of sorts hence the Educational Activities category on this site.

My passion for helping children learn has not waned although I am not currently teaching in a formal sense. Now my outlet for helping others learn comes from this source, a blog that allows me to share with you the knowledge that I have gained from my teaching experience. It is my sincere desire to convey to you through this medium the lessons I learned along the way of helping my students to achieve their set goals.

The time following when a child has been evaluated and it has been determined that dyslexia or a learning disability is the reason for them struggling with reading can be very confusing for both the parent and the child. It is not that neither realized that there were problems. Very often warning signs of dyslexia or other learning disabilities can emerge even in preschool aged children. The children themselves early on begin to realize that they are different from their peers. This often effects how children relate to others of their own age. Many times children with dyslexia battle issues of low self esteem.

Problems in dealing with a teenager’s self worth are prevalent amongst all children of this age but adding to the mix the matter of having dyslexia, this was a major factor for my former students. I knew I needed to find a means of helping them better understand the problems they faced with both their self esteem and their learning disabilities.

Allow me to illustrate this point to you by telling you about how I would begin the process of helping children learn about dyslexia and learning disabilities. After getting to know a new group of students each year I would set aside a day of classroom activities to discuss with them the reasons why they were placed in my classes. I would put their minds at ease by telling them that this was a safe haven and nothing would be held against them for speaking out. I just wanted to know how they felt about being placed in SLD classes.

A hand would usually go up and a student would say, “It’s because we are Stupid, Lazy and Dumb”. That is what the students had come to believe about themselves and what SLD stood for. Actually I would tell them, that is not the case at all. SLD is short for Specific Learning Disabilities. While it is true that each of you have been placed here because of some sort of a learning disability or dyslexia what you thought those letters meant couldn’t be further from the truth.

I would then explain to the students that each of them has at least an average IQ with some of them even above average or that they could not have even taken these classes. So that rules out the idea that you are either stupid or dumb. I would also point out to them that in that way they are very much like other teenagers that are not placed in this class. A hint of a grin would start on most faces after letting this point set in.

Next we would address the issue of being “lazy”. I would then pose the question to the group as a whole about how hard they try to get their work done and how long it sometimes takes them to understand the information they are trying to learn. I would say I know that even though it is often difficult for you at times you each try to get good grades and to comprehend the lessons. This does not equal the definition of lazy. So therefore you can check that off your list too.

Then I would let the students know that it is not that they can’t learn, it is just that they may learn differently than others; not only just from their peers outside this classroom, but also as individuals in this class. That is where the specific part of the term comes in. I would let each of the students know that they have their own ways of gaining information. This is called their Learning Styles. (You can find out more about this by following the link) I would tell them about the importance of knowing their individual learning styles so that they could understand the best approach of helping them gather, receive and comprehend information. In other words, finding the way that they could best Learn.

I would also explain that each of them has their own talents and that yes, they had strengths in areas that we could build on to help out with their areas of weakness. The key was to discover what things they do well, and to find out where they needed help the most. I worked on instilling in them that all was not lost and that it is never too late to learn. There are means of helping them overcome their problems of struggling to read and that accommodations can be made to assist with their learning disabilities. More on this later.

I realize that this has become quite a lengthy post. Still, I had a lot to share with you. To tell you the truth there is more, but I know that it would best serve you to break this into more than one post. So if you would like to learn more on this subject follow this link to Helping Your Child Understand Dyslexia and Learning Disabilities – Part 2.

Check back with us often as I continue to delve into the realms of these and other posts previously written with more to come in the future on helping your child that is a struggling reader, has dyslexia or other learning disabilities. Give us you feedback and questions. We’d love to hear from you.