Did you know that your child’s difficulty learning to read, and their clumsiness may be connected?

Most people are familiar with the five senses:

• Vision
• Hearing
• Touch
• Smell
• Taste.

There are two additional, less-known senses:

• The vestibular sense, which has to do with balance and movement, and
• Proprioception, which is your body’s ability to sense movement, action, and location.

Let me show you how proprioception plays an important role in your child’s reading and learning.

You may be wondering, what is proprioception?

It is your sense of where your body is in space.

Scientists who study the brain say that this sense is strongly related to how you process information.

Proprioception is connected with logic and reading skills. It plays a large role in your child’s ability to focus. It is also cumulative, meaning it combines movement, hearing, and vision.

When your children move, their brains get input about their bodies’ pressure on the floor and the position of their limbs.

When they look around, their brains understand the visual input by figuring out how things relate to their bodies, which gives them a sense of balance.

What they hear gives their brains input about where they are positioned in relation to the sounds they are hearing.

When a child has trouble balancing, his/her brain shuts down and he/she finds it harder to learn.

Some years ago, specialists noticed that when their students learned how to coordinate their bodies through certain exercises, they developed better balance and awareness of the surrounding space.

While these things seem unrelated to academic skills, their teachers noted an improvement in those children’s reading, writing, spelling, and math abilities.

Furthermore, their parents commented on their change in attitude towards cleaning their rooms and being more pleasant in general.

Children who are clumsy and uncoordinated, and who seek out intense sensory experiences, often have a problem with their sense of proprioception. This lack of knowledge of where their bodies are in space and poor balance can affect focused attention, reading skills, and other areas of their lives.

Your child has proprioception difficulty if he/she engages in sensory-seeking behavior like:

• Seeks out jumping, bumping, and crashing activities
• Stomps feet when walking
• Kicks his/her feet on floor or chair while sitting at desk/table
• Loves to be tightly wrapped in many blankets, especially at bedtime
• Prefers clothes (and belts, hoods, shoelaces) to be as tight as possible
• Loves/seeks out “squishing” activities
• Enjoys bear hugs
• Excessive banging on/with toys and objects

Other signs of proprioception dysfunction are:

1. Difficulty regulating pressure when writing/drawing
   • May be too light to see, or so hard the tip of writing utensil breaks
2. Written work is messy, and
   • He/she often rips the paper when erasing
3. Always seems to break objects and toys
4. Misjudges the weight of an object
   • For example, picking up a glass of juice with too much force and sending it flying or spilling
   • Or with too little force and complaining about objects being too heavy
5. May not understand the idea of “heavy” or “light”
   • Would not be able to hold two objects and tell you which weighs more
6. Seems to do everything with too much force.
   • For example, walking, slamming doors, pressing things too hard, slamming objects down

You don’t have to depend on a school system to help your child with proprioceptive skills. You can work with them at home.

To help ease your challenges and empower you to help your children, I created a program for parents of children who have been identified with dyslexia and those who have not been given any special testing but are struggling to read. In it, I incorporate exercises that help your children develop their sense of proprioception and I show you how to help your children in other ways at home so they can read easier, faster, and succeed in life.

Click here to chat at your convenience – https://letsmeet.io/florencecallender/learning-assessment-call