- Listening:
Our son had trouble following directions. Right up until his high school years I followed these five steps: limit background stimuli and noise (do not have the T.V. on or let them have their earbuds in while you’re talking about schoolwork); look into Matt’s eyes, and make sure he is looking into yours; only say what is important (don’t start talking about soccer, dinner or whatever else is on your mind); be specific about what you want Matt to do (read your English paragraph and answer the first five questions is better than simply saying, do your English); ask him to repeat your directions, or at least acknowledge whether he understands. As children get older you’ll have to use your own judgment on how far to carry out these steps. Some teenagers may think you’re treating them like a baby and tune you out if you follow each step to the letter.
When children are younger you can turn listening into a game. If you let your imagination go wild, you can probably think of hundreds of ways to play a listening game. A tried and true game, even I remember playing as a kid, is the one where everyone sits in a circle and whispers a secret to the person next to them, and then compares the final message with the original. Also the car is a good place to play listening games. You could put on one of Jason’s favorite songs, and ask him how many words he can remember, or what the song is about.
- Arithmetic:
Counting games are good. Ask Sally to count how many Pokemon cards she has. You can then ask Sally to put her cards into piles of ten, and find out how many multiples of ten she has. Or show Sally a shape, and ask her to find as many similarly shaped objects as she can in your house within five minutes. Maybe ask her to use a camera or a phone to take pictures of her items, rather than writing everything down. When you go shopping ask Sally to price match food items, and find out what the best deals are. Or give her a dollar and see how many things she can buy with it.
- Reading:
You can make reading fun by filming a movie with Jack as the star reading. Most children like to see themselves on the silver screen. What will happen is he’ll pick up on some of his grammatical mistakes and maybe even want to improve his performance. If you don’t have time for the visual part, just make a recording of Jack reading. This is also an excellent way for him to study for tests. Some children learn better when they hear information rather than see it on printed paper. In any event, two modes of learning are always better than one.
If Lucy has a favorite music artist, you can get the words to one of the musician’s songs, and let her try singing it. I always found it amazing how our son could remember the lyrics to so many songs he heard on the radio, but had trouble with everything else. Books like Dr. Seus are great because they have simple word combinations that are repeated over and over again. You can make up your own rhyming word game by asking Lucy to think of all the words that rhyme with “bill.” It can get silly too: let her create her own words. The main objective is to get children thinking about what sounds letters make.
Another idea is to find an interesting picture and ask Emily to write a story about it, followed by her reading it aloud, or maybe you reading it aloud. You can even present a story verbally to Emily, and ask her to write down what happens next. The point is many children with learning problems find reading a laborious task, which they’ll do anything to get out of. Your challenge is to break down the barriers they’ve put up and make reading fun for them.
- Spelling:
One of the best ways of learning how to spell is to read. Spelling is about seeing words on a page, remembering them, and using them in your own writing. It’s a three step process which not every child has down pat. Our son was good at remembering how to spell words, but when it came to using the words in a sentence, not so good. There is a big difference between memorizing something and actually learning it. Because kids with learning difficulties find reading such a daunting task they don’t see words in action, and that’s part of the reason they have trouble applying what they know.
Spelling games are fun and you can play them anywhere; you don’t need to sit down at the kitchen table and pull out the Scrabble board. They can play hangman, do crossword puzzles or play word games on their electronic devices while you’re driving them to school. There must be hundreds of spelling games kids can play on their computer. Teachers usually have a good idea of which ones are worth trying.
Flash cards are great because kids can use them on their own and test themselves. When they feel confident in how many words they know, you can give them the real-deal test. I used to give my children marks for each word they got right, which they could redeem for a prize later on.
Often in elementary school children get a weekly spelling list, which they are tested on at the end of the week. It’s a good idea to break this task into parts; don’t let it slide till the night before. As soon as the test walked in the door I’d ask our son to read over the list and try to remember as many words as he could. This gave us a baseline from which to work with. From there each day we’d have shorter and shorter tests based on just the words he didn’t know. The day before the test, we’d go back to the full list. There were always a few words he knew, but forgot. If you do small preps everyday, your child will be reasonably prepared for the test. What it comes down to is repetition. The more times children see words, the more likely they will remember them.
As children get older, they may get lazy about writing their words on paper; they’d rather just say them to you. My son’s favorite excuse was that his hand was cramping in on him, and therefore he wasn’t able to physically write the word on paper. I had a back-up plan: write the word in the air using your full arm movement, or write the word on my back. I always enjoyed the latter because it was fun having him write letters on my back. Then I would write letters on his back, and he would need to guess what word it spelled. The fact of the matter is the more ways children express words, whether on paper, verbally, or pictorially, the better.
I have to admit, once our son got to high school, I gave up on asking him to write everything down. When he started bringing his computer to school, it became impossible for me to follow everything that was going on. Kids nowadays don’t always need to physically write with a pen and paper; they simply punch keys on a keyboard. Once in a while I would check up on our son by asking him to print out his work; this gave me a clearer picture of his progress.
- Writing:
Start off on the right foot by teaching your child the right way to hold a pencil and sit at the table. I know this sounds like it shouldn’t have to be said, but you’d be surprised at how many variations are out there. What I found is that habits like pencil grip are difficult to change once a style is established. To this day, our daughter has one of the weirdest pencil grips I’ve ever seen.
Nowadays kids use computers regularly in class. Posture and hand positioning on the keyboard are just as important as pencil grip. I found it interesting that none of our kids were ever taught how to type on a computer keyboard. They knew how to use various programs, but not how to legitimately type an essay. My husband finally insisted the summer after our youngest son graduated from high school that he take an online typing course, just so he could type decently well at university.
To be honest, none of our kids have good handwriting. With so much schoolwork now being done on computers, handwriting has almost become a lost art. I guess I too saw the writing on the wall. My insistence to have proper letter formation became one of the battles I gave up on. What happened in the end was that our kid’s handwriting became a personal expression of their identity. Children say something about themselves through the way they write, their signature for example. It becomes hard as a parent to insist they write like the letters stapled to the wall of their grade one classroom. The bottom line for me was I had to be able to read it.