The primary grades is when children take off with reading. Their ability level is good enough to let them read a wide variety of books. They love going to the bookstore or the library and picking out a book to read. Your child may not get the same kick from reading as other children. Our son enjoyed going to the bookstore, but you’d never catch him choosing a book with lots of words in it. He’d be hanging around the comic books and graphic novels section trying to decide which one had the least number of words in it. Problems you need to look out for are difficulty matching sounds to letters, making the same spelling errors over and over again, consistently confusing words like there and their, and difficulty learning facts. Courses like social studies are particularly challenging, because they’re mostly word-based and children need to learn a lot of facts.
Grades 5 to 8 are a continuation of problems in reading. Joey may have trouble with grammar: he might be able to answer a page on nouns correctly, but gets it wrong when he needs to apply the rules into a sentence. Or he may have trouble with word problems: perhaps he can’t figure out what the question is asking. Joey may not be eager to read a paragraph in front of his class. His written answers may look messy, superficial, confusing, incomplete, or just plain wrong. This is when children’s learning problems take a front-row seat, because so much of their schoolwork requires reading.
In high school the emphasis is more on a higher level of learning; for instance, summarizing, integrating thoughts across subjects, abstract concepts, and thinking for yourself. Kids with learning challenges have trouble with all the above. Reading requirements go up, which makes it even more difficult for them to keep up. I’m not sure if our son ever finished reading a complete novel. It was just too painstaking for him, plus he found out that everything he needed to know was at his fingertips; all he needed to do was open his computer.
Parents might find their teenagers are still making the same spelling mistakes they did when they were in elementary school. What’s more, their writing style might look even worse than it did when they were in the primary grades. Sometimes children don’t take the time to read a question properly, and end up with an answer that has nothing to do with the question. This just adds extra time to the homework session, which, in all likelihood, is already too long. Our son used to spend hours doing homework, and accomplishing surprisingly little. Typically kids with learning problems have shortened attention spans, which combined with more hours spent on homework makes for a frustrating, counter-productive session, which ultimately ends up as a waste of time.
Our son had trouble planning his essay. He seemed allergic to writing an outline. He assured me he could do it all in his head. What helped him in the end was having one of the best teachers he ever had for grades 11 and 12 English. I find in high school the relationship students have with their teachers can make or break a year. I know schools don’t encourage parents to make special requests for teachers, but when your child has learning challenges, it’s definitely worth your while to try.