I have designed and implemented numerous programs for sensory, physically and mentally impaired children.

I became very interested in children diagnosed with apraxia (dyspraxia) many years ago. The term apraxia has been known from the beginning of the last century, yet educationalists shy away from it. Apraxic children are still misdiagnosed. Every decade they (apraxic children) are placed in a different group. In my lifetime they were called mentally retarded, clumsy, uncoordinated, aphasic, dyslexic, hyperactive, ADD, ADHD, more modern term is Autistic Spectrum Disorder and Asperger Syndrome.

The term dyslexia is returning for the third time. Originally Dyslexia was specified as an inability to learn to read, while the ability to learn mathematics was not impaired. Today’s “specialists” categorise any LD child as dyslexic.

The only common denominators for Learning Difficulties, dyslexia, autism, asperger, ADD, ADHD are the causes.

Let’s imagine the feelings of an apraxic child. The brain is stimulated, perhaps overstimulated and the mechanism blocking out some stimuli is not functioning well or it cannot cope with too many stimuli bombarding the brain. If a brain is overstimulated it has a safety mechanism, the overstimulated brain shuts out all the stimuli, the needed with the not needed. This lasts only for a very short time but if it happens often and sporadically, the output is disrupted (like the broken links of the chain). The messages are not clear, they are not synchronised and ordered.

This dysfunction is characterised by clumsiness in motor activity tasks (writing), poor eye-hand coordination (writing), reduced quality of speech and extra ocular control (focusing problem).

 They live in now.

They cannot plan, because they don’t understand the concept of sequential planning, they cannot transpose themselves into the future time.

Our expectations and explanations are for them very chaotic. They don’t really know what we want and what we mean for them to do.

That is why an apraxic children are not able to learn like the other kids, yet they are intelligent. They can not do the work, because they do not know what they are expected to do. They do not know the steps to use to proceed with the task.

If we look at a page in a book it looks sort of organised but for an apraxic child it actually looks all muddled. We organise things in a linear fashion, they do not.

Apraxic children prefer nonfiction books. The facts are usually organised in a kind of sequential order. There are no tricks, no unexpected plots, no metaphors and no personifications (animals and things acting as humans).

An apraxic child never asks for help at school because he wouldn’t understand the linear explanation. Children tell me: “The teacher talks in gibberish.”