What I tell every child I meet on the earth. “You’ve got greatness in you and how you learn has nothing to do with how brilliant you are.
Henry Winkler (The Fonz) @hwinkler4real who has lived his entire live with dyslexia via #mohrstories
Great day.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t posted much about Jaecob and his learning disability. Jaecob is 6 (almost 7), in Year 1 at school and has been diagnosed with an Auditory Processing Disorder approximately 2 years ago.
In a nut shell, Jaec has trouble with verbal direction and verbal understanding. I liken it to the dog (Santa’s Little Helper) in the Simpsons Episode when Bart is trying to train him.
Bart says “Go and get the ball”
Santa’s Little Helper hears “Blah blah blah blah ball”
Jaec will typically hear (remember) the first or the last word. This makes it very hard for him at school, in group situations, communicating with friends and general day to day life.
We see a Speech Pathologist and he spends time with Learning Support at school and over time we have learnt ways to help him learn. He tends to learn visually. He needs pictures to learn, or to watch others do tasks first. This is typically a trait of people with Autism (check this TED Talk when you get a chance, it’s awesome - http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html).
So teachers have attempted to help him by giving him visual aids when teaching Jaec. We initially worried about whether he would get out of Prep (Kindergarten) last year, but he came on quite well in the second half of the year and moved forward with the rest of his year to Grade 1.
This year he has struggled again and lately we have been worrying again that he may need to repeat Grade 1. Now I am not adverse to children repeating if they need too and as Jaec is a December baby, he is quite young anyway. But we have another little thing that would impact the situation… Kaine. Kaine is in the year behind Jaec and to have them in the same year would be very hard on Jaec as he moved through his schooling career. Mel and I decided long ago, that if they ever had to end up in the same year, we would move them into different schools straight away to try and limit the impact of brothers 16 months apart being in the same year of school.
So over the school holidays, I started looking at options “just in case”. Yesterday, our minds were put at rest, when Jaec’s teacher told us that he would be moving to Year 2 next year.
It was a great day :D
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