Difficulties with reading in children with ADHD
Attention Deficit and / or Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), affects not only the behavior of our children, their attentional capacity or affective and social development of the child. In general, children with ADHD present or may have learning difficulties, especially reading and writing, mathematics
Attention Deficit and / or Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), affects not only the behavior of our children, their attentional capacity or affective and social development of the child.
In general, children with ADHD present or may have learning difficulties, especially reading and writing, mathematics and calculation.
Learning difficulties in ADHD children
Some difficulties that children with ADHD may have are:
- Poor reading comprehension, errors in reading such as skipping letters, lines or changing words, or slow reading, or syllable.
- In the writing they may present spelling difficulties, poor writing, letters or words are eaten or they are joined or separated incorrectly. Pueden - They may have
difficulties in mathematics , (for example when making operations forget those that are carried, or not fixed that it is a sum and make a subtraction).-
Steps are skipped in the procedures preguntas or questions in the exams. - They are impulsive when performing exercises
, so by not stopping to think, they can make mistakes, omit important data or relevant information. All this makes their performance less than expected, frustrated, and discouraged by school work.What difficulties with reading present children with ADHD
Reading difficulties (and writing) in children with ADHD may be related on the one hand, with an associated dyslexia (what we call comorbidity) and on the other hand with their own Attention difficulties:
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Reading requires them to be attentive for a generally long time
, and their attentional difficulties make them fatigue early and that fatigue causes them to stop paying attention to the content of what they read, therefore not they assimilate it. In addition they tend to be distracted by what they lose in reading and therefore also lose the thread of what they are reading. - They can also presenterrors in reading such as omitting letters or words (, (being "eaten"), replacing one word with another similar word (one-eyed cake, for example), skipping lines, or presenting a level of reading development below what was expected for their age, (reading syllable, mechanical and not automatic, that is, they read still converting letters into sounds and not extracting the meaning of the words). All this makes them logically lose information when they read or that their understanding of the message is distorted.
That is to say, in children with ADHD, there is often a double disorder, on the one hand the specific and specific attention deficit with or without hyperactivity, and on the other a specific learning disorder, which affects the processes of reading and writing. And although there is no agreement about the causes of the relationship between the two, all authors agree that the specific difficulties of each disorder favor the development of the other.
With these children who have ADHD and also have difficulties in reading and writing es, it is advisable to follow a training in reading, guided and guided by a professional in this area. This work plan with the child aims to work all those skills related to reading, (phonological awareness, semantics, reading comprehension techniques, self-instruction training ...).Reading strategies for children with ADHD
Some strategies that can help these children in reading can be, (in addition to individual work by the appropriate expert): - Allow them to use acard, plastic or sheet that they put under the line they are reading
, and they go down as they go, so they do not skip lines or get lost when they read.
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Work the visual orthography, so that they learn the "form" of the word and not the specific orthographic rule.- To train the reading starting from
reading of syllables, and later words, short sentences, and little by little increasing the length and difficulty of the texts. - Allow him to train reading at home
if he has to read aloud at school, that is, at home the day before practice what the teacher says he has to read, and so when he reads it in class it is easier for him and he is not so anxious about reading. - Point out or point out the key words in the statements of the problems or exercises of the school, so that they can better locate the relevant information.
- Adapt the reading texts to their needs, (increasing the letter, for example, or the level, or letting them see the text to answer the questions of the read). These strategies or supports serve the child in his day to day, but as we said before, an individualized work that works the academic, cognitive and emotional areas of the child with ADHD is fundamental.
