Dyspraxia prsentation

[Lithium_joe]

I get to do a presentation on the learning difficulty of my choice so naturally I'm choosing to raise consciousness about dyspraxia.

I'm just fishing for ideas of what to include and specifically how dyspaxics can be supported in school.

If you have anything you want to contribute then drop me a line here.

Thanks.

LJ

[Lithium_joe]

Presentation is due on Monday - and it's a beast. 18 slides long a multimedia extravaganza, if I do say so myself.

This'll get 'em cheering in the cheap seats

I'll see if I can find someway of exporting it for everyone on here eventually

Lj

[sheppeyescapee]

good luck

[Liz944]

Good luck!

[Pooky]

Good luck.

[Lithium_joe]

Thanks everyone - the day is upon us.

Pooky. the file is a quicktime file now I've converted it, anyway I cna get it to you for the servers?

RSVP if you are interested.

[Nicky]

How did the presentation go? I'd be interested to see it if you fancy sharing it!

[Lithium_joe]

very well - reception was slightly frosty - 'isn't this juts like dyslexia tho'' was the common complaint and in vain did I try to explain that a spectrum of needs was a continuum and that localised areas of difficulty meant two people with different diagnosis's could experience the same need (i.e in writing for instance)

but I feel it was a case of dyspraxia just still not being a recognised quantity so by raising their consciousness to its existence even if I didn;t persuade them totally of what it is or how to tackle it I feel I did my bit.

I've beena bit busy of late (PGCEs have NO free time) but I'll ge tthe file compressed somehow and get it over to Pooky eventually.

[Shadwell]

i think that is the main problem, is the dyspraxia/dyslexia windows of diagnosis are so close together that like i tried about 3.5 years ago to find out about dyspraxia through search-engines and you get like 500 hits for dyslexia - 1 partial bit of information on dyspraxia, and about 500,000 hits just mentioning the word dyspraxia, and then you open the link, and it is only mentioned once in the whole of the web-site

we seem to be in the grey area between dyslexia, and i think it was adhd, sort of like what name can we call this grey area type of thing, and the way i feel is until they define the boundries shall we say, then everywhere is going to call us the grey area,

and as such either class us as one or the other, like insurance will class us the worst of the two to bump up their profits if we do declaire it.

[Lithium_joe]

I think the real key to the diagnosis is the impairment of movement and motor functions as the primary differentiating factor. This is because dyslexics and adhd...ists..., don't have the problems we associate with balance, gross and fine motor control, sense perception and balance (at least strictly they shouldn't but remember a spectrum doesn't mean they cannot)

HOWEVER. (and this is the fulcrum of my position)

Dyspraxia is ALSO an impairment of mental co-ordination (and in this respect similar to dyslexia in that how dyspraxics process and retain certain kinds of information is imapaired. Dyslexics struggle to organise words and letters from text, but dyspraxics sturggle to organise at all.

Dyspraxia necessarily must contain this aspect, I think because if all that dyspraxia amounted to was bumping into doors or tripping over our own feet - it wouldn't qualify as a learning disorder.

What tends to happen is that in dyspraxic children the motor control deficiency is emphasised because they do not have full motor control yet. So a pre-existing impairment is immediately apparent in developmental milestones and overall progress in how we grip pencils, walk etc.

As we progress through schooling we encounter the barriers to learning caused by the cognitive impairment and if we finally arrive at a diagnosis it is usally at a time close to or approachign puberty or early adult hood when our motor control is less confronted by situations we can't control (we probably don't take up sport as a hobby) and we've had a decade or mores practice at coping with our motor impairments so we're kinda good at it, even if we slip up from time to time we're probably in ratio not as badly impaired as when we were small children. Proportional to the size of of our fully-grown adult brain; the area of neural impairment is small er than when we were younger - so not that it was more powerful or something but we literally didn't have the connections to work around it.

What doesn't appear to change, however, are the cognitive difficulties and since these are largely invisible and indeed so closely allied to the dyslexic cognitive difficulties (albeit arising from an entirely separate condition and consisting of entirely separate problems) it is often confused for or lumped in with dyslexia.

However what I am not is dyslexic - assess me for dyslexia and I'll pass.

Give me a manual dexterity test and examine my figure-ground discrimination and memory and I'll flag up all the markers for dyspraxia.

The awareness that really needs to be raised is on the twin impairments of motor and cognition, but our trump card, if you will, is that unlike dyslexics ours is an impairment of motor function, primarily. What I would argue for is that by recognising this, it needs to be just as clearly understood that motor impairment is but one half of the condition and in how dyspraxics are dealt with at school, work, in families etc is with this broader understanding of dyspraxia as impairment of the physical and cognitive.

This is the logic behind my own personal definition of dyspraxia:

'Dyspraxia is a congenital or acquired neurological impairment which results in a sequencing disorder that affects the ability to effectively co-ordinate physical and cognitive tasks.'

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I've still not found the time to go over the presentation and send it to Pooky but I still plan to.

LJ

[Nicky]

Wow, I really like that definition. I always struggle to find a useful one!

[Lithium_joe]

Thanks. It's one I'd added to bit by bit, hence the rather list-like quality , but it's probably about as comprehensive a definition as I can muster.