To facilitate a child’s learning success, parents must look beyond academics.

For the past twenty-eight days, I have been talking about some underlying skills that impact learning success.

This article provides a recap of those skills and their relevance to excellent academic performance for any student, regardless of his learning or thinking difference.

Vision

During your child’s schooling, 80% of his learning comes through the visual system, making vision readiness foundational for learning. Vision is more than 20/20.

1. Comprehensive vision testing from a developmental optometrist is crucial in the early years of life to ensure vision readiness.
2. Having your children play outside as often as possible is protective to their eyes and reduces the incidence of myopia (nearsightedness).
3. Proper nutrition is never more important than during childhood. Vision-friendly foods will not only affect him in his young years but will also offset catastrophic consequences later in his life.
4. Good visual processing skills are needed for reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, drawing, and mathematics.
5. Three basic visual mechanical skills are usually associated with poor reading.

Audition

1. Listening is key to learning and the entire body is involved in listening.
2. Speaking is listening that is directed within.
3. Auditory memory plays a crucial role in literacy. Dyslexic children demonstrate a significant deficit in auditory memory skills.
4. Auditory processing is of primary importance in the acquisition of language. It is possible for the ears to perfectly hear the sound signal and the brain misassign meaning to that sound signal.

Movement

1. Movement positively impacts intellectual development.
2. It boosts verbal memory and thinking, in addition to learning.

Sensory

1. Processing sensory information is important for your child to play, learn, socialize, and function in the world.

Memory

1. It is impossible to learn without the capacity to retain what was learned.
2. Filing information in long-term memory is fundamental for academic success.

Executive Functioning Skills

1. Executive function is the management system – the boss – of the brain.
2. Attention is the most important factor in learning and intellectual progress. There are many ways to build better attending skills.
3. Working memory is critical for a variety of activities at school.
4. Metacognition (self-awareness) helps your children thrive at home, at school, and in their relationships with other people.
5. Self-regulation is different from self-control and is essential for success in school and life.
6. As children move through the grades in school, planning becomes increasingly important. It is essential for play, language, social interaction, personal management, and academic performance.
7. Effective time management is associated with greater student learning and outcomes, and lower levels of anxiety in students.
8. The most identifiable skill many children struggle with is the skill of task initiation.
9. Perseverance in children is an important indicator of their future success.
10. Organization skills are essential to your child’s ability to interpret and retain information, thus leading to higher grades in school.
11. Cognitive (thinking) flexibility is required in multiple ways throughout  the school day.

Children with reduced visual skills experience academic and behavioral difficulties in school including reading, spelling, and handwriting.

Children with auditory system deficits have trouble with spelling, reading, and writing because that system is connected with the visual system in ways that are not often identified.

Children with speaking challenges can have as the source defective listening skills and exhibit difficulty with spelling, reading, writing.

Children with sensory processing challenges often experience interferences with learning which manifest as problems with spelling, reading, writing, among other difficulties.

Cookie-cutter educational intervention does not remediate poor academic performance. Putting a band-aid on a gushing wound will not solve the problem.

Children struggle academically because of different underlying reasons. To facilitate improved academic performance and set your child on his path to learning success, it is important to discover the underlying reason for his difficulty.

Parents do not need to only rely on schools to help their struggling children. There are many ways in which you can help them yourself. Based on the challenges you see in your child, click the applicable link in this article and begin his journey to learning success.