Dyspraxia and DCD
How to build a confident child
If your child has one of the above labels or the school or yourself sees signs of a specific learning difficulty, we can support the child.
We take a holistic approach and look at the whole child. We discuss with you what the main difficulties are that they struggle with. Some examples are:
Reading below the expected level for age
Difficulty reading, including reading aloud
Slow and labour-intensive reading and writing
Spending a long-time completing tasks that involve reading and writing
Problems with spelling
Avoiding activities that involve reading
Mispronounce names or words, problems retrieving words
Problems remembering the sequence of things
Concentrating on a task
Organising thinking, time, and things
Sensitive to quiet and loud noises
Struggle to sit in a chair or constantly fidgeting
Feelings of anger and frustration
Difficulty memorising
Transposing letters and numbers
Low self-esteem
Behaviour problems
Withdrawal from friends, parents, and teachers
Hyperactivity – seems to be in constant motion at times with no apparent goal
Problems processing and understanding what he/she hears
Problems processing and understanding what he/she reads
Problems remembering sequence of things
Difficulty seeing (occasionally hearing) similarities in letters and words
Struggling to learn a foreign language
Difficulties with maths problems
Difficulty forming letting shapes with tight or awkward grip on a pencil.
As a team, with the parents and the child, we come up with the therapy plan. The therapies we use are dependent on the above range of difficulties and how the child operates within the classroom environment. We tend to focus on one area of development at a time to ensure the child does not feel overwhelmed and their self-esteem and self-image grow.
To support dyslexia, we look at the individual senses, develop them, then integrate them to create a full functioning whole child. They involve the development of:
- Auditory skills
- Visual perception skills
- Emotional maturity
The range of therapies we use to support dyslexia are:
Sound therapy – Johansen:
This focuses on developing auditory and emotional stability. This is an individualised auditory stimulation program that uses music recordings customised to the individual’s hearing curve to organise and enhance auditory processing skills.
Children and adults with dyslexia, Dyspraxia, ADHD, speech and language difficulties, and autistic spectrum disorders may have inefficient auditory processing. The effectiveness of teaching and therapy can be greatly increased if these skills are improved.
Johansen IAS can contribute to improvements in:
- Concentration
- Understanding
- Social Skills
- Listening
- Attention
- Learning
- Reading
- Spelling
The therapy program involves listening to Johansen IAS music specifically designed for each individual child. They listen to it for 10 minutes each day. The student’s progress is assessed every other month and based upon the results a new music disc is made.
Visual Perception skills :
This is the ability of the brain to draw a conclusion from the information it views through the eyes.
Vision perception is necessary for reading, writing, and movement. Without it, children may find daily tasks such as completing homework, reading comprehension, copying from the board, organising their body movements extremely stressful.
We assess the child using the TVPS (Test of visual perception skills). We then work on each skill to integrate the skills to produce a child who can read with comprehension, interpret mathematical and scientific graphs, data, visual information and write more efficiently.
The key visual perception skills we develop are:
1. Visual Memory
This visual skill allows us to record, store and retrieve information. This, therefore, supports comprehension, spelling, mathematical calculations, and word problem-solving. It allows us to learn and later recall what is learned. This supports doing spelling, times tables, homework, revision, tests, and exams.
2. Visual Sequential Memory
This relates to visual memory in that it allows us to store and retrieve information when necessary or useful. However, sequential memory helps us remember and recognise people, places we have been, and a series of events, equations, and procedures. Can you remember the order of every times-table or difficult spellings?
Visual memory and visual sequential memory methods would be used in schools commonly to support students to learn weekly spellings.
3. Visual Form Constancy
This visual skill allows us to distinguish one object from another similar object. Being able to tell the difference between the letter “b” and “d” or “3” and “8”. Though the forms are similar in shape, they are very different in meaning. The ability to see and distinguish these differences is form constancy.
4. Visual Figure Ground
The visual skill that allows us to distinguish, segregate, isolate or find an object or stimuli in varying environments. This can include faces, figures, objects, landscapes, and letters or numbers. Properly processing our visual figure ground helps to organize the information we see in our environment.
This skill is essential for homework, answering questions in class, skimming and scanning text, answering comprehension questions, analysing data for maths, science, and geography, and revising for exams.
5. Visual Spatial Relations
Visual spatial relationship allows the organisation of the body concerning objects. It has implications for understanding how other objects, shapes, people, letters, and words relate to each other.
It can greatly impact children’s abilities to read with or without a dyslexia diagnosis.
6. Visual Closure
The visual skill that allows us to detect, differentiate, select, draw conclusions and understand information when we are only given certain pieces of information, rather than the entire information.