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Time for
Training and Therapy
For children with real
learning challenges, focused cognitive or perceptual
training can lead to real progress in academic
achievement. The timing for training and therapy is the
trick issue. Here homeschoolers have a real advantage.
Because children with learning
challenges often have real physiologic endurance problems and
will fatigue over the course of the day, parent of
school-attending children should look carefully for
flexible therapy providers or programs that include the
possibility of a computer-based component.
Different Types of
Cognitive and Perceptual Training
In
The Mislabeled Child,
we talk in more detail about specific educational
approaches to improving attention, memory, language, and
visual, auditory, or sensory processing, but briefly,
training can take the form of one-on-one private therapy
visits, computer software programs, special workbook
practice, one-on-one private instruction at home.
Often with significant dyslexia, dysgraphia, or sensory
processing dysfunction, the most difficult time for
school is in the early elementary years. If a children
undergoes targeted training in a critical area of
weakness as identified by formal assessment, then it can
set him on the right track for all the following years
of his education.
Whenever possible, we recommend looking for hobbies or
other activities that might improve the skill you're
targeting - is it timing, multi-tasking, error
detection, auditory attention, or impulse inhibition? Is
there a way these skills can be improved with normal kid
activities like juggling, learning piano, martial arts
class, or needlepoint?
Often times, though a targeted practice lays the
groundwork that makes it easier to learn and master
future activities. Some of the different types of
targeted training are listed below:
Targeted Cognitive or
Perceptual Training
- Auditory
Memory Practice: Training
up Auditory Working Memory,
Visualization, Organization by Main Points
- Auditory Discrimination Practice:
Phonics, Hearing & Speaking
- Visual Memory Practice:
Training up Visual Working Memory,
Verbal Mediation, Spatial or Kinesthetic Mediation, Color Cues
- Visual Discrimination Practice:
2D-3D Translations, Color Cues,
Parts: to Whole, Spatial Rotation
- Spatial Memory Practice:
Training up Spatial Memory, Verbal
Mediation (including Mathematical Descriptions), Gross Sensory-Motor
Memory, Fine Sensory-Motor Memory
- Speaking Practice:
Training articulation,
word retrieval, prosody,
informal and formal speech.
- Language Learning:
Vocabulary, sentence
organization, grammar,
sentence combining.
- Impulse Inhibition, Resistance to Distraction:
Visual and / or
Auditory Stimuli, Bodily / Sensory Distractions
- CEO Functions:
Decision-making, Strategic Thinking, Error Detection,
Resource Management, Time Management
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