African-American Pioneer Museum - Bruce R. Watkins Center
Some children who appear to be gifted in certain areas such as math may be held back by problems in language and reading. Parents can do something at home to prepare (or repair) their child’s brain for normal signal processing.
Turning off the TV and teaching phonics to your child early, the right way, may prevent dyslexia (and even autism).
Professor Maggie Snowling of York University (UK) says the fashionable cures for dyslexia do not offer really a cure for difficulties with literacy. She said, “As far as I can see, the only effective treatment for dyslexia in children is a structured phonic program in a one-on-one situation, backed by confidence-building.” See sources below.
Markers of Dyslexia - some are preventable, some are curable:
1) Sensory overload as infants – While babies’ brains are developing, too much TV, radio, or white noise (like freeway traffic) may cause premature shutdown of the brain mapping before neurons have learned to distinguish and process sounds properly, especially if they are genetically predisposed. From then on, their brains may be immature, developing 2 to 4 years behind age level. Some may never catch up without help. Sensory overload may be one of the precursors to auditory processing problems, slowed brain development, and even autism.
2) Temporal lobe timing – Children’s brains with dyslexia respond abnormally to language stimuli. Their auditory cortex neurons may be firing too slowly, so they can’t distinguish between similar sounds or which sound came first or second. They may not hear the beginnings of syllables or the sound changes within syllables.
Normal children’s neurons are ready to fire again after a 30-millisecond rest between processing. The neurons of language-impaired children take at least three times that long to be ready. They lose large amounts of language information. With slow-firing neuron patterns, the signals are not clear.
With intense remediation training, the brains of dyslexic children can be rewired to understand rapidly-changing sounds that are the building blocks of language and reading.
3) Hearing processing difficulties – Children with language disabilities have brain auditory-processing problems with common consonant-vowel combinations that are spoken quickly (called “the fast parts of speech”). The children have trouble hearing them accurately and then reproducing them accurately. Improper hearing leads to weaknesses in all the language tasks – vocabulary, comprehension, speech, reading, and writing.
Dyslexic children’s brains can be trained to help them hear sounds in words and operate more like those of normal readers. Many used to think these kids were ‘broken,’ but they can be fixed.
4) Speech difficulties – Early speech difficulties may predict dyslexia. Young dyslexic children are not as good as their peers at pronouncing multi-syllabic words. Studies have shown that the brains of children with dyslexia work about 5 times harder than other children’s brains when performing the same language tasks. Dr. Michael Merzenich and Dr. Paula Tallal found that preschool children with a language disability later have difficulty reading, writing, or even following instructions. This can be misdiagnosed as ADHD.
Wouldn’t it be much better to prevent nuch of dyslexia (and possibly autism) by starting phonics early at home than to have to try to fix it later? Wouldn’t it be better to help a savant be well-rounded in all areas of intelligence from the beginning? Proactive, purposeful parents may never realize how much damage they spared their child. The worst thing possible would be to wait until school age and let the schools do the teaching.
The next article will discuss commercial remedial programs that work to cure dyslexia.
Unrelated to the topic above, in Kansas City you can take the family to the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center. As the website says, this living museum stands in tribute to the legacy of Kansas City’s early African-American pioneers and embodies the artistic, cultural and social history of the African-American experience. Admission is free. http://www.kcmo.org/parks.nsf/web/watkins
Contact info: Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center and Museum, 3700 Blue Parkway, Kansas City, MO 64130. Phone: (816) 513-0700. Open Tues - Sat, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Sources:
http://www.dyslexia-parent.com/news.html
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 2004
University of Washington in Seattle, Dr. Virginia Berninger and Dr. Todd Richards
University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Professor Carsten Elbro
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