So what are learning skills anyway? Most of us were never taught about these underlying mental skills that lay the foundation for our ability to learn. We were always taught that we could learn if we set our mind to it.
Between home and school we should be fine. If not, just see a tutor for a bit and you will be good to go. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to learn in this type of scenario. Why? Well, how easily and efficiently we learn is based on how strong our underlying learning skills are. This definitely turned out to be the case for my daughter who suffered from a traumatic brain injury at the early age of 11 months.
The skills we use to learn with are technically known as working memory, attention, processing, auditory analysis (including auditory processing), visual processing, word attack and logic and reasoning. We see these skills play out everyday based on how well we can pay attention, how well we can remember, how well we can process what we hear(we hear fine – its the processing of the sounds), how well we can process what we see (letter reversals, etc.), how well we can read unknown words (beyond the words we may have memorized) and how well we can plan, organize and problem solve. For each of these learning skills there are sub-categories that exist, too.
Lets explore an example of attention as a weak learning skill. In this example, we have a student is able to attend to one thing at a time only. However, the student will state that they get distracted very easily. After I work them through a series of exercises I can tell whether or not this is truly the case.
9 times out of 10 it is not the case. You see, students like this one tend to hyperfocus on their targeted input. They zone in on the teacher and everything else around them disappears. So, when an additional task is being introduced that requires processing, they are conflicted because they can only attend to one thing at a time and state they get distracted. In actuality, their "divided attention" skill is very weak along with their ability to process more than one thing at a time.
A student with the above weakness will state easy distractability but will also have great difficulty with remembering information coming from different inputs at the same time, especially if one is auditory. This student is able to take notes and process the input in the brain. However, if the teacher begins "discussing" the topic of the notes on the board, the student is lost. Similarly, if the teacher started to talk first, the student would be able to process this input but once the teachers asks the student to start writing notes along with the teacher speaking, the student would be unsuccessful. They are unable to share processing within the brain.
The good news is that the above weak skill is just one of many that you are able to strengthen due to the brain's ability to develop and grow. A student doesn't need to struggle with this weak skill set any longer.
Science has proved through research that our brains have the ability to strengthen their existing weak skills, build new pathways and strengthen existing connections. This is life changing news – it was for my daughter.
My daughter was 10 years old when introduced t brain training, residing in a self-contained 4th grade classroom and trying to learn with the skill level of a 5 year old. Brain training enhanced my daughter's ability to learn, created new pathways, strengthened her learning skills from mostly a 5 year old up to a 9 year old level in most areas measured.
Feel free to schedule a FREE 30 minute consultation with me and we will map out a vision and plan for your child.
your story about shannon sounds like my daughter lidia. she is ten. has oms and all the learning disabilities that go along with it. i cant wait to learn more about your programs.