Have you ever been baffled or surprised by something your child says? You may be certain that you heard the words correctly, but they don’t make sense. Having children with learning struggles, I often found that I needed to clarify both what I said to my children and what they were communicating to me. With [...]
Ahhh, executive functions. We love them, and when they are lacking we long for them. Children with AD/HD struggle to develop vital executive functions such as organization and planning. Students with learning disabilities and struggling learners (officially identified or not) often have some degree of executive dysfunction. Any experienced teacher can look at a student’s [...]
In the last six weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to speak at three different state homeschool conventions. At each conference I attend, I share information about learning disabilities, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Sensory Processing Disorders, and Auditory Processing Disorders. More important than the facts I pass along are the real-life stories from my own family [...]
Take a look at this paper. What kind of information does it tell you? Right off the bat you can see that this child, my son Josh, has difficulty with writing tasks. His letters stay on the lines pretty well and he is doing a good job of leaving spaces between words. Margins are still [...]
I love talking with my son, Josh. He has such interesting perspectives and the way he verbally expresses himself gives me insight into how he thinks and processes information. When he was young, Josh had some difficulty remembering words so he would use descriptions to get his point across. He once described his ankle as [...]
My typical exercise pattern is to walk several times a week. I walk the dog, walk around the park, and walk on a treadmill. Then I thought about how my daughters and their friends seem to really get a good workout doing the video game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), and they have a lot of [...]
This is a page out of Josh’s journal. It’s a concise entry. He was in middle school at the time, and was taking a composition class with our homeschool support group. The assignment was to tell a little about himself. Except for the final four words, his entire description relates to his AD/HD. Even his [...]
A few years ago I did a unit on mythology as part of our homeschool curriculum. We learned about Greek mythology as well as mythology that originated in various other parts of the world. Although I found some of the stories to be kind of creepy at times, there’s no question that it held the [...]
I have been speaking at conferences for over 10 years. I’ve had the opportunity to speak in multiple states to groups consisting of a couple dozen people up to a couple hundred people, and I love doing it. I’ve talked to many people who say public speaking, even just the thought of being up in [...]
My daughter, Beckie, has AD/HD. Now that she’s a teenager, her primary challenges are with the executive functions (EF) like planning, organization, and working memory. She also continues to need more prompts and external rewards than her peers without EF challenges. Beckie and her sister have been sharing a hair dryer for years. It is [...]
