Dyspraxia

Far too often, when trying to describe dyspraxia, the simplicity of the learning disorder gets lost in a cloud of scientific words and labels, in the same way as it can with dyslexia. I will try to keep everything very simple.

The word is Greek for “difficulty with movement or muscles”, which tells you a lot about what it actually is.

Dyspraxia is generally broken down into two types, -

Developmental Motor Dyspraxia (DMD)
Verbal Dyspraxia

However more and more labels are being invented to further subdivide this basic condition. Many also have hyper-flexible joints which make it harder to learn fine motor skills.

There is a great deal of confusion about these, especially verbal dyspraxia. About 6% of the population is dyspraxic, although I believe today’s modern life style, is causing an increase in cases. I have always had far more dyslexic students than dyspraxic ones. It tends to run in families but not thought to be genetic as such.

I do not believe in giving a kid a label unless the diagnosing of that label tells us how to overcome the problems and teach that kid. In understanding how best to help a dyspraxic kid you have first to understand what causes it. Unlike dyslexia, dyspraxia is actually thought to be caused by a sort of brain defect and most of those I know have suffered from some trauma during or near birth, including extreme poor health of the mother. It is thought that the neural and motor pathways in the brain have not always formed correctly.

What are Neural and motor pathways?

When a human baby is born most of the billions of brain cells it is born with are not yet wired up or joined together.

This means that this baby has to learn how to do things, recognize things etc and as it does this the brain cells get joined together to form electrical pathways called “Neural Pathways”. This is how that baby remembers what it has

learnt. The neural pathway runs from the body to the brain and the motor pathway runs from the brain to the body. Both can be impaired and tend to be the same routes used in both directions.

Neural Pathways and Developmental Motor Dyspraxia

Mostly these new learning pathways form correctly and concisely but in the case of a Developmental Motor

Dyspraxic child they do not always form a complete pathway or do not always take the most direct route.

Here are simplified examples of neural pathways

Correctly formed neural pathway:

Incorrectly formed neural pathway. You can see that the route taken in not the most simple or elegant:

To understand this let us use the analogy of a road network in a large country.

We use maps to get from one city to another or from one part of a city to another and after a while if we do the same journey a number of times we learn the best route and no longer need the map. This is what happens in the baby’s brain, as it repeats actions the brain learns how to do the action automatically.

If, however, we did not use the map correctly or use an old or poor map we may not have learnt the most direct route from one place to another and may instead be traveling further than we need to or continually get lost. Also we could easily learn a route that is not the most direct. If this were to happen then another person traveling to and from the same places could very well leave after us and arrive at the same destination before us.

This is what seems to be happening inside the brain of a Developmental Motor Dyspraxic pupil. Sometimes the most direct neural route is taken through the brain and at other times a longer route is taken. Sometimes the journey is never completed and the destination never reached. Then the neural pathway is not complete.

When this happens information taken in through the senses may get lost in the brain and not reach its destination at all. In such instances the Developmental Motor Dyspraxia pupil will not even be aware that the information has entered the brain. As well as this any information taking a long route may reach its destination out of sequence. This is why when you give a list of instructions to these children they get muddled.

Since these brain pathways work in both directions – that is to say they take you to your destination and, when ready, back again – the Developmental Motor Dyspraxic pupil sometimes finds that actions s/he wanted to do, or things s/he wanted to say get lost in these brain pathways and s/he gets muddled. This is of course very frustrating for the pupil and also very scary.

It also means that these children find it hard to “see” the whole picture. When you cannot take in the whole picture spatial understanding becomes impaired.

This is why a Developmental Motor Dyspraxic pupil will achieve poor results in the areas of spatial thinking and understanding. In the WISC test – this may show up as a poor result in the block design and perceptive sub-test.

These children’s perception of the world is similar to viewing a jigsaw puzzle before it has been put together.

Clumsy

If a child cannot perceive the world about him/her properly he becomes clumsy and this clumsiness is most apparent in these children when they attempt to run or hop or undertake complex sporting activities. Because they cannot always estimate distances correctly they tend to fall over or bump into things. I was never able to see three dimentionally, even though I was a landscape artist, ( of course I was not aware of this until I was shown how normal people see, and if you look at my painting and prints you may notice how three dimensional they are becauseIi tried extra hard to because I was not able to onserve how three dimensional they actually were.)

Instructions

Because they may not be properly processing all of a set of instructions they will find it hard to know what they are meant to be doing. They should never be given a list of instructions. You cannot ever be sure that one simple instruction is perceived properly, and when your dyspraxic pupil or child tells you that he/she never heard the instruction remember he/she may be telling the truth. The instruction may never have traveled all the way along the neural pathway and reached the brain.

Coordination Activities

These children benefit greatly from coordination and body awareness exercises, particularly those involving hand

eye coordination. Learning how far things are away from each other and from themselves helps the brain to wire up properly. Many therapists actually get the children to crawl through obstacle courses. This is particularly important if the child never crawled when a baby.

Many occupational therapists consider that these children need to be taught to coordinate their hands, eyes and balance through play activities before they are taught academic skills.

Reading and writing

These children find it hard to use a pen or pencil and to form every letter perfectly and some even have problems “seeing” the edge of the page. They usually benefit greatly from learning how to use a keyboard and word process.

Many of the teaching skills needed to best help dyslexic children also help dyspraxic children. However some find phonics very hard and these have to be gone over a lot. Thisis one reason why I developed my phonics apps to be adictive! They have to be taught to pace their reading so that they do not miss out words or lines. I have found that they have, initially, to be slowed down when reading and then learn to speed up again.

How to recognize Developmental Motor Dyspraxia

Tick Tests for dyspraxia can be found onside menu bar of the home page for 3 different age groups. Dyspraxia overlaps dyslexia in many ways so you might wish to try both sets of tick tests. Ticking many on the dyslexia test does not necessarily mean that the students have both conditions but I have discovered many who do have.

This article is partly taken from my book “Dyspraxia – A Guide for Parents and Teachers”, which is available as a

downloadable pdf, from the top menu under "shop" very cheaply. We are here to help rather than get rich!

Also my apps and Dead Easy Phonics have been proven to speed up literacy while learning in an enjoyable way.