Please note: These are just some of the symptoms that could be seen. Someone does not need to exhibit all of them to be weak in a particular area, and if interest level is high, that affects what the symptoms look like. I often have potential clients that comment that their child can remember in detail a vacation the family took two years ago; because that was an extremely positive memory, they are able to remember. Our goal is to make that possible with things that are not of high interest.
Long Term Memory: As it's name indicates, this skill is useful in remembering information over a long period of time. Reading and listening comprehension can be attributed to this cognitive area. If it is a weak skill, a person might struggle with:
- sight words, math facts, spelling
- reading could be an issue because remembering the sounds letters make is affected negatively
- reversals (both letters and numbers)
- remembering people's names
- their daily work might be fine but they do poorly on unit tests
- they may have difficulty writing papers because they have a hard time remembering what they have read.
Symptoms of weak short term memory include:
- difficulty copying from the board or a book (inability to remember more than a word or two)
- Taking notes (the important pieces of a lecture are gone before they can be written)
- Attention difficulty
- Skipping lines when reading
- Inability to multitask
- Having to read and reread passages or story problems to understand the meaning
- Difficulty with multi-step directions
- Poor handwriting
A person may exhibit the following if this area is weak:
- poor reading comprehension
- difficulty parallel parking
- catching a ball (or golf, or shooting a basketball, etc)
- poor coordination
- struggle understanding geometry
- riding a bike
- inability to understand and retell jokes
- unable to find an item if you describe where it is (EG: Go the basement and get my hammer. It's on the workbench next to the red paint can.)
- difficulty with higher math
- difficulty with story problems
- sequential writing/retelling an incident
- difficulty learning to tell time and count money
- prioritizing tasks can be problematic
- easily frustrated/ has melt downs or shuts down
- doesn't understand the correlation between math problems such 9+1 and 1+9
- difficulty learning new tasks and new material
- unable to get started on a new task/paper/project
- homework taking too long
- putting off a task
- daydreaming
- tasks done quickly with poor quality results
- routine tasks may be overwhelming
- may have trouble filtering facts when relating an incident, so may include everything
- Easily overwhelmed
- simple tasks take a long time
Auditory processing: This is how the brain hears the sounds of our language and a weakness in this area is the cause of 88% of the reading problems in our nation. This may be a weakness if a person is a choppy, nonfluent reader and mispronounces simple words: "Anventureland" for "Adventureland", "Prentzel" for "Pretzel," "Amblance" for "Ambulance", for example.
The good news is that all of these cognitive areas can be strengthened through the administration of non-academic, more game like procedures that kids engage in much more readily than the same academic challenges with which they have had limited success in the past. These skills can be strengthened comparatively quickly and have long lasting impact, far exceeding the short term gains of hiring a tutor, for example, to get someone through Algebra or Spanish.
The next segment will address attention, the different types of attention, and how a weakness in that area can lead to learning struggles -- as if that isn't glaringly apparent!
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