Showing posts with label ADHD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ADHD. Show all posts

Babbling...
Thursday, August 19, 2010

Children with apraxia or children with Autism, mostly have low oral tone and poor oral coordination. It is hard for these children to plan, coordinate and execute oral movements, resulting in poor verbal skills. Imitation and verbalization both are difficult for them.

As normal speech development, a child at the age of 5-6 month starts babbling. Babbling helps the child to practice oro motor function and develop the ability to change what he hears and understands the motor act of verbalization. Babbling helps in syllabic understanding and production hence, it facilitates the normal speech and language production. Babbling at earlier stages has vowel both short and long vowel but, long vowels predominate. After this, babbling changes to reduplicated babbling - sequence of identical, repetitive sequences of CV syllables (e.g /ma/ma/, /da/da/). Later it changes to CV, V, VC, VCV format.

Initial forms of vowels are /a/, /aa/, /oo/ and then /i/, /e/ and then dipthongs (combinations of 2 different vowels like ie/, /io/)

Initial course of speech therapy should follow normal course of development. Babbling should be a part of curriculum and used as methodology during speech therapy. However, teaching to speak is not easy task. The child who does not speak will take longer time to learn to speak than child who can speak few words.

Posted byNeeti at 11:20 PM 1 comments  

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Brain Gym
Sunday, June 27, 2010

Remedial educationist Dr Dennison, developed simple pattern of 26 exercises based on movement. According to him, movements are important keys for development and learning. Originally it was developed for Reading difficulties among children but later it was proved beneficial for the children with learning difficulties, ADHD, Autism and other disorders of coordination. It helps in improving memory, coordination, learning, attention, behaviour pattern and hence overall performance.

According to brain gym theory, some specific movements stimulate specific brain area and hence, stimulate its function. It also increases the coordination among various brain areas and increases learning. As a whole brain is stimulated in various but specific activities it also improves the emotion, cognition, understanding, conceptualization, abstract thinking and coordination.

PACE is one but important part of the brain gym. PACE stands for

P: Positive: hook ups
A: Active: cross crawl
C: Clear: brain buttons
E: Energetic: water

Other activities are important but this group stimulates the learning maximum.

Posted byNeeti at 11:25 PM 0 comments  

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Movement therapy...
Thursday, October 29, 2009

While every child with autism is a unique individual with his or her own particular personality, set of behaviors and degree of severity of delay, there is a fundamental pattern that is part of the autism spectrum. Most of the children with ASD or other childhood disabilities have movement or motor problems. Sometimes motor problems or difficulties are neglected because of other prominent problems like speech delay and social isolation.

Researches have proved that persistence of primitive reflexes and fixed motor patterns may be responsible for learning difficulties in children with ASD, ADHD and other disabilities. So, movement therapy, reflex inhibition or rhythmic movements or motor repatterning therapy can help child to learn better from his environment.

Most of us don’t know that sitting still is a tough and actually a complex brain mechanism requiring certain developmental processes in proper function. If functions are not proper, then to sit is something like sleeping. So, to be active and alert the child must move. For those children who have poor initiation or whose arousal level is too high they need movement therapy even in the class room. For example, doing an activity on the therapy ball or on the water bed.

Somebody correctly said “what we call thinking is [actually] the internalization of movement. Cognition and movement are really the same.”

Posted byNeeti at 11:46 PM 1 comments  

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Sensory awareness month
Wednesday, September 30, 2009


From the Vedic science to the modern science, Senses are given utter importance for human development. For overall development senses play an important role. We can not even think our life if we don’t have or have a disturb sense.

Senses don’t work alone. Sense organs sense the sensation or stimuli and brain turns the sensation to perception. Perception is a form of learning. Most of us have near to normal functioning of all senses in coordination. But, sometime because of known and unknown reason the process of sensory process get affected which may further leads to problems in routine life. If problem is minor and mild it can be compensated but if processing is effected on larger scale may affect our functional and occupational life.

Children with ADHD, Autism, Cerebral Palsy, speech disorder, brain injured, Down’s syndrome, dyslexia and other learning disability and neurological disorders do have mild to severe degree of sensory problems. However sometime children with normal development do have sensory issues.

Let’s make Sensory awareness month a campaign to arise awareness about sensory processing disorder among parents, teachers, community and professionals. This will not only help in creating awareness but also make us to understand our children behaviour in better fashion rather than thinking the behaviour as odd.

Sensory integration therapy looks like organised and structured play which has an objective or goal. SI activities provide the right challenge (not too difficult and not too easy) so that the child is motivated to achieve the goal.

Posted byNeeti at 4:18 PM 1 comments  

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