Being A Champion For Your Child With A Learning Disability

Raising children is never an easy job, but raising one with learning disabilities can be an even bigger challenge

. Most learning disabilities are never even apparent until your child starts school. My youngest had a visual acuity problem. There were a lot of small signs that he had a problem, but I just wrote them off as insecurities.

When my children were young we had many grand adventures outside exploring the woods, picking berries and climbing trees. When we found an interesting bug we would look it up and find out all about it. I taught them how to traverse the woods with care. Never step across a fallen log without checking for a snake lying under or even just on the other side. We would examine the animal dens we came across trying to figure out who lived there and if they were still there. Armadillo holes, fox dens, and who knows what else was out there. You could always tell if a hole in the ground was occupied based on the number of spider webs across the entrance. As a result they both have a very strong knowledge base in the life sciences.

I did not spend a lot of time working with letters and numbers when they were young. They knew their alphabet and could write their names, but actual writing did not come into play until they started school.

My oldest son had no trouble in school at all. He made friends easily and excelled in just about anything you put in front of him. There was nothing he would not try and he had no fears at all. My youngest on the other hand was always Mr. Cautious. He never tried anything unless he witnessed his brother survive first. When he started school he hated every second of it. After the first week of school; as I was dropping him off, he wailed Why did school have to happen to me? This was just the preschool phase!

The real problem showed up in kindergarten when they started working with sentences and spelling. He would write mirror image just fine. A lot of his letters were turned around and he quickly became frustrated because what he was seeing did not exactly fit what the teacher was writing on the board. His kindergarten teacher became frustrated with him thinking he was a troublemaker and did not know what to do with him. She had too many other children to work with to expend a lot of time trying to get him to do his work. I tried to help him at home, but at the time did not realize the extent of his problem and did not know how to help him. I suggested to his teacher that he may have dyslexia. She told me they did not test for that until the fourth grade and to keep working with him and perhaps he would catch on.

When he got into the first grade things started to get worse, because the work level had increased. He was failing in everything and became a bigger problem in the classroom. When he tried to write he would start his sentence on the right side of the page and spell everything perfectly, though they were all backwards. When she tried to get him to write from left to right he would simply stop working with her, break his pencil and push away from his desk. I worked with the principle and his teacher, but they told me their hands were tied unless he had him declared a 504 student. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 protects students from discrimination based on their disability status. A student must demonstrate a need for special services in school. This is determined through formal assessment, review of educational records, formal observation and adaptive behavior measures, and parent and teacher reports. The child must also exhibit an inability to attend to instruction, tolerate the classroom environment or related learning difficulties. If they are significant enough to have a substantial impact on his learning you can declare them a 504 student. The principle advised me to wait and not label him a 504 until he was older. I knew if I waited until the fourth grade, as they wanted me to it would be too late and his entire school career would be a disaster. They would not teach him without the 504 designation so I insisted on it. I wanted him to love to read and I knew if the school system won he would lose.

After the 504 status was in place things quickly improved. His teacher applied methods to help him start reading from left to write. When they had a spelling test she would put a dark line on the margin on the left side of the paper and let him know that was the side to start the word on. If he put a letter backwards she would let him know that it was backwards, but did not check it as spelled wrong. School was no longer a nightmare and he quickly improved. When he started the second grade his teacher teamed him up with a stronger student and gave him more time to complete his tasks, which worked very well. By the time he was in the third grade he no longer needed the 504 status and worked with the rest of the class. When fourth grade came around he no longer had a learning disability. He never really enjoyed school, but he was learning and that was what I really wanted for him. As a teenager he is reading all the time and his comprehension level is above average. His handwriting is absolutely horrible, but you cant have everything.

He inspired my childrens book Williams Troublesome Tongue. I was looking for something he could relate to hoping to help him with his feelings of inadequacy. I took a simple young frog and gave him a disability that he had to work through to survive. Im not sure if it helped or not, but I had a wonderful time writing and illustrating the book and hope it helps other children with some of their problems as well. You dont have to be like everybody else to be happy and sometimes even the simplest tasks are hard to do.

by: Maureen Hinton

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