At this moment in the history of mankind, no skill is as important as reading. The learning disabilities which cause this learning disorder are usually language related and not visually related. Reading disorders come in three types, depending on if decoding and/or comprehension is affected.
Some people decode fine, but do not comprehend. That is, they can read to you just fine but can not answer any questions about what they have just accurately read to you. This is relatively rare.
Other people have a hard time decoding, but have good comprehension. That is, they have a hard time reading to you, but once they do read it correctly, they understand it. This is the most common.
Others have both problems. They can 't decode well and they can't understand it well once they finally do read it correctly. This is more likely the case with multiple learning disabilities or mental retardation.
If you can't read, usually you can't spell. They usually go together.
The number of different ways that this learning disorder can present is very great. To start with, some children reverse numbers and can not align them properly. Math requires great attention to doing things in a specific order and an ability to work abstractly with no real - life context at all. Some people have great problems with understanding the relationship between different shapes and the concepts that go with them. Most math is now taught using concepts like halves (of objects), area for teaching multiplication, and parts of a whole for teaching adding and subtracting. with this learning disorder, this can be baffling. Later on the application of the basic operations to real world math problems is very difficult. Flexibility in teaching is more likely to be beneficial in this disorder than the others.
There are two main ways this presents. Some children have very bad coordination of the small muscles of their hand. It is hard to make the letters and they are slow at it. They are also bad with scissors, coloring, drawing, and other handiwork. Others have normal fine motor control, but have a great deal of problem with the rules of writing. Spelling, Grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and composition are very difficult. In a normal writer, these skills come nearly as automatically as speaking. In this disorder, the person is having to consciously recall these rules at all times. This makes writing slow, painful, and of poor quality. This disorder often is related to reading problems.
These children are clumsy. They are always falling, tripping. and they do badly in most sports, but especially those involving catching and throwing. Things like swimming and biking and less affected. It is a horrible blow to a child's self esteem, especially boys. In a recent Swedish Study, this was a quite common condition. About 5-8% of children had significant problems with coordination. Boys are about seven times more likely to have this problem than girls. ADHD is quite common in children with Developmental Coordination disorders. At least 20% of children with Developmental Coordination disorders have ADHD. Children with Developmental Coordination disorders also have evidence of other learning disorders and language disorders, especially problems with reading. (1)
In my experience, this problem can lead to very poor self esteem in boys when present with ADHD and learning problems. It certain warrants an aggressive intervention.
[ Previous: More About Learning Disorders ] [ Next: What Can Be Done? ]
[ Table Of Contents ] [ Homepage ]