Parent Checklist: Is My Child At-Risk for Learning Issues? - Kristina Collins

Spark Learning  has developed the following parent checklist to learn what concerns parents see in their children and to help them decide if their child is in need of help. Choose one answer for each question and indicate how often the behavior is exhibited in your child’s daily life with the following options: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, or Always.

In case you require the soft copy of the Parent Observation Format, please mail to sbg@sparklearning.in

• Misunderstands what you say
• Needs instructions repeated
• Misunderstands jokes
• Has difficulty understanding long sentences
• Needs questions repeated
• Has difficulty retelling a story in the right order
• Cannot finish long sentences
• Has trouble saying the same thing in a different way (rephrasing)
• Has trouble finding the right word
• Pronounces common words incorrectly
• Gets confused in noisy places
• Has difficulty engaging in conversation with others
• Has behavior problems
• Lacks self-confidence
• Avoids group activities
• Has trouble paying attention
• Has trouble sounding out words
• Has trouble reading
• Has trouble spelling
• Cannot tell you about the events of his/her school day

If you answered Sometimes, Often or Always to several of these, your child may be at-risk for a language-based learning disability and will likely require intervention to prevent these issues from affecting him/her academically in the future. Why are we posting this?

We hear from countless parents like you who are looking for help for their bright child who struggles with reading, writing, attention, or other issues. You’re in the right place. We can help you help your child....

Take a Minute to understand my World : An AUTISTIC CHILD

Please take a minute to understand what an AUTISTIC Child wants to tell you;

1. First and foremost “I am a CHILD” and Autism is just one aspect of me.
2. All those things that are ORDINARY to you (like light, sound, touch etc) can be PAINFUL to me. Click here to experience how I feel
3. Change is the only constant to you but I love to be in “MY ROUTINES”. I get disturbed when there is a change in it.
4. Don’t compare me with other Children, not even with other Autistic Kids. I am special in my own way.
5. Not every Autistic Child should or can have special or hidden TALENTS. Do not search for the “Rain Man” in me. Please focus and build on what I can do instead of what I can’t.
6. You may think I don’t do what you expect me to do because I don’t listen to you….I am sorry I JUST CANNOT UNDERSTAND what you say. Sometimes even small instructions are extremely difficult for me to understand.
7. It is very tough for me to tell you what I need. I do not know the WORDS to talk to you…not even my pains….
8. Most of you do not want to be with me but I want to BE WITH YOU. Only thing is I do not know how.
9. Learning is tough for me. But if you can tell, show and do things along with me “I TOO WILL LEARN”.
10. Please love me without any expectations. I sometimes may not be able to “RECIPROCATE” the way you want me to. After all.... you all know that “Love is unconditional” and so I DESERVE IT.

            Yours Lovingly,

            AUTISTIC CHILD

            (Your Fellow Human Being)

The Shared Roots of Mental and Physical Pain

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." 

The old adage is being called into question by new research from UCLA: 

Dr. Naomi Eisenberger has found that social rejection and physical pain are intrinsically linked in the brain, so much so that a lack of the former can impact the latter or how social rejection might affect physical pain. In an experiment published in the 2006 issue of the journal Pain, Eisenberger used 75 subjects to explore perceptions of physical pain in the context of social situations. 

First, researchers identified each person’s unique pain threshold by transmitting varying levels of heat to the forearm. Participants rated painlevels until they reached “very unpleasant.” This provided a baseline for personal pain thresholds under normal conditions. 

Participants then participated in a ball-tossing game with three characters on a computer screen. One character represented the participant, and researchers told participants that the other two characters were played by real people, though a computer actually controlled everything. The participant was either socially included (the ball was tossed to their character) or excluded (the ball was never tossed to their character). In the final 30 seconds of the game, a new heat stimulus was applied and subjects again rated the level of pain they felt. 

Unsurprisingly, the non-included group reported 67% more social distress on average. More surprisingly, the same people who reported great social distress from the game also reported higher pain ratings at the end of the game-showing a link between social and physical pain. Other studies on improving emotional control. Many fMRI studies have confirmed that emotional and physical pain both activate the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Still other studies note that people who suffer from physical conditions such as chronic pain are more likely to have emotional anxiety and feel social rejection more deeply. 

Neuroscience, researchers explored one method of enhancing emotional control through an adaptation of a well-studied working memory task called n-back. In the standard n-back task, people must remember different visual or auditory stimuli from 1, 2, 3, or more trials ago; in this case, they were prompted with images of different facial expressions and emotionally loaded words such as dead and evil. Out of 34 total participants, those who spent 20 days using this emotion-based working memory task controlled their distress more effectively when later exposed to films of traumatic events. 

These two studies are fairly preliminary; the future of understanding and improving emotional control is still full of open questions. But as researchers continue to explore the complex workings of the human mind, there is more and more evidence that seemingly unrelated functions may in fact share underlying brain processes. These fascinating insights into the neuropsychological basis of emotional distress only scratch the surface of what we can learn about the impact of emotional control on our daily lives.