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5 Things To Tell The Teacher

Poor Reading Isn’t Forever

One of the first things to tell your child’s teacher is that your child’s poor reading isn’t forever. It can be so frustrating for a parent and a child when reading is difficult. It makes homework and concentration turn into impossible tasks. I bet that no one has explained to you that poor reading is usually caused by fixable eye tracking issues. It is wrong to assume that your child is unintelligent because they can’t (yet) read. It may just be that they don’t yet have the skills to do so.     

 

Eye tracking is the way in which your child takes in information. If your child struggles with reading, it may be that their eyes flicker and jump across the page. This is a problem as to read well you need your eyes to travel smoothly across the page. Poor eye tracking can often lead to symptoms of dyslexia as many words may be mixed up. This challenged brain has to unscramble these letters and put them in the correct order. This can lead to your child finding reading very difficult, and they might be less eager to read at school. I find it so hard to watch children that struggle with reading.

 

It can be so difficult at school for your child if they struggle with reading. It is one of the most fundamental skills that they have for life. This is why it is so important that your child has the correct brain wiring to help develop skills such as reading, writing and focus. I remember when my own daughter was trying to read, and I assumed she wasn’t trying hard enough. I was ignorant about the issues she faced. If only I had realized then just how difficult it was for her.

Clumsiness Isn’t Intentional

Many people assume that clumsiness is intentional. I am here to tell you that your child isn’t choosing to be clumsy. Clumsiness happens when the instructions from your brain and body are imprecise. When children crawl as babies they are activating the vestibular system. The vestibular system activates the brain for learning and starts to stimulate our fundamental skills. If you or your child bypassed the crawling stage as a baby it can mean that some skills may not be fully developed. These underdeveloped skills can lead to problems in later life, such as being clumsy as a teenager/ young adult.

This can be frustrating as a parent, but you need to focus on the root cause rather than the symptoms. The root cause is the underdeveloped cerebellum within the brain. The cerebellum is responsible for a range of different skills, such as reading, writing, focus and concentration.

Poor Concentration Isn’t Deliberate

If your child struggles to turn what they hear into what they can understand, then they may be labelled as lazy or rude. Often children will find it difficult to process and retain auditory information. Often the teacher will have moved on with the lesson by the time these children are still processing information. This leaves children struggling and finding themselves further behind at school. If your child is struggling with concentration then there might be other skills that they suffer with, such as reading and writing. With children that suffer with poor concentration it can be frustrating as a parent to hear that they are ‘not trying’. Often these children are trying the hardest in the classroom simply to catch up with what is being said. My daughter struggled in the classroom, often having to have extra classes or special attention. She was not unintelligent or a slow learner, she just couldn’t process the information by the time that the teacher had moved on.

Slow Learners Are Intelligent

The majority of children that struggle at school are wrongly accused of being unintelligent. Teachers (and parents) tend to misunderstand those children that can’t retain very much, can’t write very much, and score poorly in exams. In a teacher’s world, this usually means low intelligence.

It causes so much misunderstanding. The majority of children that struggle at school are wrongly accused of being unintelligent, yet the opposite is true. Parents often sense the intelligence in their child, and they don’t understand why schools fail to discover their obvious potential.

Exams don’t measure all types of intelligence. A lot of exams can only measure the ability to regurgitate information. Creativity is an intelligence and children with it question conventional systems. Creativity doesn’t like being put inside boxes, and instead thinks outside them. If your child is struggling to take in information when reading because of eye movement issues it may lead to the inability to process. This can lead to a working memory overload.

Your Child May Forget, But They Are Trying

When your child’s working memory is overloaded, frustration can occur. If your child is struggling with basic fundamental skills such as memory, they will be overloading the working memory. When the working memory is stuck attempting to process the fundamental skills it means that it will become incapable of processing more developed skills. This will often lead to frustration from the child.

This can even happen in parents. When they lose control and shout at their children. Their working memory is overloaded and led the parent to lose control and trigger the fight or flight response. Don’t blame yourself or your child. It’s all down to the working memory.

By rewiring the brain/ body connection and developing the fundamental skills, it means that the working memory will be more freed up to work on more complex skills. By working on the working memory and the cerebellum we can help these skills that need developing.

If you would like to know more things to tell the teacher, and learn more about the cerebellum + brain body connection then click the link below to get a FREE copy of my #1 best seller ‘Stop Struggling In School’ and only pay postage and packing!

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