|
Dyslexia and Specific Language Learning Disability (Dyslexia and related disorders) Greenhills has the advantage of having only 2 to 4 students in our Orton-Gillingham reading classes. These students have been matched for their phonetic knowledge. This homogenous grouping allows each student to be directly taught during each daily fifty-minute lesson. Public schools cannot afford to offer this class size for LD students. Many (estimated 80%) of LD students are dyslexic or have related learning difficulties, but psycho-educational testing often does not use this term because it originally comes from the medical field. The condition is neurologically based, but its treatment is educational. If your child has difficulty with reading or the spelling of words when writing sentences, sometimes writes or reads "d" for "b", "p" for "q", or "form" for "from", or has difficulty with legible handwriting, these are clues that dyslexia is the cause of the problem with academics. There are teaching techniques which "teach out" many of the academic problems of these students, and we use these. There are a variety of physiological processing problems, which cause these students difficulty in acquiring academic skills by conventional means. Language sounds may be mis-perceived due to auditory perceptual processing, integration, or recall difficulties. These students may misread and misspell printed letters and words due to visual perceptual processing, integration, or recall difficulties. They may have sequencing, organizational, and co-existing attention difficulties. Because of these problems, these students must have carefully structured academic programs conducted by qualified faculty who are also experts in their special subject matter field. These teachers must appreciate the child's intelligence and understand the student's disability. Additionally, academic classes must be restricted to a small group and taught by techniques which are multisensory, structured and sequential. The dyslexic may be blessed with many special talents - spatial acuity, artistic abilities, musical talents, and inter- and intra-personal relationship strengths. All of these abilities are based in the right hemisphere. These strengths must be recognized and employed for the dyslexic to learn to process language. Unfortunately, most schools offer programs that are left-hemisphere oriented. The dyslexic learner is, therefore, discriminated against because of his or her invisible learning difference. |
