We are beginning to learn that much of the problem w/ my daughter is possibly ad/hd-ld. I understand that it is difficult for her to absorb and learn her work. For ex: two night ago we were learning the conversion charts. At one moment she could do it and understand how to figure pints to gallons or cups to gallons, then five minutes later it’s gone and she doesn’t remember how or why the answers are what they are. Again, I know this is part of the problems we have going on. Is there any type of book I can read or website I can go to that will teach me different ways and strategies of teaching her. Also different things that will hopefully make these things stick longer in her mind. I’ve tried demonstrating, bringing out the measuring cups and such.
While we are trying to diagnos the problem I would still like to help her as much as possible. Any help or advise would be greatly appreciated.
Agree with Nancy (m)
We used Audiblox for a year, and it really helped my son’s memory. My son had a really poor long-term memory. He would lose things over night. His math improved in just 8 weeks. They have different programs, so you might want to tell them about her, and then they can tell you which one would be the best. They have a message board.
Cindy.
Just as a general approach, you might want to try Audiblox with her. It strengthens skills in a wide variety of areas including visual and auditory short-term memory, sequencing, pattern recognition, etc. It generally takes about 40 hours of one-on-one before you start seeing gains carry over into academics, so the program requires some dedication. However, strengthening the underlying cognitive skills like this can make academic learning much easier for a child. Website for Audiblox is http://www.audiblox2000.com
If your child has great difficulty making progress in an area of Audiblox exercises, that can be a signal for you to get testing for more fundamental underlying problems in need of remediation — developmental vision (vision therapy), for example, or auditory processing (sound therapy).
Some children need a high number of repetitions before information becomes committed to long-term memory. In this case, what you would want to do is spend 3 minutes at a time four times a day drilling facts (usually just orally). It’s not just the number of repetitions; it’s also how those repetitions are spaced out, and how they are sequenced. For the conversions, you would probably want to start out with just one conversion and orally drill that for 2 minutes at a time several times a day until it is truly automatic. At that point, you would start drilling a new conversion for 2 minutes at a time, but continue reviewing the old one for a minute at a time also.
See http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infocs/Study/Curve.html for a very interesting “Curve of Forgetting”. You can adapt this for application with an LD child — frequent review for short periods of time.
Nancy