I teach “foster kids” at a residential treatment facility with a school on the site, i.e., those children who have been abused and neglected and so forth. Some of them have proven too difficult for the foster homes to handle, so they wind up with us.
One kid is 13 years old. His mother was a drug addict, I believe, and she died in her sleep about two weeks ago. He has been “out” on a pass, away from the residential facility, with his family for about ten days. I believe he was in the facility at the time when she died, in another words, he did not have the opportunity to see her even briefly.
He will return soon, I assume. He has an LD in the area of auditory & visual integration, auditory processing, discriminations, short term memory, and visual perceptual motor integration, as well as sequencing. His strength is math. He is weak in spelling, punctuation, grammar, subject and verb agreement, and he omits words when he writes.
Any suggestions? I also have another kid who is disabled in the area of short term memory, so that area would be helpful as well.
Re: Short term memory
With issues like the emotional ones he has, getting him on board for instruction will be a bigger challenge than his Ld’s I suspect. Are you looking for program suggestions? Or just instrctional techniques?
Short term memory is an intake issue more than an actual memory issue the way we think of it. Think of a bottle. If you pour to much into the bottle too fast, then a bunch of it spills off and is lost. Folks with Short Term Memory issues have smaller than normal openings to their bottle, so they don’t get the same amount of information. General instructional recommendations usually include speaking more slowly when you are introducing new information, limiting the amount you present at what time, and associating all verbal information with a visual cue which then acts like a funnel, allowing more of what is said to be captured.
The visual motor and visual perceptual issues should probably be looked at by an Occupational Therapist- do you have one that consults with your facility- or his sending school will have one on board.
Relative to the rest- you need to find a good multi sensory instructional program to work with. One thought for writing might be “Framing Your Thoughts” form Project Read. It is very visual, begins at the sentence level, and I have used it with adolescents with a great deal of success. Think about what you would like to know more specifically and I bet you will get a lot of suggestions. And- God bless you for having the stamina to work with these very needy children.
Robin
Re: Short term memory
Your good intentions with this poor child are commendable. I ever admire that school goes on no matter what. I have a student at my school who was removed from his mother’s care because she was beating him and my dear colleagues thought that was no reason to alter their approach in any way. I thought differently. I thought that at least while the bruises healed, we should try to understand that his mind might be elsewhere. Indeed, his school performance was not good for some time thereafter.
I would suggest that your student, even more than my student, first needs to heal a bit, if that’s possible given the hard life he has had. I would think about his first needs not being academic needs but emotional needs. I would offer him emotional support before academic support.
If you ever sense that this child is ready to tackle mundane school tasks again, he sounds dysgraphic to me. There is no good remediation for dysgraphia. Dysgraphic children need extra time - usually years - for their writing skills to develop from inside and the things we do on the outside often hurt more than they help.
If his strength is math, let him do math for a while. This child who has seen so much unfairness and so little control over his life, needs to feel a little in control
Re: Short term memory
Sara -
How can you tell if a child has dysgraphia? My son is not a good writer - simple sentence structures, thoughts are not necessarily in any order. He can write a simple narrative with a few paragraphs at the most, but nothing that approaches an essay. He is in the 8th grade. Thanks.
A low-cost approach to developing short-term memory (both visual and auditory) is Audiblox. You need the book and video to start, and the packet of manipulatives would be useful. Total cost to get started would be about $80. This wouldn’t fix all of the problems, but would likely help.
The program requires working with the child one-on-one for 1/2-hour per day. Because it’s a cognitive training program, it takes awhile for skill development. A few kids start responding in a couple of weeks, but often you need to put in time for 5 or 6 weeks before you start seeing notable improvements in non-Audiblox activities.
Website is http://www.audiblox2000.com
Mary