Some Children Must Work Too Hard To Learn

I received this via email from the Home School Legal Defense Association, but it has great information for anyone who struggles in school or with learning...

It is always puzzling to a parent when one of their children doesn’t learn to read or write as quickly as their siblings. Sometimes parents find that giving the child more time to mature works well. Other times the child struggles with the learning process in spite of being given more time.

Maybe you are a parent who has recently taken your child out of the school setting because he was not learning well, despite an Individual Education Plan and special reading and writing classes. Your child is likely suffering from a block in one or more of his “learning gates.” One of the main learning gates is the “writing learning gate,” and consequently is the most common to be blocked by a glitch in learning.

Writing Gate Blocked—When Copying Doesn’t Work

God designed our left brain hemisphere to concentrate on new tasks, such as driving a car, or riding a bike. After concentrated practice, that task is then transferred over the corpus callosum (the brain midline), to the right brain, which is responsible for automaticity of processes. If we imagine the left brain hemisphere as the “thinking (concentrating) brain” and the right hemisphere as the “doing (automatic) brain,” we can see how this transfer allows us to “think and do” at the same time. Then we can think and drive at the same time, or think and ride our bike at the same time.

Generally, when we teach a child how to write, after six months of practice that writing is expected to cross over from the “concentrating brain” to the “automatic brain” so the child can now “think and write” at the same time. For many children, this transfer does not easily occur. Thus, they have to give energy, or a level of concentration, to a task that other children do not have to do...

This often solves the mystery of why many children learn their spelling words easily by writing them in a workbook, or writing them five times each, while other children can write words hundreds of times and still not store the spelling word in their long-term memory. Now we realize that these struggling children have to use their “batteries” just for the writing process, so that the learning process cannot occur. Thus, the method of copying to learn is totally ineffective for these children. We need to help them open up their writing gates.

These children are very commonly thought of as “lazy, sloppy or unmotivated.” We, unknowingly, make them re-copy work that is sloppy, not realizing that they have a bona fide writing block. The majority of the time, when a child who loves to listen to mom read stories, but says that he doesn’t like or even “hates” schoolwork, he is struggling with a blocked writing gate.

Characteristics

Let’s look at some of the symptoms children who have blocked writing gates present to us daily:

• Frequent or occasional reversals in letters or numbers (after age 7)
• Letters made from bottom to top (vertical reversals)
• Writing is very labor intensive
• Copying takes a long time
• Math problems solved mentally to avoid writing them down
• Writing appears sloppy and child is often considered lazy
• Oral recitation of stories is excellent, but writing is minimal
• Capital and small letters mixed in writing
• In math, lining up numbers in multiplication or division is difficult

No child has all of these characteristics, but if your child has several, you may consider this an area he or she is struggling in. If a child has many of the characteristics, or is over age 9 and still writes reversals, they may be labeled with dysgraphia. Many times these children are considered “gifted with a glitch.” They are excellent in verbal expression, but way behind in written expression. Writing paragraphs and longer papers are something that they take great pains to avoid. They give one-word answers whenever possible.

Compensation

When a parent recognizes that their child has a blocked learning gate, and is not just being sloppy or resistant to writing without a reason, then steps can be taken to alleviate some of the writing burden on the child, until the problem can be corrected.

• Reduce the amount of writing a child needs to do during the day. Do more answers for chapter questions orally. Limit the amount of writing in workbooks.
• Reduce or eliminate copying for 3-6 months. Save the child’s “battery energy” for writing paragraphs, or a paper once a week.
• Use another method of learning spelling words that does not include writing multiple times. Resources include Sequential Spelling or Right Brain Spelling.
• Teach the child keyboarding for some writing projects (However, most children who have dysgraphia, or a writing glitch, also find keyboarding quite labor-intensive also.)

Correction

There are various methods that can be used to take the stress out of a child’s writing system, and make the whole writing process more fluent. Here are a few:

• NILD has a private therapy program that incorporates “Rhythmic Writing” to help reduce the stress in the writing system.
• “The Source for Dyslexia and Dysgraphia,” from LinguiSystems contains ideas on how to correct writing problems.
• The “Brain Integration Therapy Manual” by Dianne Craft, contains a daily “Writing Eight Exercise,” that opens the child’s writing gate and eliminates reversals.
• “Handwriting Without Tears” is a writing program that works well after a child has a strong midline.

Conclusion

A child can have a learning glitch, or block in a learning gate, that causes him to struggle everyday with schoolwork, without the parents’ knowledge. Using some simple checklists, the parent can identify this problem and design the school day to be less frustrating. More importantly, the parent can avail herself of all the wonderful corrective techniques, so that the child does not need to struggle with the burden of having to work so hard at writing, or with a dysgraphia. God has wonderful answers for us. He leads us in so many ways, and we are ever grateful!

For more information on the Four Learning Gates, and how they can be affecting your child’s daily learning, visit the HSLDA Struggling Learners website. This site is designed to help parents both identify and correct many of the everyday learning challenges that children experience. Of particular interest is the “Smart Kids Who Hate to Write” article on that website.