A scientific discipline upset is termed Learning disorder. “All learning happens as a result of the brain develops specialised structures for various tasks,” says Glynis Hannell, a family scientist and author of Dyscalculia: Action Plans for sure-fire Learning in arithmetic. “Some people area unit endowed brains that quickly develop networks that create scientific discipline straightforward, obvious, and fascinating. Students and adults with learning disorder realize scientific discipline puzzling, frustrating, and difficult to learn. Their brains need more teaching, more targeted learning experiences, and more practice to develop these networks.”

Don’t Blame ADHD

At first, we blamed our daughter’s ADHD for her Math struggles. The ADHD brain has little trouble focusing on topics it finds exciting or interesting. On the flip side, the ADHD brain finds it tough to focus on topics it doesn’t like or finds boring. Math certainly qualified as boring to our daughter. It made sense that her inattentiveness was driving her problems.

It wasn’t until we learned about dyscalculia that we realized there was more at play than just her ADHD. Hannell points out that “about 20 percent of students with ADHD also have dyscalculia. To put it in perspective, this means that 1 in 5 students with ADHD/ADD are at risk of also having this learning disability.”

Distinguishing a specific learning disability from ADHD can be challenging and intimidating for parents. Overlapping symptoms make it hard to determine where ADHD ends and the learning disability begins. Knowing what to look for can make all the difference in figuring out whether your child has ADHD and dyscalculia.

Long-time educator and dyscalculia specialist Ronit Bird lays out the symptoms of dyscalculia in The Dyscalculia Toolkit, a book designed to help teachers and parents whose children are struggling with the disorder. Bird says that there are many subtle indicators to watch for.

A child with dyscalculia may use his fingers to count out math solutions, long after his peers have stopped using that method.

He may work tirelessly on memorizing math facts, but he always has trouble recalling them.

Numbers and symbols are not linked to amounts and directions, making math a negotiable subject rather than a concrete one. When doing an addition problem, our daughter would look quizzically at us and announce firmly, “But I don’t want to add, I want to subtract.”

Making sense of money is a challenge. A child may hand a cashier a fistful of bills and change rather than counting it out.

Telling time on an analog clock is a problem.

There is a hesitation before sorting out right from left.

There is difficulty in recognizing patterns and sequencing numbers. Our daughter recently confessed that, when she was young, she counted 3, 2, 1, 4 instead of 1, 2, 3, 4. It took years for her to get number sequencing down.

There is no cure for dyscalculia. It’s not a phase a child will outgrow. Like the color of a person’s hair, it’s part of who she is. It’s the way her brain processes math. By the time most children are diagnosed with dyscalculia, they have a shaky math foundation. The goals of diagnosis and treatment are to fill in as many gaps as possible and to develop coping mechanisms that can be used throughout life.

If you suspect that your child has dyscalculia, talking with her teacher is a great place to start. She should be able to tell you how well your child is doing in math, as well as how she compares to her peers.

If your child’s teacher isn’t familiar with dyscalculia, don’t be discouraged. The disorder is not well known or understood. Many teachers don’t know the signs. They may attribute problems in math to laziness or to not being math-minded. “If the teacher initially says nothing is wrong, don’t give up until your child’s math abilities have been evaluated by the teacher or a learning specialist,” says Hannell.

Though schools and private testing centers have different approaches to determining dyscalculia, a test should identify a child’s math ability and skills compared to those of other children his age. A combination of tests will identify specific areas of weakness. It’s important to remember that every child with dyscalculia has different strengths and weaknesses.

Once your child’s needs have been determined, a learning specialist will develop a plan that targets them. “I tailor the lesson to the individual needs of the child, focusing on any misconceptions he might have, and finding the gaps in understanding that require to be crammed,” says Bird. “The goal is to make a stable foundation on that to create additional skills.”

Math worksheets aren’t essentially the solution in serving to a toddler with learning disorder. children want a active approach to learning scientific discipline skills. Bird has written many books centered on games that use concrete materials, like Cuisenaire Rods, coloured glass stones, dice, or dominoes, in conjunction with a multi-sensory approach. as an example, victimization glass stones, a toddler will begin to seem at numbers otherwise by breaking them into sets and rearranging them on colourful mats. Six dots on a domino will be classified into two sets of three, three sets of two, or one set of two and one set of four. Grouping and regrouping is very important. It helps a toddler see numbers in executable ways in which. she will take this new talent and apply it to basic math issues.

The long-range goal is to show calculation techniques and reasoning that use scientific discipline principles to resolve scientific discipline issues. Our dyscalculic female offspring is in highschool currently, and still doesn’t have her times-tables perfect. however she understands a way to multiply. once visaged with a multiplication drawback she doesn’t grasp the solution to, say 8 x 9, she goes back to 1 she will grasp, like 8 x 5, then adds four additional teams of eight to resolve the matter.

Deciding to own your kid evaluated for learning disabilities is tough for folks. we have a tendency to don’t wish to stay labels on our youngsters. Bird answers this concern, citing that once “no one has investigated the character or the causes of great difficulties in scientific discipline, youngsters area unit usually given the unofficial labels of ‘lazy’ or ‘disengaged’ or perhaps ‘stupid,’ which might harm their vanity. several youngsters United Nations agency are diagnosed with learning disorder realize it liberating to be told that there's a particular cause for his or her challenges. The condition are a few things they were born with, and is on the far side their management, just like the color of their eyes or the form of their fingers. It helps to grasp that.”

We have seen this with our female offspring. Knowing that learning disorder was simply a locality of however her brain was wired, like her MBD, helped her settle for and perceive her several scientific discipline challenges. It conjointly actuated her to figure onerous and realize new ways in which to overcome scientific discipline. Our reward came last summer, once she known that she had passed the American state highschool Exit test on her 1st attempt. For that day, she was master of scientific discipline.