Special Education
Special Education: Functional Neurology Treatments,
Interactive Metronome, Sound Therapy
Our experience in the treatment of neurobehavioral
disorders is that children that don't pay attention at home tend to have problems at school as well;
their grades will not necessarily reflect their intelligence.
Before we can treat these symptoms, we must first determine if
they are caused by a learning issue or an attention problem, and how the two are inter-related.
In addition to neuro-rehabilitation treatments, we
offer a Special Education program because not only do we want the child to pay attention better,
but to also perform well in school,
and to get them up to their grade equivalent. Our Special Ed. teacher
provides a curriculum specifically designed for each child in the areas that we objectively identify that the child is struggling in. She works with the children in each session for a half hour with a curriculum designed to improve the weaknesses that we find on the "WIAT".
Finding Your Child's Academic Potential
The test we use to determine a child's academic
potential and problem-solving abilities, and find the areas they
struggle in, is called the "WIAT II" - Wexler Individual
Achievement Test (Second
Edition.) The test is a comprehensive measurement tool for achievement skills assessment, learning disability diagnosis, special education placement, curriculum planning, and clinical appraisal,
and furthermore, indicates if if a problem is right-brain or left-brain
related.
The sub-sets of tests on the WIAT-II, and the
hemisphere of the brain that each highlights, include:
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Reading comprehension - right brain
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Word Reading - left brain - sight-reading
of words already learned
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Pseudo-word Decoding - left brain - the ability to sound out lettered words, to take a nonexistent or abstract (false) word and sound it out.
The ability to sound these words out tests phonetic processing. Phonetic processing is how we learn to speak. The ability can be affected by an ear infection or other hearing problem in a child's early development phase.
Both of these left brain abilities are needed, so we would design a treatment program to help strengthen the weak area, if one exists.
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Numerical operations - left brain
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Math reasoning - right brain
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Written language:
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Oral language - right brain/left brain - listening comprehension / oral expression
We use the WIAT-II to objectify whether a child has more issues with the
left hemisphere of the brain or the right. Because the WIAT-II tends to be very consistent with the symptomology we see in the child,
the battery of tests are an objective measure of brain function from a cognitive standpoint.
Once the test is completed and analyzed, we utilize the results to prescribe a treatment
plan,
while our Special Ed teacher uses various strategies to help the child in one area or another by targeting
the specific areas that are deficit, for example reading, math and spelling in left-brain-deficit children, or reading comprehension and math reasoning for right-brain deficits. Globally, our approach would be to increase the firing of neurons in that side of the brain to help increase brain function in that area.
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