A Few Words About Legasthenia

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The irony was that during the period of the most severe bullying of the least literate users on the network, I looked with pride at my one-year-old daughter, who was already making complex sentences with the correct arrangement of declensions, conjugations, conjunctions, prepositions and semantic accents. And I certainly did not expect that it was this delicate blond creature that would present a unique surprise. The modern name for a surprise is legation. This is the name of the simultaneous disorder of reading and writing skills ("dyslexia + dysgraphia"). In those distant times, when my cousin studied at school, he could hardly read in the eighth grade, unable to write his name without mistakes, it was called "a quitter and a loafer." The teachers really believed that a rather smart and already mustachioed guy, who writes the same word every time in different ways, mocks them and at the same time over the language of Pushkin and Lenin. My daughter is a little more fortunate than my brother. It seemed to me that she was mocking me and the Russian language not in the eighth grade, but when she was 4 years old. The child retells the texts literally word for word in prose in huge chunks. And he was completely unable to learn the poem. Rhyme is something that didn't exist for my daughter. The child easily replaced words with suitable synonyms, rearranged the word order. The meaning did not suffer from this, sometimes it even got better! But this very intelligent child could not at all reproduce four simple lines twice in a row in the same way! Knowledge of psychology suggested that at 4 years old, even very smart children are not capable of bullying for the sake of bullying. I had the first concern, we turned to a speech therapist, but for some reason we did not impress him at all. "What do you want, she is still small! And how beautifully she speaks!" At the age of five, the child knew all the letters (but constantly confused the spelling of asymmetrical letters), knew how to add syllables from letters (but forgot after a moment that he had just folded) and read 12 words per minute. At six, a child could do the same thing at the same speed. It also turned out that when trying to draw simple rhythmic figures to prepare the hand for writing, the child confuses "right" and "left", "top" and "bottom", does not see the lines in the lined notebook. The school psychologist said, "The girl draws beautifully, no problem!" The elementary school teacher stated, "A very smart child will be discharged, but reading is simple - read, read, read." In the second grade, the child read 12 words per minute. And he wrote his name in three different ways. I already knew the word "dyslexia", but two speech therapists, a psychologist and an elementary school teacher did not know these words. And they convinced me that the problem was that my child and I did not study much. Eight hours a day with short breaks for eating and walking - that's how much we did. This was not enough. At the end of the second grade, a child who left dancing and additional English to study school subjects received the entry "pedagogically neglected" in the school characteristics. Unfortunately, a specialist who correctly diagnosed and at least suggested in which direction to move, came across to us when my daughter was 10 years old. Already at that time we were studying with special notebooks for dyslexics. But there has been little progress. A child psychiatrist was the name of the specialty of a person who 5 years ago knew what dyslexia was. It is a pity that this is so, because already neglected cases usually reached psychiatrists. Such as ours. As a rule, the school appoints a pedagogical-medical-psychological commission when the child obviously does not cope with the program. According to the results of the commission, the child is recommended to study at a school for children with speech disorders (dysgraphia and dyslexia - violations of written speech). For some, this is the way out. For some people (dyslexics and legacy children if there are no other speech or thinking problems), it is much better to continue their education in a regular school. We chose the second option and did not regret it, I already wrote about this. Now I am transferring my daughter to full-time education in order to manage to combine the school curriculum with extracurricular activities. And now some practical advice to those whom the article may concern. I will make a reservation right away - I do not work with legacy children as a specialist. For this there are professionals specially trained in correction techniques - correctional teachers, correctional psychologists, speech therapists. I am the parent of my own most beloved and intelligent legacy, who knows how difficult it is for such children to study in a country where almost every first teacher, when he says legacy, asks, "where is this?" In our country, official education still considers the problem of dyslexia to be exclusively parental (you do not work well, pedagogically), and medicine does not consider this problem especially medical (we do not have pills for dyslexia, if you want to drink nootropics, be like a massage). Does this mean that nothing can be done? No. The sooner the problem is identified, the more freedom in the choice of teaching methods the child's parents will have, the more attention the child will receive, and, therefore, the chances of compensating for poor reading and writing skills will be maximum.

1. With dyslexia / legacy, it is better to overdo it than not to overdo it. This means that any child, even without problems with speech, who speaks the letter "Rrrrrr" loudly and amazes grandmothers with erudition, should visit a speech therapist not with the aim of formally getting a stamp in the medical card for kindergarten. Ask a speech therapist to be attentive to your 3-4 year old child, especially in those cases when there were legends in the family about amazing relatives of "idlers and loafers". Legation is a family heirloom that is passed down in a very random and unpredictable manner. Tell the speech therapist about your suspicions and you will spend an extra five minutes in the office, but leave it with more confidence in the child's bright future. 2. Pay attention to how easily the child learns poetry, is able to retell the content of the fairy tale heard, to put the illustrations for the story in the correct sequence. If it seems to you that this causes more problems for a 4-5 year old child than for most peers, go, again, to a speech therapist, correctional (this is important) psychologist or child psychiatrist. Unfortunately, we do not have screening specifically for dyslexia in kindergartens, and this problem may go unnoticed right up to school. But if you start studying at least a year before the first grade exactly according to the methods for dyslexics (this is important, the methods of teaching reading / writing for children with ordinary perception of dyslexics are only confusing!), Then there are chances to significantly improve the quality of learning. 3. If you have the opportunity not to teach your child the letters - do not teach until you are required to do so. It's simple - don't teach, that's all, if the child is not interested. If you really want to teach a child to read before the age of 5, 5 years, because such a family tradition - everyone in our family started reading at the age of three (this is me about my family), then teach to read in syllables at once. Below I will give a link to a resource where there is an online program for such training. If there is no dyslexia, then the child will quickly move from syllabic reading to continuous and rather fluent reading - in a year at most. If there is dyslexia, then learning syllabic reading will be difficult even at 3-4 years old, and at 5-6 years old, and progress will be very slow. Therefore, if it is difficult for a child to read, it is better not to force him to read even more, but to stop and think about what could be the reason. In some school, they conducted an experiment - they took into the 1st grade children who did not read at all and children who by the 1st grade read quite fluently. By the end of the year, the group of children who did not read at all had only 20 percent worse reading scores than those who read from the pot. In the third grade, there was no difference between the groups in terms of average indicators. This does not mean that reading is not necessary with children. If you want, do it. If reading brings joy and pleasure to the child - study-study-study. But if reading in a child causes fatigue (dyslexics after reading a paragraph may fall asleep from fatigue, as if they unloaded a carriage of coal), discomfort, pain in the abdomen, pain in the eyes, headache - this does not mean that the child is a "quitter and loafers" it means - either they were too hasty with reading (the necessary centers have not yet developed and we are waiting for the right age), or … to a speech therapist. 4. Pay attention to your child's physical development. With legasthenia very often go hand in hand imbalance (it is difficult for a child to stand on one leg or perform complex cross exercises), disorientation in space (left-right, up-down - concepts that cause some pause in the response or the child gets confused in them)). Fine motor skills can be well developed (and speech, by the way, too, although not always), or maybe not very well. It can be difficult for dyslexics to hit the eye of a needle with a thread sometimes up to 12 years old, and getting a ball into a basketball hoop is even more difficult. Physical exercises and games, dancing in a SUPPORTIVE environment are beneficial for all children, and for dyslexics / legacies doubly. Often, following the growth of physical "competence", those structures of the brain that are responsible for the skills of deciphering letters are also tightened. 5. If it turns out that the child still has dyslexia, first of all we carry out work with ourselves. If necessary, talk to an adult psychologist yourself. Many consider it unnecessary, but I myself saw how much the child benefits when the parents make some decisions and become calmer and more confident after talking with specialists. During the first "discovery of the problem" it is better not to rush to parent forums for support. I can say that other people's stories can breathe energy, but they can also deprive it. It's not just bad stories that drain energy. For example, to support themselves, some parents talk about their children's miraculous successes or magical healing. I can say that true dyslexia and dysgraphia, unlike some types of school neuroses, which can be mistaken for legacy, are stable things and do not promise magical changes in a short time. Usually this is a long work on building a new, unique system of relations between the child, parents, school, teachers, speech therapist, child psychologist, the child's grandmother (who believes that the child does not have enough belt), peers of the child (for whom everything is a thousand times easier than a child with legacy and who can be cruel, just like I was in the era of the Grammar Nazi). If someone promises simple recipes for dyslexia, then it's not a sin, of course, to check. But be sure to consider your strengths and resources - you will need a lot of them. 6. Parenting a dyslexic child is a unique experience. If you focus on dyslexia as a limitation, you can lose the joy of being a parent in an uncompromising effort to "hold out" the child to "at least average." Conversely, if you accept dyslexia as a unique feature, there is a chance to become very close with such a child, giving him a lot of attention, spending more time with him than with a child who does not need parental help with learning. Such a child can greatly enrich those who are really "close to him" with his amazing vision of the world, non-standard solutions, non-trivial logic. The recipe for parents is to increase the "area of contact" with the child in what is natural and easy for the child. Enjoy what the child does with pleasure, be interested in it, support. Relying on your child's strengths can help relieve stress in areas where there is a lot of it. With reading and writing, there will always be too much of it. In general, as always, instead of two words, it came out right away. I repeat once again that I am not a dyslexia specialist, I myself use the services of specialists. I just wanted to share what turned out to be useful for me now. For example, here is this link for teaching children syllabic reading "Slogophone". I recently found this program, I had absolutely no hope that it would somehow help my 14-year-old daughter after all the exercises, techniques (we studied using the rebus method, but without a computer) and everything else to improve literacy. But literacy is gradually improving somehow. Whether this is related to the program - I don't know. But you can try for your children and write about the results here.