What Should Be Done If LD or AD/HD Is Suspected?

Advice

When LD or ADHD is suspected because a child is struggling with learning and performance, the first thing parents and teachers should do is seek advice. These disorders are complicated and different from each other, and there are many who do not fully understand their impact and the methods that can be employed to help. Often the approach taken to support these children falls far short of what is necessary.

Here are 3 steps to simplify what is necessary to maximize success. When these things are done, we discover that students who were thought to be "dumb" become firefighters, salespersons, teachers, doctors, engineers, etc. They can truly be contributing members of society.

Step 1.

* An LD diagnosis requires a Psycho-Educational Assessment done by a registered psychologist. This assessment has 2 parts. First, we must prove that the individual has at least average ability, often called IQ. Throughout North America, the WISC IV is the common tool used. Second, we must test the individual's academic achievement levels in reading, spelling, writing, mathematics, etc. and compare them with expectations for his/her age. The WJ III Tests of Achievement is a commonly used tool.

* An ADHD diagnosis usually requires a formal symptoms checklist completed by each parent and a teacher and a questionnaire and a computerized test done by the individual. This can be done by a doctor or a registered psychologist.

Step 2.

The goal for this step is to determine the strengths, the weaknesses, and the learning stylein order to write an appropriate plan of action, or individual education plan, for the diagnosed individual. This is a challenging task which requires input from parents, teachers, and an LD specialist who can interpret the findings.

Strengths should include any skills from the list below, along with personality strengths, social strengths, emotional strengths, and skills in music, art, or athletics.

A simple test can determine learning style. It is important to know whether the individual learns better by seeing what is to be learned (Visual), by hearing what is to be learned(Auditory), or by doing (Kinesthetic-Tactile).

The following list of commonly used skills should help to formulate a list of difficulties with learning and performance. It can also help to identify some strengths.

* Organization -belongings, schedule, tasks, thoughts

* Memory -working memory, short term, long term -visual memory, auditory memory

* Conceptual -abstract, idioms, similes, metaphors

* Writing -speed, legibility, spacing, spelling, copying

* Reading -speed, sound/symbol, fluency, comprehension

* Mathematics -numbers, operations, concepts, language, problem solving

* Processing Speed -visual, auditory, subject specific, general

* Executive Function -planning, organizing, completing a task

* Attention -engage quickly and maintain focus

*Behaviour -appropriate, emotional control, obedience, impulsivity, hyperactivity

* Social -working with others, making/keeping friends, compliant, liked

Step 3.

Accommodations are supports provided by the teachers or the workplace. Coping strategies are supports a student or adult learns to use to improve learning and performance. Both of these types of supports should be listed in an action plan.

For diagnosed individuals who are not in school an action plan should be written and may require the help of a LD Specialist. This help may be found at any LD Association office. For diagnosed students an Individual Education Plan will be written with the input of parents, and schools must review these plans annually.

Two things are important in deploying the plan: 1. Since most individuals with LD have low self-esteem, efforts must be made to continually build self-esteem; 2. It is very important that these individuals learn self-advocacy skills so that they can explain their difficulties and ask appropriately for the accommodations needed.

LD and ADHD are complex disorders, and every individual has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. To list all of the possible accommodations and coping strategies to cover all of the difficulties would take numerous pages. Listed below are some of the most common difficulties and suggestions proven to make a difference. Also keep in mind using strengths to assist with difficulties.

* Organization -everything in its place, weekly planner, list of steps to follow to complete a task

* Memory -highlighters, colours, pictures, mnemonics, funny stuff and maximize memory through hearing it, seeing it, and doing it

* Writing -use a computer software program called Dragon Dictate to translate oral speech into text with no spelling errors done quickly

* Reading -faster reading is accomplished with computer software programs which read aloud any text (standard in MacBooks), including the internet. This fluent reading aloud enhances comprehension and memory.

* Mathematics -a calculator bypasses the inability to memorize multiplication tables

* Attention -reduce sounds and visual distractions, wear earplugs, listen to music without lyrics

What You Should Know To Help Struggling Students

Children, adolescents, and adults with learning and performance difficulties are usually faced with information processing problems in a few specific areas. These areas include visual processing, auditory processing, organization, memory, attention, executive function, abstract reasoning and more.

For children and adults with LD and/or ADHD, their parents, and their teachers there are three very important words to remember: 1. Information, 2. Knowledge, and 3. Wisdom. Read on to find out what this means.

INFORMATION
The 1st level of understanding comes when you gather information (a) about LD and ADHD, their types, the combinations of difficulties, how they are diagnosed, and how they are treated so that you know as much as possible in order to proceed successfully, and (b) about the individual, including strengths, difficulties, testing results, behaviours, and performance. You will read books, watch DVDs, attend workshops, and ask questions.

KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge is the level above information. You must organize the information under headings and into categories. Secondly, you must apply the information by taking action to find solutions to practical problems. For example, a girl is unable to memorize the multiplication tables, so she is allowed to use a calculator at all times. Be aware that often the first solution fails, and we have to try something different. What if the girl with the calculator confuses 3 and 8, 2 and 5, and 1 and 7, resulting in many mistakes? You will search the software and assistive technology, or ask a specialist to find a solution for a problem.

WISDOM
The highest level of understanding is what we call wisdom. This occurs when the individual, or the parents/teachers, learn to view the problem in a larger context, such as graduation from school, career choices, playing hockey, or getting on with life. Sometimes we find that a problem we thought was very important is not very important in the big picture of things. When the problem is put into a larger context, then we are able to give the problem an appropriate weight. An adult with a serious problem with mathematics will see that there are many interesting jobs which require almost no mathematics ability. Once again, a specialist can help to answer questions and provide valuable insights.

Information + Knowledge + Wisdom = The best chance at future success.

We must use this formula to teach children, adolescents, and adults what is needed to develop strong self-advocacy, independence, increased self-esteem, and happiness.

Before You Were Born Things... Part 2

I like the way my brain will suddenly take me to a place I haven't remembered for a long time... like the time my friend and I bought DQ blizzards. They said they were so thick you could turn them upside down, and they wouldn't fall out of the cup. My friend liked that and turned his upside down for all to see. We saw the blizzard quickly slide out on the ground... the smile was gone... and advertising became a scam.

When I was a kid, meals were different than they are now. We ate stuff people cringe at now. During my week the typical fare included kydneys, pork liver, beef tongue, blood pudding, pieces of bread with brown sugar and milk, pig tails, tapioca, kool aid, and salmon patties, to name a few. Since my dad was a hunter, we also had rabbits, pigeons, ducks and venison, often with shotgun pellets in it. Margarine was white, but came with a colour pack if you wanted to make it yellow. Roast beef, pork chops, and turkey were sort of normal. Spaghetti was rare. My grandmother could make a whole meal in a wood stove... potatoes, roast, veggies, and pie. It always amazed me how it would be cooked perfectly with no burning. She even chopped the wood. There were no fast food places until, as a teenager, I discovered pizza. One pizza place was called Vito's Cave. It was downstairs, and it was like being in a cave. My first time there I had to watch others because I didn't know how you should eat pizza. And the only kind of donuts was honey-dipped. Eventually they added chocolate-iced honey-dipped. We never bought more than one or two at a time.

People have always had pets, but in those days kids' pets were a little different than today. Dogs were popular, but I can't remember anyone with a cat. In cages we had rats and turtles. I had a huge white rabbit that we mated with some guy's male rabbit, and there were 11 babies. He got to pick first, and I gave them away after that. My favourite pet was a baby raccoon I found in the woods. I put him in my bicycle carrier and took him everywhere, and he got lots of attention. Then one night a big old raccoon attacked him, and he died. My dad took his shotgun out in the yard (this was in the city) and shot him down out of a tree. That mulberry tree reminds me that we had no driers, so washed clothes were hung on a line in the yard. The birds liked the mulberries, and it was common to have purple bird droppings on your clothes. In the winter the clothes froze stiff as a board... funny sight.

By the time I got to high school I was very naive and very young because I had skipped a grade. We had 2 choices... the academic and the tech high schools. I had no ideas about the future, except that I liked music and chose it for an option. I found out that my mother didn't make lunches, and I ate in the cafeteria. I was already a sports star, so I tried out for the track team and the basketball team. I guess we were shorter in those days. Our centre was 5'11''. Today everyone is more than 6'. School was school and had some new and baffling things for me. I took Latin and always wondered why. Physics was a total mystery to me, and I had no interest in people who lived hundreds of years ago, so History was the absolute worst thing ever. The outcome was a report card with 96% in Math and 50% in History. Of course I blamed it on my Grade 8 History teacher. Something many of you never heard of was the provincial exams to graduate from high school. Every kid in Grade 13 in Ontario academic high schools wrote the same tests, and your marks were published in the local newspaper. What a slam for some that was. My buddy, who was nicknamed "Ace" because he couldn't pass anything and once had a score of 1 on a Chemistry test was so embarrassed. His marks were like Math 19, Eng 38, Physics 10... I kid you not... right there in the paper for all to see.

The last thing I want to do in this blistering piece about life before you were born is to talk about how we managed to survive without technology and batteries. Here is what most kids and adults carry in their pockets in 2012: a mobile phone, all your favourite songs to listen to, access to the internet, a movie player, the latest sports scores from around the world, a gps locator and maps of everywhere, all your books to read, text messaging to any phone number, all your friends e-mail addresses, the phone book yellow pages, what restaurants, gas stations, hotels, and tourist attractions are nearby, dozens of games to play, a camera, a video camera, a tape recorder, and more. Did you read that I wrote "in their pockets"? At home today are: a television with 300 channels from around the world, a machine that records a hockey game which is on at the same time you are watching a basketball game, a computer loaded with family photos that can be made into a slide show and burned to a dvd for watching on your tv, an elaborate games machine for all kinds of games and with some you can get out of your chair and hit baseballs or ski or sing or play the guitar, and so much more. Now believe it or not, here is what I had for activities: a pen knife for whittling, a gun carved out of wood, a used bicycle, a baseball glove, a woodburner tool, a fishing pole, a bb gun, paper and pencils, and a wooden sword. In high school I got drums, a guitar, a record player, records, and a girlfriend. Did you notice that not one thing needed batteries? I spent all my waking hours outside doing something when I wasn't in school. I joined the Boy Scouts, and we did a lot of camping in summer and in winter. I loved the woods and the snow, and there are stories about trying to open a can of beans when you forget a can-opener, taking an entire 70-page newspaper to get a fire started, and cutting a hole in the ice to get water and sticking a little evergreen in it to keep it open and being unable to pull the tree out of the hole with 12 guys. Youth, before you were born, grew up learning to create and develop physically active things to do.

Uh oh... I lied. I just thought about candies and munchies in the dark ages. Soda pops were coke, orange crush, wishing well lemon-lime, root beer, and Vernor's gingerale. There were no chocolate bars for a while. We had black licorice only, suckers, jelly beans, and boodle bags (a very small bag with hard candies and different sweets). We didn't have chips, cheesies, pretzels, and carmelcorn. The big treat was an ice cream cone, or a candy apple from the lady in our neighbourhood who made them and sold them from her house. We munched on a lot of fruit. I loved oranges, pomegranites, grapes, and peanuts (not a fruit). I'll stop now. Imagine the fun I had as a teacher telling my students these stories. What a wonderful time it was before you were born... oh yeah, did I tell you about...

Before You Were Born

Here is just what you need... another old timer telling you what it was like when he grew up in the dark ages. Most of these kind of articles list things that were remembered, like Hopalong Cassidy movies, iceboxes, radio shows, and the 5 and 10 cent store. Let me take a slightly different approach by telling you about my life as a kid... are you game? I wish teens and 20's would read this, but probably it will be mostly the ones who can say, "I remember that."

I was born during WWII. When I was one year old, Canada began rationing sugar, tea, coffee, then meat, tin, and petrol. Families received coupons to be used when purchasing these items. This went on until 1946 when I was 5. A few unused coupons lay in a drawer for a long time.

I went to Kindergarten at a school where boys and girls played in separate playgrounds and entered the school through separate doors. In class we were together. Outside the boys saw lots of fights, but we had unwritten rules... no kicking, no punching a kid with glasses... usually it was wrestling to the ground and twisting appendages. I was a top academic student, but I had about 5 or 6 fights a week, unlike top students today. On weekends there were no fights. We played baseball and floor hockey or road hockey and went fishing. In the winter we often used frozen horse buns for pucks in road hockey. They were plentiful because bread, milk, and ice were all delivered from a horse-drawn cart. Bakers, dairies, and ice-makers all had stables of horses for their delivery carts. That was a different time, and you would occasionally see a horse start running, get badly injured, and then be shot and killed where it lay.

Inside school there was a big emphasis on grammar and spelling. We had pencils and erasers, and an ink well at the top right corner of the desk (I guess they didn't care about left-handed kids). We filled our own ink wells with blue ink, and you can imagine how many times someone would spill a puddle of ink on the floor. Everywhere there were stains. Our pens were a stick that you could push a pen nib into. You dipped the nib in the ink and wrote a few words, blotted it with a blotter, dipped again, and kept going until you finished. A major breakthrough happened when a pen was invented with a little balloon inside. You pulled a lever which squashed the ballon, stuck the nib in the ink, and sucked as much ink as possible into the balloon. You could write a lot more before getting a refill. Years later, when I was in Grade 11, the ball point pen was invented, and red and black inks were also used. Trouble was they leaked, funny... they still do. Kids these days might be surprised to learn that we weren't given many projects in school. That was because we had very little information about anything... no internet, no television, no magazines, very few people had encyclopedias, and we knew just about nothing about other countries of the world.

Let me tell you about my house. It had 3 small bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, and  a kitchen with the tiniest bathroom off the kitchen. The bathroom had no shower, but we did have hot water. One oil stove in the living room heated the whole house in the winter. The bedrooms, kitchen, and bathroom were always cold in the winter. I remember having 4 blankets on my bed and putting my clothes on the stove every morning before I put them on. The kitchen had one sink which was like a laundry tub, a stove with an oven, and an icebox to keep milk and stuff cool. Every few days we got a block of ice from the iceman. Milk was in glass bottles with cream floating on top. A glass of milk always had lumps of cream in it... gross to me. My favourite cereals were Sugar Crisp and Frosted Flakes and Shredded Wheat. Our entertainment was a radio for music and radio shows like The Shadow. These were stories with different characters. We became very good listeners. We also had a windup record player for 78 rpm records. When I was in Grade 7 we got a television set. There weren't many shows, so programs were on for only a few hours a day. The rest of the time you saw a test pattern. I remember watching boxing Friday nights and hockey Saturday nights in the early years of tv.

In high school I got $5.00 a week (that's about 30 kr to my Swedish friends) for bus fare, lunches, and a movie. I lived a long way from the school, but I often walked to save my money for other stuff. Movies cost 10 or 15 cents. Popcorn and a drink were 10 cents. In high school they taught instrumental music, and that's when I became a drummer. Before that I took piano lessons, and after that I learned to play guitar. The most important things in my life then were music, sprinting (I discovered I was a faster runner than every kid in my whole city), basketball (my favourite sport), and girls to dance with. We danced a lot. Another great one was water skiing. I loved that.

So... I've given you a glimpse of my life in the 40's and 50's, and I still have another 50 years to tell about. I find this stuff really interesting, but young people, including my grand-daughters never ask questions about it.

Is an Attention Deficit Disorder a Learning Disability?

This question is difficult to answer, probably because so many people really don't know what these two disorders are, and they don't realize that they are very different disorders diagnosed in very different ways. The confusion lies in the fact that most people think that anyone who has trouble being successful in school must have a learning disability. To them LD covers everything. If we could teach the world the facts about LD and AD/HD, then I'm sure there would be a dramatic increase in the number of people interested. The fact is that both disorders affect an individual's performance.
Generally speaking, these are the groups with the most interest: (a) parents who have a child who is struggling to learn and perform, (b) teachers who are seriously concerned about the strugglers, (c) the children, teenagers and university students who have diagnoses, (d) adults who have diagnoses, and (e) employers who have workers with difficulties. Then, (f) there are the people like me who through education, experience, and motivation continually seek ways to support, counsel, and teach all of the above individuals how to cope with their problems.
One becomes far more interested when LD and AD/HD are understood, even with a basic understanding of the following information.

Learning Disabilities:

There is a problem processing information. We receive information through our senses, organize it, store it, recall it, and use it. When you have a learning disability, one or more of these areas functions well below average.
To diagnose a learning disability, two things must be proven. (a) The person has at least average intellectual ability, and (b) The person's performance in one or more areas, such as reading, writing, mathematics, fine motor skills, and others, is at least one and a half years behind expectations for his/her age and grade level.

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

There is a problem with behaviour in one or more of these areas:

    Attention:        The person is highly distracted by sights, or sounds, or thoughts.
    Impulsivity:     The person often speaks or acts immediately on impulse.
    Hyperactivity: The person is often fidgety and in motion as if driven by a motor.
Diagnosis proves that the problem occurs 24 hours a day in all situations.

Interestingly, all of us exhibit some of these symptoms and behaviours to a minor extent. I have been diagnosed with ADD as a result of my thoughts constantly interfering with my focus of attention.

What's New About the New Year?

It is my intention to write something here every week this year. My topic choices will be completely random, as is my life... no plans and no themes. Everything is interesting to me.

When a new year starts people do lots of things. Some look back at the highlights of last year, and they find good ones and bad ones. Are they looking at personal stuff, or other stuff from anywhere? I do both. Three that come to mind are the stronger efforts to increase food and medical supplies for the sick and starving, the new reality focusing on education for every child as a key to future peace, and the American troups leaving Iraq. On a personal level, a very big highlight was having Queen Rania of Jordan retweet my comment on Twitter. Imagine how I felt.

A bunch of us make resolutions, or goals, for this year. If you have realistic and achievable goals that challenge you, you may be happy with the results of your efforts, and it only took a new year to get you started. It makes me wonder how many of us actually monitor our progress and pay attention to whether or not we are successful. Sometimes I forget that part.

Another thing we love to do at the beginning of a new year is to look back at last year and discover things like who got married, who got divorced, what was the best music, who died, how many murders happened, and so on. Sometimes we like to look at the lives of others, rather than checking out  our own lives.

And then there are those who continue doing what they are doing without any interest in highlights, goals, or what happened to others. I wonder what percent of the population is like this.

So what's new about the new year? Is it a chance to review, take stock, and seize the opportunity to begin an annual effort to make plans for changes? Or is it just another 12 months on the calendar, and time goes on?