Teach English in Dayangshu Zhen - Hulunbei'er Shi — Hulunbuir

Learning disabilities, or learning disorders, are an umbrella term for a wide variety of learning problems. A learning disability is not a problem with intelligence or motivation. Kids with learning disabilities aren’t lazy or dumb. Most are just as smart as everyone else. Their brains are simply wired differently. This difference affects how they receive and process information. Simply put, children and adults with learning disabilities see, hear, and understand things differently. This can lead to trouble with learning new information and skills and putting them to use. The most common types of learning disabilities involve problems with reading, writing, math, reasoning, listening, and speaking. The term learning disability encompasses many different learning differences. The three main types of learning disabilities are reading disabilities, written language disabilities, and math disabilities. Each type of learning disability can include several different disorders. When the term "learning disorder" is used, it describes a group of disorders characterized by inadequate development of specific academic, language, and speech skills. Types of learning disorders include reading (dyslexia), arithmetic (dyscalculia) and writing (dysgraphia). At what age does a learning disability start to show? Learning disabilities can usually be diagnosed by the time a learner is 7-8 years old. Early signs of learning disabilities are often picked up in the first two years of school. When a learning difficulty is suspected, it’s typically recommended that an individual be screened. This is done using a short and sometimes online assessment tool that can indicate whether or not more testing is recommended. If dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADHD or dyscalculia are suspected, comprehensive testing can be performed by an educational psychologist, or in some cases a speech and language therapist. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning difficulties also known as learning disabilities. There are different types of dyslexia but the most common type is phonological dyslexia which affects the way people break words down into their parts. Because reading and writing are central to most school curriculum, children with undiagnosed dyslexia can quickly fall behind their peers as they experience problems with note-taking, reading, homework, writing assignments, and assessments. Dyslexia is not associated with lower intelligence, but language difficulties can cause children to believe they are less intelligent than their peers and result in low-confidence and a poor self-image. Some common signs of dyslexia include problems reading out loud, inconsistent spelling – they may be able to spell a word one day and not the next - losing one’s place on a page, a poor grasp of phonics, letter reversals, halted writing due to trouble with spelling, and a vocabulary that’s more limited in scope. Attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) used to be grouped under the umbrella term of ADD. However, in recent years it is ADHD that has become the general label for attention difficulties, both with and without hyperactivity. ADHD with hyperactivity is often characterized by difficulties maintaining focus over extended periods. Children with ADHD can have poor impulse control, be fidgety, and produce messy written work. They are often easier to pick out in a classroom than a student who has ADD without hyperactivity, as in the case of the latter a learner may not call any attention to themselves. A learner with ADD may appear to be paying attention and thus the learning difficulty can go unnoticed until it results in incomplete assignments and poor performance on tests. Children who struggle with dysgraphia have a hard time with writing and may produce illegible text. Writing can be labored, taking a long time to complete and causing frustration and stress. This includes planning the white spaces between letters and words, writing in a straight line and/or producing lines of text that are vertically spaced. Staying in the margins, using punctuation and choosing between capital and lowercase letters may also be hard. Children with dysgraphia are often eager to avoid handwriting, particularly in front of their peers. They may feel embarrassed when writing on the board, produce less text than is necessary for written assignments and can generally perform poorly on assessments that require written answers. As opposed to dyslexia and dysgraphia which are both language-based learning difficulties, dyscalculia has to do with processing numbers. When dyslexia and dyscalculia are present together, reading word problems is made more difficult, and number reversals may be frequent. Dysgraphia and dyscalculia together mean a child often finds showing math work in a long-form particularly difficult to complete. Writing math symbols may be near impossible, as can certain spatial or graph-oriented aspects of math. While not always grouped under the learning difficulties/ learning disabilities header, dyspraxia is a motor skill difficulty that can also impact academic success. That’s because it affects the planning and coordination of muscles, including those of the hand. As gripping the pen or pencil in written language production is painful, writing may contain more spelling errors and less text as a result. In cases of verbal dyspraxia/ apraxia of speech, the muscles of the face, mouth, and throat are affected, limiting spoken language production. As described above, a learning difficulty does not affect general intelligence, whereas a learning disability is linked to an overall cognitive impairment. The important thing to remember is that most kids with learning disabilities are just as smart as everyone else. They just need to be taught in ways that are tailored to their unique learning styles.