Kentucky Partnership for Families and Children

Learning Disabilities are neurological disorders that interfere with a person's ability to store, process, or produce information and create a gap between one's ability and actual performance. Learning disabilities generally affect a child's ability to read, write, speak, or do math and can interfere with social skills. There are several types of learning disabilities, which are explained individually below:

• Dyslexia: inability to read, and is perhaps the most commonly known. It is generally used to describe difficulty with language processing and its impact on reading, writing, and spelling.
• Dysgraphia: inability to write. Problems might be seen in the actual motor patterns used in writing. Also characteristic are difficulties with spelling and the formulation of written composition.
• Dyscalculia: involves difficulty with math skills and impacts math computation. Memory of math facts, concepts of time, money, and musical concepts can also be impacted.
• Dyspraxia: (Apraxia) is a difficulty with motor planning, and impacts upon a person's ability to coordinate appropriate body movements.
• Auditory Discrimination: trouble taking in information and/or processing that information. For example, a child may have trouble differentiating sounds such as "th" and "f" or "m" and "n."
• Visual Perception: trouble taking in information through the sense of sight. A child may have trouble seeing a specific image within a competing background (not find a face in a crowd) or have trouble perceiving how far or near an object is.

Causes:
There is not a precise, known cause of learning disabilities. They are presumed to be disorders of the central nervous system. A variety of factors may contribute to their occurrence.

These include the following:

• Heredity: Learning disabilities tend to run in families. It is not unusual to discover that people with learning disabilities come from families in which other family members have reported similar difficulties.
• Problems during pregnancy or childbirth: Learning disabilities may be caused by illness or injury during, or before birth. They may also be caused by the use of drugs and alcohol during pregnancy, RH incompatibility with the mother (if untreated), premature or prolonged labor or lack of oxygen or low weight at birth.
• Incidents after birth: Head injuries, nutritional deprivation, poisonous substances, (e.g., lead), and child abuse can contribute to learning disabilities.

Preschool
• Late talking compared to peers
• Pronunciation problems
• Slow vocabulary growth
• Difficulty rhyming words
• Trouble learning numbers, alphabet, or days of the week
• Extremely restless or easily distractible
• Trouble interacting with peers
• Poor ability to follow directions or routines
Grades K-4
• Slow to learn the connection between letters and sounds
• Confuses basic words
• Makes consistent reading and spelling errors including letter reversals (b/d), inversions (m/w), transpositions (felt/left), and substitutions (house/home)
• Transposes number sequences and confuses arithmetic signs
• Slow recall of facts. Slow to learn new skills, relies heavily on memorization
• Trouble interacting with peers

• Stay up to date on your child's academic performance. Don't wait until report cards come home to see that your child may be having difficulty with a certain subject.
• Provide schools with additional information from outside settings that may contribute to understanding the child's difficulties. This includes pediatricians, guidance counselors, teachers, coaches/recreation leaders, etc.
• Request an evaluation of the child if problems persist. (See pgs. 4 & 5)
• Communicate with the school (teachers, counselors, etc.) to monitor child's progress.

• Communicate with parents about children's progress and difficulties. Parents can be an excellent form of information about the child's behavior and learning in many situations (home, sports, clubs, homework, etc.).
• Use accommodations when available to help with the child's difficulty.
• Provide opportunities for success in a supportive atmosphere to build self-esteem.
• Familiarize parents with the special education process when their child shows signs of needing help.