Teaching after 12

After the age of twelve:

·         Tendency towards negligent, careless, sometimes incomprehensible writing.

·         Grammar inconsistencies and orthographic mistakes, sometimes permanent omissions, changes and additions, just like mentioned at the previous step.

·         Difficulty to plan and write stories and all kinds of written compositions.

·         Tendency to confound oral instructions and phone numbers.

·         Great difficulty in learning foreign languages.

·         Low self-esteem.

·         Difficulty in perception of the language, like in the case of following instructions.

·         Poor reading comprehension.

·         Occurrence of disruptive behavior or progressive seclusion, sometimes leading to depression.

·         Aversion towards reading and writing.

All these disorders that start during infancy, childhood or adolescence require treatment as quick as possible, in order to avoid a great amount of suffering for the child and his family, and to ensure higher chances of improving the quality of his life.

The neurocognitive evaluation allows us to carry investigations at different levels, from syndromic to physiopathologic and etiologic.

Syndromic investigations let us evaluate the constituent signs and symptoms and lead us to consider a presumptive diagnosis of a clinical syndrome that must later be confirmed by specific evidence of academic difficulties. Neuropsychology plays an important role in helping us recognize the basic cerebral mechanisms that are involved in each case and, by associating them with physiopathologic studies, we get a complete picture, so that we can discern clear neuropsychological subtypes.

The possibility to include complementary studies that investigate cerebral structure – neuroimages, functional studies using radioactive compounds, PET (positron emission tomography), and SPECT-CBF (cerebral blood flow single photon emission computed tomography) – and cerebral functionality – neurophysiology, evoked potentials, cognitive potentials, quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG), analysis of the inter- and intra-hemispherical coherence – complete the third level of clinical investigation, essential for discovering the cause of the disorder, understanding the prognosis and also administering adequate treatment, tailored for each child.

Teaching 6-11 year olds

Between 6 and 11 years of age, during the primary school period:

·         The child shows difficulty in correlating a sound with a certain letter, and in deciphering the learned words.

·         Confounds the right and the left side, and some of them write reversely.

·         Reverses letters, numbers, words.

·         He mixes up the order of the letters in a word that he is writing, and the same can happen when he wants to represent numbers.

·         Still pronounces the words wrongly, inverting, substituting or adding syllables.

·         His reading comprehension is deficient, but he can recount a movie plot, a text or a TV show that he has heard.

·         His clumsiness of movement becomes more prominent, and children that tend to get into trouble are more prone to accidents than the other children.

·         Usually works at a slow pace and doesn’t manage to finish the tasks that the teacher assigns in the classroom, and it is difficult to have him do his homework.

·         His fine skills deficit makes his writing disorderly, uncalligraphic and sometimes impossible to read.

·         It is difficult for him to plan his actions and thoughts, therefore his compositions can look very mixed up, without any particular main idea of the story.

·         Displays a deficit of auditive and visual sequencing, as well as of working memory, which means that he needs more time to process the information that he receives; not only does this have an effect on language, but it also triggers important consequences concerning the study of mathematics; it affects his reasoning and the development of strategies to learn algorithms and solve problems.

The difficult task of learning to read and write

Sometimes dyslexia comes with pronunciation difficulties that usually appear when it comes to pronouncing words that are new or long, or that contain groups of letters of a certain type, that they find difficult to read.

Dyslexia is a main problem that usually occurs together with other learning disabilities, like dysgraphia (difficulties in tracing the letters correctly, in regard to the parallelism of the lines, the size of the letters and the pressure applied when writing), and, later, with dysorthographia (difficulty in using the orthographic rules correctly, from the most simple to more complex ones), and other syndromes from the `dys` family, that we are going to discuss henceforth.

THE FAMILY OF ‘DYS’ AND ITS RELATIVES

What are the symptoms that parents and educators must pay attention to?

Certain signs or details that could make us suspect that a child might be dyslexic can be observed from as soon as the preschool period.

Between 3 and 5 years of age, during the preschool period:

·         The child can display a delay in the development of speaking, having difficulties in pronouncing words and slow vocabulary acquisition.

·         We can notice unusual clumsiness in running, jumping and pushing objects forward; the child cannot control his movements and force very well; with respect to his fine motor skills, he makes great efforts to fasten his buttons and tie his shoelaces, open bottles and perform other activities that involve the coordination of  arms, hands and fingers, like writing or cutting with scissors.

·         They tend to be very riotous, find it difficult to pay attention and control their impulses, and prefer games that involve much movement.

·         They struggle to memorize the numbers, the vowels, the days of the week, colors and shapes.

·         On the one hand, they can act shyly, but they can also be irritable and display hostile attitudes that affect their social relationships with adults and other children.