My nine year old daughter has areas of of difficulty that affect her schooling and home life. Primarily I have noticed the following; Very slow to complete anything, including her meals, homework, chores and enjoyable activities such as colouring in, dressup etc. Its not that she moves slowly, she simply appears to dilly dally. She often appears confused over spoken instructions needing frequent ‘refresher’ cues. She has very poor awareness of time and distance. She frequently mixes up yesterday, last night tomorrow etc and frequently needs to ask which day it is. She reads reasonably well but struggles to copmplete written work, can spell vocally but not in writing. She still needs her fingers to count and struggles with mathmatical concepts unless its written down.
My son has adhd as does my eldest daughter and myself and we all have non specific learning disabilities. The reason i say non specific is because in New Zealand, we are somewhat behind the times in providing testing and support for LD’s and testing is either per one year waiting list or several hundred dollars per testing. So my son is the only one to recieve LD testing.
My question is this, what resources (preferably free) are available for cognitive developement for my nine year old. I desperatly want to do whatever i can to prevent her falling any furthur behind. I have done alot of reading and research on cognitive developement and need to know what i can do to assist my childs learning, especially in regards to processing and spatial awareness etc
Hi Rogue-red,
Good to see another Kiwi here, I’m an Aussie. You have done well in identifying your daughters difficulties.
I run a Forum for the maths disorder Dyscalculia, where one of the main sub-types is; Visual- Spatial Dycalculia. Which is a difficulty with either or both Visual Working Memory and Spatial Working Memory.
You might like to have a look at my Dyscalculia Forum:
http://www.dyscalculiaforum.com/
Though I’ve also just started another Forum as well, called Minds Eye. Which is just focussed on Spatial and Visual Working Memory. If you would like to join up and post there, I can help you with some simple and free exercises for your daughter.
Though to start with, we would need to get an idea of her Visual, Spatial and Motor skills. As these all work together. So that we can define the right exercises.
http://forums.delphiforums.com/mindseyes
Hope to see you there.
Geoff,