I have been teaching children with learning disabilities for 9 years, so I am familiar with general techniques in this area. I currently have a first grader who writes everything in complete reverese order- he begins his sentence on the right and reverses every letter, so that his sentence is the exact mirror image of what we would consider a correctly written sentence. He is also having great difficulty retaining visual infomation and is still struggling to learn the alphabet and the letter sounds. I would appreciate any suggestions about any special techniques or resources that I can access to help a child with this level of perceptual disability.
He is extremely bright, and I am very concerned about him.
Re: mirror writing
My son had major school problems until by accident we found that he sees total mirror image. It was very difficult to get him diagnosed because he had become very good at “changing the words.” He is still having some problems(I had a major argument with his English teacher today) but once we figured out what he was actually was seeing he was relieved that he knew why things were so hard.(Misunderstood Minds) We actually let him take a mirror to school to read with and the school was supposed to copy his work onto transparencies so he could turn them over and write his work as it came to him and the teacher could just turn them over to read them and grade them.That worked for a while until he ran into a teacher who said that every kid could write backwards and he was just too lazy to work. He is now out of public school (Norman, Oklahoma) because I got tired of fighting them every step. He too still hyas trouble with everything and doesn’t know left from right.
Re: DaVinci wrote this way
I once read that Leonardo DeVinci used to write backwards from right to left in a mirror image! There are notes that he has written that actually show this. People used to believe that he did this to keep his notes secret, but then they believed it was because he had a learning difference ! Cool, eh? Let your kids know that one of the great minds of all time was just like them!
I wish I could remeber which site I found the pictures of his notes (there are sooo many sites about him). It might be aneat thing to do with your kids to look him up yourselves.
Take care!
Cat
Re: DaVinci wrote this way
A dr. friend of mine was telling me about his best friend, a neurosurgeon, who can only write in mirror image. He had a successful career and is now retiring. I like to tell my students about him.
My son did that for a while too. His SPED teacher put a star in the upper left hand corner, and taught him to use that for his starting point. As long as he started in the right place, he wrote in the right direction. By the end of 1st grade, he was starting in the upper left consistently by himself.
Then he made me very nervous be reverting to mirror image during Christmas break. But a few days of going back to the star in the corner got him reoriented again, and he hasn’t gone back to it since. (although he pretty frequently mixes up right and left in other contexts)
Karen