My 6-year old son is having difficulty with his work. His attention span is very limited. He is constantly frustrated and angry. He has trouble retaining information. His written work is illegible (and that is when he actually does try). He will work with me at home and learn things that we do verbally or by song, but cannot learn on paper. If you ask him, how do you spell car, he will shout out C-A-R. But if you write car down on a piece of paper and show it to him, he has no idea what it is. How do we find out what the problem is and how to help him?
Re: discovering LD
You may want to get some of these evaluations through your medical insurance, as it can be much faster and the evals can be more thorough. To do this, first find a good occupational therapist, then call their office to ask about insurance coverage. Since they deal with insurance every day, they can usually tell you exactly what you need to do to get coverage (e.g., referral from your GP with specific wording).
The type of vision evaluation you want to get is a developmental vision eval, which is much more comprehensive than a regular eye exam. For more information, check out http://www.childrensvision.org . Symptoms of ADD are often linked to undiagnosed developmental vision delays. Go to http://www.covd.org to find board-certified developmental optometrists in your area. If funds for therapy are limited, you might want to use one of the developmental optometrists who offers therapy via computer software, as this is relatively inexpensive. See http://www.homevisiontherapy.com for more info. Although only the regular eye exam portion of a developmental vision evaluation is covered by medical insurance, it’s worth the money to get a developmental evaluation as well.
A good home program that can help with attention is Audiblox (http://www.audiblox2000.com ).
Nancy
You need to request (in writing) a psychoeducational evaluation at school. I will tell you that you have mentioned many symptoms of ADD as well, so I recommend you check in with a doctor who assesses ADD and explore that area, too. Be sure they check his vision as well. He seems to have some visual motor issues at the very least. Hopefully the general evaluation would indicate if he needs an OT evaluation or not. This may be a combination of the above issues, but I’d definitely explore this immediately and not wait until he gets further behind.
Janis