Attention deficit disorder – difficulty attending to the tasks required of you – is a common diagnosis among school children. These are the students who “stall” when it comes to getting down to business. They daydream, work on something more interesting, talk to the child sitting next to them, etc.. When learning is too hard, many children “tune it out,” much like a child with ADD or ADHD does. Many of the methodologies we use have successfully changed the way these children approach learning and made it easier for them to concentrate on academic tasks.

One young student we worked with awhile back had been diagnosed with ADHD two years before his parents contacted us for help. He had been on meds those two years but his learning problems had persisted. We tested him when he was in 6^th grade and found deficits in language comprehension and visual-motor processing. He also had significantly underdeveloped math skills and wasn’t reading as efficiently as he should have been. He received treatment the summer between his 6^th and 7^th grade years. He started off pretty disgruntled about having to come, but by the end of the summer he was asking to continue into the school year. The language comprehension work had improved his ability to think appreciably enough that he knew he would benefit from more!

Many of our students come to us with the diagnosis of ADD or ADHD. They also have processing deficits making it hard to learn even when medication has proven to be an effective treatment for the attention disorder. We’ve found that the methodologies we use work well with these students whether or not they are medicated. These children frequently also struggle to learn efficiently for other reasons: language comprehension problems, phonological and/or orthographic deficits making reading harder than it should be, difficulty understanding and retaining math concepts, visual-motor deficits making handwriting difficult.