I think that the best way to help children with learning disabilities is repetition. This will especially help them with their language processing in reading, writing and speaking. Repetition will help with many aspects of language such as hearing words correctly, understanding their meaning, remembering verbal materials and communicating clearly. It takes the average student 100 times to see a word for it to become a sight-word whereas for a student with a LD, it takes them 600 times. Use repeated reading- small passages over and over- as they get to know it, it boosts their self-esteem and will begin to enjoy reading because they can actually do it.
Give these students direct instruction, listen to them, and help them when they ask for help. These students cannot teach themselves out of a textbook like some students can. All they need is time and they will be able to complete anything. Understanding where their difficulties are is the hardest part as a teacher, and once you can establish those difficulties you can take the proper steps to accommodate learning.
Re: Repetition is the key to success
I think we all tend to overdo it on whatever piece has been missing. Thus, if you’ve been immersed in phonics and drill, drill and phonics, you realize that there really *is* more to it and you want to find lots and lots of ways to build more sophisticated language skills. On the other hand, when you keep running into people who are missing the basics, that’s what you search for.
Then you toss in that different folks need different htings and things get entirely too interesting.
Re: Repetition is the key to success
It probably depends what you are repeating. If you keep on doing the same thing that already isn’t working, well, that’s not going to work.
It depends on the nature of the disability. If you have a child who is very bright but is not learning to read with his peers, and the underlying problem is developmental vision delays, repetition will simply bore and frustrate him. Unless the vision problem is corrected, repetition will do nothing but turn him off to academics.
I think repetition is over-used. At best, repetition is a last resort strategy after everything has been done to correct sensory-level deficits, optimize cognitive skills development, and find curriculum materials suitable for the individual child’s learning needs.
Learning disabled children are smart enough to figure out that if they have to spend six times as much time going over everything in order to learn, they will not be able to keep up with their peers. Worse, they will probably not have any time left to play.
Repetition has its place within the context of learning, whether children are disabled or not. However, it is probably the least desirable of the many interventions now available for LD children.
Nancy