Learning

Difficulties with Narrative and/or story telling skills:

Children with poor story telling skills may have problems in some or all of the following areas:

• Keeping on topic (“Topic Maintenance”)
• Describing something clearly and precisely
• Starting at the beginning of a story, then giving the middle and finishing with the end
• They may focus on small details but not give the “main idea” or “whole picture” of the story
• If the story is about a problem, they may not really understand what the problem is.

Word Finding Difficulties:

Children who struggle with word finding have difficulty retrieving or “finding” words despite knowing and understanding the words that they want to use.  They appear not to know answers that they actually do know. They struggle to find “the right word to use at the right time”. These children may show some of the following:

• Frequent use of empty words or fillers like “thing”, “thingy”, “something”
• Substitution of  a related, but incorrect word e.g. “shoe” for “sock”
• Use of gesture instead of a word e.g. making a “writing” motion with a hand instead of saying “pencil”.

Describing a word rather than saying it e.g. “It’s the thing that you draw with. You know ..”.

ADHD and Language Difficulties

It is estimated that 60 – 80% of children diagnosed with learning problems and ADHD have language related learning difficulties.